The new training, which has been redesigned to be both massively scalable and capable of being deeply personalized, will be free in 2020 for existing Acronis partners.
Gaidar Magdanurov, Acronis’ Chief Cyber Officer and Chief Operating Officer
On the first day of the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2020 on Monday, Acronis, announced the launch of their Acronis #CyberFit Academy, which reworks the way that the company trains and certifies its channel partners how to position, sell, and deploy Acronis cyber protection solutions.
Gaidar Magdanurov, Acronis’ Chief Cyber Officer and Chief Operating Officer, stated that the CyberFit Academy solves several key challenges that had been created by both the rising complexity of technology and the massive growth of Acronis’ channel.
“We now have a massive partner base – 50,000 partners and growing rapidly,” he said. “Things also change rapidly in technology. We have to be able to educate our partners about all these things. We need to provide what they need when they need it.”
Acronis #CyberFit Academy was designed to be able to provide a highly scalable way of training huge numbers of partners, while at the same time providing a highly customizable and engaging learning experience. The goal is to be able to train one million people on the platform by the end of 2022.
“The CyberFit Academy is a scalable engine, with processes and people in place to educate a massive amount of partners,” Magdanurov indicated. It is designed to select the specific content an individual needs to consume, with a progressive course structure and multi-level certification targeting specific persona.
The platform itself comes from collaboration with Alemira Education, a new learning management system for personalized digital learning developed by the Swiss-based Schaffhausen Institute of Technology.
“Alemira lets us do personalized training and learning experience using modern technology to provide a personalized digital learning experience,” Magdanurov said.
“Our mission is to drive transformational advances in science and technology,” said Laurent Dedeinis, Alemira’s CEO. “We are interdisciplinary by design. Alemira delivers active learning to transform passive information consumption, and uses the latest tools and technology to be much more engaging.”
Dedeinis emphasized that active content is at the core of Alemira systems.
“Traditionally, content blocks and most training content are mostly static, and are rarely changed,” he said. “We make it more customizable and adaptive to each student. Active tutoring also provides real-time feedback from an AI-powered agent.”
Dedeinis also highlighted what he termed Alemira’s unique lab capabilities with unattended and automated labs. The online courses themselves are led by professional instructors, which are built using an engaging delivery format that features whiteboarding, video and animation, lab work, and live panel discussions.
“This is a new approach to partner education,” Magdanurov said. “It will provide a higher level of engagement which will help train and educate the entire ecosystem.”
The training will offer new #CyberFit certification courses in more than 20 languages focused on three major areas – sales, technical, and developer training. Magdanurov indicated that all the training will have certifications from Acronis. 14 courses are available initially with more on the way.
“Between Acronis and Alemira we have over 30 people working on this,” Magdanurov said. “We are also using training partners.”
Along with the launch of Acronis #CyberFit Academy, all 2020 training sessions and certification courses will be offered to existing partners free of charge.
Acronis partners can start exploring the Acronis #CyberFit Academy by visiting the Partner Portal.
