Acronis launches bi-annual partner survey
SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, October 18, 2011 - Acronis Inc., a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced the findings of its first EMEA Partner survey.
The survey results reveal our EMEA partners' feedback on their experience of working with Acronis and their vision for SMB technology trends over the coming year. More than 1,200 of Acronis' EMEA partners across 11 countries completed the survey in July and August 2011.
One of the key findings is that the SMB storage software channel sees virtualisation as the future of their businesses, ranking virtualisation's potential for cost cutting and efficiency above physical backup, the cloud and deduplication. As a result of cloud and virtualisation, 49% of Acronis partners have shifted their business model to become service providers and over a third (35%) are now selling more software licenses than boxes.
There are, however, further opportunities for the channel to embrace new technologies, with only a third (31%) currently seeing the migration to virtualisation and cloud as presenting further business opportunities for them.
Laurent Dedenis, President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Acronis, "In order to better address the channels' needs, we decided to run a barometer to analyse our partner's satisfaction, perception and vision. We will benchmark our community's satisfaction with the recently introduced Acronis Global Partner Programme every six months moving forward to make improvements for them."
"In addition, virtualisation is a key strategic focus for us this year and we want to arm our channel with the products, tools and support they need to help their customers implement virtualisation solutions. This year we have launched both Acronis® vmProtectTM 6 and Acronis Backup & Recovery® 11 Virtual Edition. We are one of the only backup and recovery companies following a true partner model for the adoption of virtualisation."
Top 3 findings:
- Virtualisation is the top technology to help companies cut IT costs: Acronis continues its commitment to the virtualisation market in order to arm its channel with information, plus support them as their business models change
- Acronis partners are satisfied: More than three quarters (76%) indicated they are satisfied or very satisfied with Acronis. EMEA Partners expressed appreciation of tools made available to them (such as the Acronis Partner Portal, training programmes and free NFRs) in addition to joint communication activities (roadshows, events, customer case studies)
- When selecting a backup and recovery solution, the main priority for channel partners is technical support: Acronis was one of the first backup and recovery providers on the market to provide free and unlimited technical support to its channel partners, regardless of the partners' level
Acronis commitments to its partners:
- Improve partners' satisfaction Fully implementing the new Global Acronis Partner Programme which was announced in June
- Educate the market Support our partners' business model changes due to new technology adoption and provide best of breed technology for virtualisation backup
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Acronis is a global cyber protection company that provides natively integrated cybersecurity, data protection, and endpoint management for managed service providers (MSPs), small and medium businesses (SMBs), and enterprise IT departments. Acronis solutions are highly efficient and designed to identify, prevent, detect, respond, remediate, and recover from modern cyberthreats with minimal downtime, ensuring data integrity and business continuity. Acronis offers the most comprehensive security solution on the market for MSPs with its unique ability to meet the needs of diverse and distributed IT environments.
A Swiss company founded in Singapore in 2003, Acronis has 45 locations across the globe. Acronis Cyber Protect is available in 26 languages in 150 countries and is used by over 20,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses. Learn more at www.acronis.com.