Acronis will provide six months of free service to partners who sign up to attend the Acronis Cyber Summit, with three months to new MSPs who sign up after the event later this year.
Gaidar Magdanurov, CMO and Chief Cyber Strategy Officer at Acronis
Cyber protection vendor Acronis has announced a $10 million investment in their service provider incentive program. Aimed at traditional resellers who want to build an MSP business with Acronis, it will help them through the early period of building an MSP business where expenses are more of an issue compared to revenues. The new measure is part of a concentrated strategy around developing the Acronis Cyber Platform, which will be fleshed out further at their upcoming Cyber Summit event in Miami.
“The idea came from conversations with our MSPs,” said Gaidar Magdanurov, CMO and Chief Cyber Strategy Officer at Acronis. “We did research a year ago with resellers, and found about 30 per cent said they wanted to become MSPs. Now, between 5 to 10 per cent appear to be starting to implement this, and now close to 50 per cent consider it their next move.”
Magdanurov said that resellers transitioning into the business typically face a hurdle.
“There is a common pattern from the point where after they sign up and start using our platform, they have a slow ramp up,” he said. “They do have stronger growth after they pass the first period of initial setup. That slow ramp up caused by the costs compared to the lower revenue as the MSP develops their business is the reason for the slower development. That’s what we are addressing. If they can put the initial software costs into acquiring additional customers, after three months they will have more runway to invest in the business. This will help them because there is now no upfront investment in the software.” Those who sign up for the free services will, however, agree to conditions about making this investment.
Partners who sign up for a cloud service provider contract at the Acronis Cyber Summit, in Miami on October 13-16, 2019, will get six months of free usage. Other new Acronis cloud service providers, who sign up to be a partner between October 7 and December 31, 2019, but not at the event itself, will get three months of free usage.
Acronis is also launching a program this quarter to educate traditional resellers on the benefits available if they convert to MSPs, including acquiring new customers, reducing churn and increasing revenues.
“We are educating them on how to transition successfully,” Magdanurov indicated.
This incentive program is part of the $147 million investment by Goldman Sachs in Acronis that was announced on September 18.
“We will also use that funding for some acquisitions to accelerate the portfolio, in order to add additional services,” Magdanurov said. “We are also hiring more people into our engineering team to we can build out more engineering capacity.”
That investment funded the acceleration of the new Acronis Cyber Platform as well.
“At our Summit in Miami, we will formally announce that our Cyber Platform, which we launched back in April, will now be available to any third party,” Magdanurov stated.
The Cyber Platform is critical to Acronis’ vision because it lets third parties customize, extend and integrate the company’s Cyber Protection solutions, which in turn, the company sees as critical to MSPs’ success.
“The primary reason we launched our Cyber Protection solutions was to allow MSPs to deliver customized services,” Magdanurov stressed. “MSPs’ main concern is that everyone provides the same services. Backup provides some stickiness, but not enough. We advise them to customize, focus vertically, take a platform and integrate with vertically focused systems. If they want to stay in business, they have to differentiate, ideally with a unique focused workload.”
Magdanurov also noted several other announcements that will be coming formally at the event.
“We will also be launching a key Acronis Cyber Protect solution, a complete toolkit for an IT guy,” he said.” Also new is Acronis Cyber Infrastructure, in which our software-defined storage in the past is now a full blown infrastructure for hosting cyber protection solutions”
