Acronis flips majority of partners to become MSPs

Acronis wants to help its “classic” partners to become service providers.

Revenue officer Pasha Ershow last week explained to CRN that the company uses the label “classic” for partner that engaged with it to sell backup or on-premises licences.

“We want to pass on the knowledge on how to move from perpetual-on-prem licences to subscriptions.”

“And maybe not everybody will make it,” Ershow added.

The reason for the push is Acronis’ own evolution: the company’s lead product is now its Cloud Platform, which adds security and data integrity services.”

“One of the key developments that we're investing this year is launching a project that will offer endpoint protection, better management, and remote access capabilities that our partners can leverage to protect their customers on top of existing traditional data protection services,” Ershow said.

“It’s a story of convergence of data protection and cyber security into a cyber protection concept.”

The message is working, said Neil Morarji, Acronis’ general manager for Asia Pacific.

Morjari told CRN that in Australia Acronis now has more partners selling its cloud platform than classic resellers focussed on licences.

“That happened this quarter,” he said, “which is a good turning point.”

“We expect this to accelerate and we are investing ourselves and with our cloud distribution partners to accelerate this service providers recruitment engine.”

“We have a methodology, we have telemarketing, we have inside sales, we have all of those recruitment engines, and we share that knowledge with our key cloud distributors as well.”

Ershow also explained to CRN how the company’s recently-announced hyperconverged appliance fits into Acronis’ MSP push.

“Smaller service providers usually leverage someone else's infrastructure,” he explained. “Larger service providers have their own infrastructure already.”

Acronis’ appliance, he said, “is the easiest way to get to get in there and make a cost effective hardware software solution in backup and disaster recovery. And we are planning to develop and evolve this offering force again, having service providers in mind … because some of our larger customers don't want to go to a public cloud, they want to keep it private.”

“And our architecture now allows them to deploy the same the same platform that we have in our own data centres to deploy for a particular large customer.”