Acronis helps put VMware virtualization in easy reach of the channel

WOBURN, MA, June 28, 2011 - Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments today announced that it has made it easier for channel partners to penetrate the small business virtualization market. In a campaign through joint channel partners, Acronis will offer incentives and marketing promotions to target small businesses wishing to migrate their data to virtualized environments.

According to a recent survey by Acronis¹, adoption of virtualization among small and mid-sized businesses is expected to increase by 50% this year. This represents a huge opportunity which Acronis and VMware are addressing through an expanding network of channel partners with go-to-market initiatives. Acronis is also offering increased margins of up to 30% for VMware projects and is looking to aggressively enlist more VMware resellers.

Acronis® Backup & Recovery™ 10 Virtual Edition protects over 100,000 virtual machines across thousands of customers worldwide. In addition to backup and disaster recovery, the powerful, unlimited migration capabilities have allowed businesses of all sizes to seamlessly move nearly 1,000,000 servers between physical, virtual and cloud environments. The latest version of this solution, Acronis® Backup & Recovery™ 11, shipped on June 21, 2011. Together with the industry-leading VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions, including VMware vSphere®, this new campaign brings Acronis and VMware solutions to channel partners who have not yet taken advantage of these solutions, as well as bringing additional benefits to existing resellers.

"Small business customers will benefit from a virtualization solution that includes VMware software and Acronis. Migration is one of the first areas a small business will tackle and the unlimited physical to virtual conversions provided by Acronis give you a lot of flexibility," said Jason Schuerhoff from Sublime Solutions, a reseller for both VMware and Acronis. "With Acronis and VMware marketing their solutions together, it will be easier for us to reach and serve this growing market. Sublime Solutions have already seen great traction with VMware solutions and Acronis amongst our small business customers, these new financial incentives will make it easier for us to win new business."

"Small businesses are rapidly embracing virtualization as they look for ways to manage their IT infrastructure and critical business information in a cost-effective way," said Doug Smith, vice president, Global Partner Strategy and Operations, VMware. "Many still need help understanding an efficient way to achieve cost savings and protect their data. VMware has partnered with Acronis to provide small business customers the tools, products and expertise needed to adopt virtualization and move along on the journey to cloud computing."

"Every company needs high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, no matter how large or small," said David Junca, vice president sales and channels Americas for Acronis. "Acronis has award winning technology that has served the small business market for almost a decade and VMware has an industry-leading virtualization solution proven in thousands of organizations worldwide. By creating a dedicated campaign, we have built a financially attractive proposition that can accelerate our channel partners' business."

Resellers and distributors who wish to find out more about this initiative and become an Acronis Channel Partner should go to www.acronis.com/partners