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.