Business continuity, CSPs, Telecom cloud

How Acronis Caught On WIth Cloud Service Providers

Serguei Beloussov
Serguei Beloussov

Take a proven coach and a proven playbook. Then mix in a healthy dose of modern technology. What do you get? A new generation of success. That pretty much sums up the recent momentum at Acronis, a hybrid cloud data protection specialist that works closely with hosting providers, telcos and other types of service providers.

Scan the Acronis executive team and you'll find names like CEO Serguei Beloussov, Senior VP of Engineering Stanislav Protassov and Chief Marketing Officer John Zanni. Now, rewind the clock a bit and you'll find that each of those leaders -- and some of their Acronis peers -- previously held key key positions at Parallels.

Cloud Service Provider Partners: Deja Vu

Why is that important? Parallels at one time owned Odin, a cloud automation platform that Ingram Micro Inc. acquired in 2015. Poke around, and you'll find that Odin has a strong following among telcos, hosting providers and cloud services providers.

In other words: Acronis's management team -- the Odin and Parallels veterans -- has a history of building successful service provider ecosystems. And they appear to be doing it again at the storage company. A case in point: Acronis Backup Cloud 5 -- the company's latest storage platform -- has generated triple digit year over year growth, and has attracted more than 300 CSPs.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, Acronis also continues to leverage existing relationships. A case in point: Odin, now a business unit of Ingram Micro, is promoting an Acronis integration to its partners, according to Pavel Ershov, senior VP, Sales, Marketing and Customer Success at Odin.

Backup for Cloud Service Providers: Intense Competition

John Zanni

Still, Acronis faces plenty of competition as it pursues CSP and hosting partner relationships. Rival StorageCraft recently raised $187 million, hired a new executive team, and aggressively expanded its partner program. Somewhat similarly, Continuum's R1Soft business is catching on with more CSPs and hosting providers. And Veeam has relationships with scores of cloud service providers.

So how exactly is Acronis performing amid that competitive mix? We'll be checking in with CMO John Zanni for more details in the days ahead.

Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.