Acronis to launch Aussie channel program

Partners will be classified as Certified Partners and Enterprise Solution Partners and based on their certified levels, channel partners will be entitled to various benefits, including training programs, marketing funding, co-branded events and access to special bundle packages.

According to its newly appointed CEO Jason Donahue, Acronis (pictured), Australia is one of its most successful in terms of its channel model and growth for the business.

He said the business here has grown three-fold in the last 12-14 months and is now worth $130m in total business revenue.

It has also taken on two new distributors this year; Datastor and SAN Systems and continues to work with Manaccom.

“It’s a strong brand and we have a good relationship with our distributors and VARs. Our success here is really driven by our partner model,” said Donahue.

“We started as a company serving the consumer and larger companies but as the products we provide become more sophisticated we will be launching a new partner program in the New Year adding gold partners to that.

“We want to target the high end sector, looking at SMEs,” he added.

Bill Taylor Mountford general manager A/NZ Acronis said the company has already signed up 50 partners to its first inaugural training program called ACE (Acronis Certified Engineer Progam) in Sydney on 25th November and Brisbane on 27th November with plans for a second one next year.

He said ACE will improve channel partners’ knowledge and expertise in Acronis’ solutions and the fields of backup, disaster recovery and deployment.

“It will provide engineers with the technical competencies to successfully manage projects, using and deploying the Acronis’ technology,” he said.

The training includes a full-day course about the company, its product line, a demo of its True Image software, and a hands-on lab session, finishing with a test.

Acronis is also going to bundle two of its products together to offer customers a 30 percent discount, these will be on True Image, a back-up and recovery solution and Universal Restore, to restore an image to a new system.

It plans to launch True Image version 10 in the second Quarter of next year.

“It’s a more profitable way of selling our products to the enterprise sector,” said Taylor Mountford.

The company is also pushing out a new licensing model for the virtualisation market called the Acronis Virtual Edition.

With a single Acronis True Image Enterprise Server Licence, users are entitled to back up a host server and up to four virtual servers running on that host.

But, with the new edition, users can back up the host server and an unlimited number of virtual servers running on that host.

“The Virtual Edition eliminates the limitation of traditional licensing model and provides resellers and end users with great flexibility in the virtual environment,” said Donahue.

“It will create more opportunities for resellers to reach a broader audience who have a larger network and more virtual servers in one host,” he added.

acronis software