The Star (Malaysia)

January 19, 2007

Original article on The Star web site

Acronis Bullish on Malaysia Ops

Kuala Lumpur

Systems and storage management solutions provider Acronis Inc is bullish on its growth in Malaysia and has forecast sales to rise more than 300% this financial year ending Dec 31, 2007.

Although the company is relatively new in the local market, demand for its software has been growing and is widely used by universities, colleges and multinational corporations.

President and chief executive officer Walter Scott said its customers were mainly small and medium enterprises (SMEs), big corporations and home users.

"Over the last two years, we have been selling our software through appointed resellers. We have received comments that our software is the right fit for SMEs," he told StarBiz in an interview.

Acronis offers technically advanced storage management solutions for mission-critical applications but claims to be easy to use.

Its solutions include disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning, boot management, privacy, data migration and other storage management products for enterprises, corporations and consumers.

Acronis projected US$50mil in global revenue last year. It expects to double that figure this year.

"As we get closer to a public offering, we generally give wide ranges (in our forecast). In 2005, company-wide, we grew 150%. This year, we are looking at 80% to 100% growth," Scott said.

He said the six-year-old company, which started in Singapore but is now based in the US, was considering a public listing within the next 12 to 18 months. It is still evaluating on where to list its shares.

"It's the investor base (which would decide where Acronis will be listed). One of our core competitive advantages is the Russian development organisation that we have. The European market sees the Russian development strength as a very big asset for us".

"We are a highly profitable company and have high growth, so the European market sometimes value earnings more than the US market, which values growth. We will work with our bankers to determine the right way," he said.