ARN Middle East

February, 2006

Computing With Confidence

Acronis all set to offer a wide range of disaster recovery solutions for the regional enterprise sector

The market for backup software solutions is dominated by the usual suspects such as EMC, Veritas (now part of Symantec), IBM, Network Appliance, and so on. IDC's quarterly Storage Software market tracker confirms their sway over the market. However, besides them, there are the smaller sized companies that are also trying to get a share of the pie. And they have their strongholds when it comes to innovation and patented technologies.

Acronis Asia is one of the emerging players in storage management solutions. The company based out of Singapore has currently evinced an interest in the Middle East and is reportedly testing the waters. It has a reasonably broad range of solutions to offer, especially to the mid-segment companies that are discovering the need to manage their storage needs more effectively.

Acronis, which offers storage management solutions for mission critical systems, recently launched its Acronis True Image Enterprise Server 8.0 in the region. This new application from Acronis is a backup and disaster recovery disk imaging solution, which uses Acronis' patented Drive Snapshot technology. The technology allows users to create images of partitions or whole hard disk drive online, in operating system, without the need to reboot the machine.

As a middle-tier player, the company handles the complete Acronis product line (corporate, OEM and retail sales) for the region. Acronis provides disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning, boot management, privacy, data migration, and other storage management products for enterprises, corporations and consumers. The company has a wide product portfolio, spanning across personal, SME, and large enterprise segments. Their portfolio covers home solution with workstation products (Acronis True Image), the SME market with its corporate and server products (Acronis True Image Corporate Workstation, Acronis True Image Enterprise Server) and the enterprise market with corporate solution (Acronis Snap Deploy).

Acronis sells its products through retail outlets, its corporate website and resellers — one of them being Advanced Industries Solutions in Dubai. The company operates its business in the Asia and the Middle East region through its office in Singapore. It now sees a huge demand for storage management solutions in this region and thus has drawn up its marketing strategies for the regional market. "Our strategy in Middle East involves developing a strong reseller and partner presence in the key countries of the Gulf and increase their know-how about our solution," says Laurent Dedenis, Acronis Asia Managing Director. "We are now aggressively searching for these partners to complement and strengthen our presence."

Large businesses have traditionally used esoteric concepts such as progressive media rotation, using tape based backups to ensure security of data. The latest breed of traditional backup products provide easier paths to data protection. There are many different methodologies and techniques that vendors use, such as conventional backup, contiguous backup, and imaging the whole drive. The regional and global storage management solutions market is poised for a boost, if IDC's numbers are to be believed. According to IDC, the storage software market has had eight consecutive quarters of double-digit year-over-year growth. IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker also indicates that the worldwide storage software market grew 10 percent year over year to $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2005.

The market researcher further goes on to reveal that in the third quarter of 2005, the storage replication market posted the largest gain at 16.8 percent year-over-year growth, while the backup and archive market enjoyed a 12.7 percent growth rate. IDC also reports that the storage resource management and the backup and archive markets continued to represent the largest storage software markets, each representing a third of the market. Meanwhile, the file systems software market once again enjoyed strong results with 15.6 percent year-over-year growth in the third quarter.

The growth according to IDC was spurred by a strong demand in the backup and archive and replication segments driven by fundamental user requirements to protect, recover, and retrieve information, not only in the data center but also in remote and branch office locations. IDC also opines that this demand is in response to drivers such as application availability and business continuance, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance. Anticipating a huge demand for such solutions, Acronis has now chalked out a variety of schemes for its regional channel community to enable them to sell better.

For instance, the company would offer special discounts to standard resellers, off the price of the software along with volume licensing discounts, which they can then sell directly to customers. Also, resellers won't be bound by commitments as to the number of licenses they are required to sell within a cycle. Partners will be given periodic updates on Acronis' Asia Business Development in the region, and resellers with outstanding sales performance will be promoted to the "Gold Partner" status.

Since storage solutions also require a fair level of training, Acronis plans to provide extensive technical training to its channel partners. The company would also provide education and implementation support to corporate enterprise solution clients. "Because no two businesses are alike, Acronis has developed a range of programs to fit a company's corporate model," explains Laurent. "Whichever program you choose, Acronis will work with you to maximise both your sales and return on investment (ROI). When you are successful, we are successful — that is the essence of the Acronis Partner Program. We have a few specific programs and you can get more information by contacting us."

Laurent claims that Acronis' solutions are already being used in a variety of world class ogranisations such as Oman Arab Bank in the Kingdom of Bahrain, The Coca Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia, and Sultan Group Investments LLC.

While Acronis has no immediate plans to start a local operation, the company's first level of support is provided through its reseller in Dubai. The second line of support, if necessary, will then be escalated to their support centres situated in Singapore and Europe. With the support structure in place, the company feels good and confident about it Middle East business. But what is surprising is that the company plans to finalise its new strategy for the region only by next yet.

According to Laurent, "Our Middle East strategy is being discussed right now. The final decision will be implemented in 2007." While the vendors may have more than enough reason to be circumspect about having a full go at the regional market, it could get more tough as markets will could be more consolidated by then. Even the bigger sharks are forced to look at all SMB prospects in this era of fierce competition.

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