Acronis Invests in Cloud Backup and Mobile Working for Enterprises [Updated]

By Corentin Béchade, StorageNewsletter

Following the acquisition of GroupLogic, we met the CEO and president of Acronis Inc. Alex Pinchev. He explained the mechanism of the company and talked about its future.

Former executive VP of RedHat, US citizen, born in Russia and then working in Israeli Army, he joined Acronis on January 2012 as president and CEO.

Pinchev took the head of a successful company. Acronis is entering its tenth year in the storage market and has been profitable since its early days. It has offices in 18 countries, sells product across 90, and maintain a network of 25,000 partners. It started as a consumer-focused company to later address the needs of SMBs and now big enterprises. It's now also pushing directs sales with partners.

On the financial side, the only funding it received was a $10 million investment from Insight Venture Partners in 2004. Pinchev did not disclose the company's revenue and only claim that it was "far above $100 million" with the last known number being $120 million in 2009. The perspective of an IPO was also discussed, although, he insisted that it was not in his immediate plan.

The company has around 300 developers and 150 support engineers including 8 Ph.d in Moscow, Russia.

With 175,000 corporate customers and 2.5 million consumers, its main product, Acronis Backup & Recovery, now in V11.5, is widespread in the enterprise environment.

In a time in which, according to Pinchev, "30% of enterprises are changing vendors in the data protection space," Acronis needs to provide the best service and innovate in new sectors. Just before the acquisition of GroupLogic, it launched a new backup platform with compression and de-dupe with "the same functionality as CommVault". It protects enterprise data with encryption at the source.

Pnichev also said he is also looking in the future to acquire storage software companies.

For the CEO, Acronis' main competitor today is CommVault, not EMC, Symantec or partner NetApp - Iomega is also a partner.

The Woburn, MA-based firm owns three data centers to support its online backup and recovery services, two in the US and one in Europe for a total capacity of roughly 15PB. Pricing is only $0,02 to $0,04 per GB. With a new architecture for its data centers, "like but better than Scality", the company did not lose a bit of data when 300 of HDDs crashed the same day. 

With GroupLogic, the firm is now expanding into the growing mobile enterprise world. The company is dedicated to provide access and Mac - Windows compatibility tools. Integrating the Apple ecosystem onto the enterprise world.

The recently acquired firm, based in Arlington, VA, employs 35 people that will join the Acronis team.

This purchase is aimed at improving the way we access and work on enterprise files from smartphones, tablet or any mobile devices. Grouplogic is focused on providing cross-platform access to data saved in the cloud. It already support both iOS and Android platforms and support for Windows Phone is coming. Because mobile working triggered some deep changes in the way people collaborate, Acronis is investing in cloud storage like Dropbox but with an emphasis on security.

The company owns over 30 patents

With 80% of revenues coming from SMBs and enterprises, Acronis had to adapt to these new ways of collaborating and communicating. GroupLogic is now part of the plan to be further involved in this paradigm.