Acronis to build partner ecosystem around cloud services

Zanni.

Acronis expects to grow its Cloud Business in the double digits this year, says John Zanni, Senior VP, Cloud Business, Acronis. The company offers various subscription-based services, including Acronis Backup as a Service, Acronis Disaster Recovery as a Service, and Acronis Backup Advanced for vCloud.

While the Cloud Business was less than 5% of the business last year, this year is will be different. “This year we will grow in the double digits,” Zanni predicted of both the Asia Pacific and the global business. We expect the Cloud Business to grow more than 100% year on year for next three years. There is natural demand for consuming these cloud services.”

Zanni said that the company’s business model is focused on working with partners locally where possible to gain market share on its backup, disaster recovery and storage solutions. He pointed out that service providers can monetise their partnership with Acronis through various ways, including reselling capacity at a premium; building and selling supporting services; and charging for specific aspects of the Acronis services such as storage capacity, SLA options or bandwidth tiers.

“We’ll work with service providers to ensure they are providing a high quality service,” he said. “It is more work, but definitely worth it.”

Acronis will tune the software for certain Asian countries, India and China in particular, Zanni shared, in addition to working with partners. “Data centre providers are very well entrenched in India. It just makes more sense to work with them than to have a huge presence in India. We just have to figure out what the right pricepoint is,” he said.

Acronis also wants to work with governments via partners. Zanni explained that governments typically want the Acronis functionality but do not want the company to host or manage the service. Nor do they want their backups to be in a multi-tenant environment (public cloud) to be shared with unknown entities, he added.

“We partner - in many cases in Asia it's with a telco - to deploy our software in a government cloud, that entity serves the government,” he said.