Cloud data management vendor Acronis is aiming to step up support for its MSP partners, with key updates to its offering unveiled at its annual #CyberFit Summit held in Miami.
IT Europa is attending this week’s event, and was keen to find out how major channel-player Acronis is doing against the competition in a very crowded cloud data management space.
With thousands of partners worldwide, Acronis predominantly competes in the SMB space with its solutions, and is often asked whether it plans to scale up its enterprise business efforts. It is also arguably facing a narrower go-to-market (GTM) when it comes to MSPs, as technology suppliers who provide solutions to MSPs are increasingly developing their own systems.
Kaseya, for instance, recently acquired Datto, and is obviously keen to promote Datto’s data backup and recovery hardware and software over Acronis’ software-only alternatives. In addition, N-able is scaling up its own backup and recovery software in the SMB space too, with guestimates pointing to a $100m business on the horizon.
One bright spot in the MSP GTM scenario though is ConnectWise, which did a keynote in Miami and which sells the Acronis platform through its marketplace. To illustrate the ties between the companies, Acronis is even offering free buses to #CyberFit attendees to Orlando, to enable them to more easily take part in ConnectWise’s own partner event there later this week.
Acronis still chooses not to issue total sales figures or ball park sales targets, but it is a lot smaller to rival Veeam, which breached the $1 billion annual turnover barrier a couple of years ago. Veeam has also successfully broken into the enterprise market in a big way.
On the GTM issue, Acronis CEO Patrick Pulvermueller (pictured) told IT Europa: “The market is not narrowing for us, there are 250,000 MSPs out there and we have a truly global footprint [supported by 52 data centres that house Acronis service delivery and management systems].
“60% of our business is outside the US and 40% is inside it, which is a good mix in this market.”
On the enterprise side of things, Pulvermueller said: “We have focused on the SMB market because it wants the consolidated services platform we can provide, but things are changing.
“Enterprises may well have their own IT departments, with chief information security officers, for instance, and operate separate and best-of-breed backup, security and data centre operations etc.
“But more enterprises are coming to realise they can’t control everything separately, and they need to consolidate.”
He said Acronis was increasingly looking to global system integrators and other partners to get its solutions into enterprises, not least at the edge where enterprises may have branch offices, for instance.
The question of what constitutes enterprise business came up when IT Europa sat down with Acronis president and chief corporate development officer Ezequiel Steiner.
Steiner said: “We often get asked by analysts and investors about ‘enterprise business’, but it already represents 20% of our sales, and it is the fastest growing part of our business.
“We are talking about manufacturing plants, retail outlets and other operations that may be at the edge. Enterprise IT departments will work with service providers to support their edge needs.”
In addition, Acronis already has an established alliance with Scale Computing – the edge data appliance specialist – to integrate its technology with those boxes.
So what about those product upgrades for MSPs?
For its Cyber Protect Cloud platform, Acronis has added Advanced Automation, and Machine Intelligence (MI) to its Advanced Management solution.
Together, they aim to help MSPs “reduce complexity, stay focused on value-based service delivery”, and provide the tools needed to ensure client businesses and their systems, data and applications are “up and running productively, safely and securely”.
An Advanced Management update of Remote Desktop will come in December, and both the machine intelligence monitoring and new Advanced Automation product will arrive in the first quarter of 2023.
In addition, Acronis has introduced Acronis Advanced Security + EDR for Cyber Protect Cloud. Advanced Security + EDR delivers an “innovative approach” to effective threat detection, containment and remediation, “by reducing the complexity present in other EDR (endpoint detection and response) solutions”, said Acronis.
The offering leverages a unified platform approach that allows IT teams to detect and understand advanced attacks, and then “recover rapidly” using features like attack-specific, one-click rollback.
By correlating events, analysing attack chains and presenting “human-friendly, guided interpretations”, Acronis says companies can “dramatically reduce the time-tax” on highly specialised (and expensive) security analysts, and the time-to-remediate (TTR) for business operations.
