Acronis Academy Is Getting an Expanded and Revamped Curriculum

The Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2020 kicks off on Monday, October 19, and among its many exciting announcements is an expanded mission and curriculum for the Acronis Academy, formerly known as the Acronis Academy, which delivers online technical and sales training and certification to our MSP, VAR, and distributor partners. I sat down with Jonathan McCarrick, Global Head of Partner Evangelism at Acronis, to get the highlights of this major upgrade of our educational operations.

Thanks for taking the time to chat, Jonathan. You must be up to your eyeballs with preparations for the Summit!

Yes, we’re offering a big slate of round-the-clock training and certification classes for our partners on Sunday and Monday, before the main Summit sessions kick off on Tuesday. I’m staggered to have this opportunity to serve attendees in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. It’s the first look that many of our partners will get at the Academy’s new approach to sales and technical training.

Acronis has had a jam-packed year of new product rollouts since the last Summit: Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, Acronis Cyber Protect 15 for premises-based deployments, Acronis Cyber Platform, on and on. That’s a whole lot of new training ground to cover.

That’s true. The two flavors of Acronis Cyber Protect introduce a whole range of new cybersecurity and remote management capabilities to our traditional data protection and behavioral antimalware solutions. And with Acronis Cyber Platform, we’ve opened up our APIs to developers, ISVs, and systems integrators to build more automated, integrated solutions linking their technology and ours.

But since we’ve doubled the size of the Academy’s faculty to ten, we decided to do a refresh of the entire curriculum. Every class we deliver is all-new, with brand-new supporting materials. And we have a new head of the Academy: Mr. Righter Kunkel joined us over the summer and has brought a shot of energy and vision to our efforts.

That makes sense, as Acronis is rolling out new cloud features on a monthly basis now. In looking at the course catalog, I see the focus is still very much on sales training and technical deployment and configuration, but there seem to be more courses.

That’s right: we’ve broken down the courses into smaller, more easily-digestible pieces. That makes for eight basic tracks: Sales and Tech (for premises-based solutions) and Cloud Sales and Cloud Tech Cloud (for cloud-based solutions), each at the Foundation and Associate levels, replacing our former ACE designation.

We think that should make it easier for our partners to fit training sessions into their busy schedules, and given all the new material and features, we encourage everyone to refresh their Acronis skills regularly. The new certificates are valid for twelve months, and the annual Summit is a perfect time to renew them, like changing the batteries in your smoke detector every spring.  

I understand that our partners will also be able to access courses via the Acronis Partner Portal?

Yes, that’s another new feature we think our partners will love. We figured the Portal was the right place to make the whole Academy curriculum easily accessible and consumable.

Any insight you can share on future developments?

Sure! Acronis Cyber Protect keeps growing steadily in functionality and we continue to refine and expand our training efforts for our integration and automation partners on Acronis Cyber Platform, so we’ll be updating our courses and adding many new ones between this year’s Summit and the next.

Congratulations, Jonathan: a very exciting time for the Academy. Break a leg at the Summit!

Thanks, James! I’m looking forward to seeing everybody there and in the coming year! We’re still accepting reservations for our training sessions, but capacity is limited so attendees should be sure to register soon.