Exclusive Interview With Acronis CEO Serguei Beloussov

Born on August 2, 1971, Serguei Beloussov, CEO and COB of $250 million Acronis International GmbH since 2013, co-founder (with Ilya Zubarev, Stanislav Protassov and Max Tsyplyaev), was until 2011 CEO at Parallels where he is executive chairman. He was born in Leningrad, Soviet Union. In 1997, his parents moved to Princeton, NJ. From the age of ten, he began making money by selling things he made: throwing shards, twoway tin soldiers, 3D cowboys, slingshots, bows, crossbows, fishing accessories.

The serial entrepreneur founded the following firms in order: Unium, Rolsen, Standard & Western Software, Solomon Software South East Asia, Falcon Computers, Western Computers and Peripherals, Westcom, Infratel/MightyCall, Anturis Parallels, Usonix, Rusonyx, Acumatica, Robson Communication, CloudLinux, Qwave Capital, Phystech Ventures, , and Theory Bar & Business.

He is a shareholder of firms including Solomon Software South East Asia, Acumatica and he sits on the board of directors at the Russian Quantum Center, Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore, Parallels, and Acumatica.

He is also a senior partner at Runa Capital venture fund which he co-founded with his university colleagues in 2010.

He holds a B.S. in Physics, M.S. (Hons) in Physics and Electrical Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology where also attended Ratmir Timashev, co-founder of Veeam Software.

He filed 200+ patents.

Acronis, with HQs in Schaffthausen, Switzerland, since 2018, acquired 6 companies: PEZ Kommunikationssysteme in 2006, GroupLogic in 2012, nScaled in 2014, BackupAgent in 2014, T-Soft in 2018, 5nine in 2019.

It got a total of $158 million in financial funding, $$11 million in 2004 and $147 million in 2019. Note that Insight Partners – acquirer of Veeam – owns 1% of Acronis, according to Beloussov.

It aimed 1,500 employees in 33 locations in 18 countries, solutions sold to 5.5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses, including 100% of the Fortune 1000 companies. Its products are available through 50,000 partners and service providers in 150 countries in 30 languages.

R&D is based in Scottsdale and Tempe, AZ, Arlington, VA, Moscow, Russia, and Bulgaria.

The vendor has offices in Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, USA (Burlington, MA, and Tempe, AZ), and several countries in Northern Europe (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, UK and Sweden).

Main competitors are Veritas, Veeam, Druva, Dell EMC and Commvault.

StorageNewsLetter.com: What is the biggest activity for Acronis today?
Beloussov: We basically have a single solution called Acronis Cyberprotection which we offered through service providers. It’s focused on the edge workloads (small data centers, remote offices, etc.). A significant part of our revenues comes from endpoints but it’s not the majority, it’s probably only 25%. Core is another 25%. Edge is bigger and represents 50% of our revenues. On a bigger scale, if you look at our customer base, probably 60% of our revenue comes from small businesses or SMEs. Large businesses (bigger than 1,000 people) represent 40% of our revenue.

Do you have products designed for businesses of all sizes?
We have Cyberbackup which is CyberProtection minus things like vulnerability assessment, remote management, migration management, etc. But it has for example malware and ransomware protection based on AI. It’s a slightly less sophisticated product. The most important product is Cyberprotection and the new version is in beta now and should arrive in March. We look at our offer in 3 different angles: proactive, active and reactive protection. Trying to prevent anything from happening, trying to prevent something while it’s happening and trying to fix something that happened. So basically you have prevention, detection, response, recovery and forensic. We’re also planning to release a data leakage prevention product that we’ll announce soon.

So you are prepared for problems of all sizes?
In large data centers, you need something like 10 tools and there are different people to manage each of them. Which is fine when you have hundreds of people doing IT. But if you go to the edge you don’t have as many people, so most of the time you don’t have full protection. They use some of the tools available, but they don’t always work great together. Our job is to integrate all of the tools into a single product that we painfully built. It’s a single agent, single UI, single policy and single behavioral engine which makes it easier to use when you have many devices.

Do you offer a complete solution with software and hardware?
One of the things we were always proud of is to give the companies control. So we offer our solutions as software, parts of software, as service and as hardware. We have agreements with hardware companies, but we also supply our own hardware, only in Europe for the moment, though.  Bust most of the time people buy the software parts, so we don’t have a lot of hardware sales. Our strategy is to offer choice. It’s our opinion that companies can achieve things more tailored to their needs if they search for hardware independently, but it is up to them. It’s kind of like a 5-star hotel. You have to have a restaurant and room service but sometimes people eat outside because sometimes hotel food is not the best food or the cheapest food.

What kind of storage do you imagine there will be on Quantum computers where Acronis is involved with University Of Zurich, Switzerland?
Storage is just a part of a computer. You have storage need to perform computations and you have storage designed to store the results of computation for long periods of time. There’s cache, there’s RAM, flash, HDDs, tape … For Quantum computers at the moment there is not really any need for long-term storage. Only the storage to perform the computation in itself is needed right now. But over time there is a benefit to store some of the computations. There is that experiment in Oxford with silicon Nitride which can be used to create quantum memories for several hours.

Any plans for IPO?
I want Acronis to be a $billion company by the end of 2022. This year I plan to grow 50% and that’s not easy. Last year it was 30% and the year before that 20%. It’s easier to decelerate than to accelerate. There is a possibility that we’ll go public.

Are you looking to expand in other areas?
For now we believe that cyber protection is a $250 to $350 billion. If we take the edge and endpoint protection segment, we believe it can represent à $30 to 50 billion market. It’s a huge market and we’re a tiny company for now. We have so much to do as of now that we’re most likely not going to go anywhere outside of cyber protection. The only thing we’re going to do is support more workloads. So more applications, more type of data, etc. When you think cyberprotection, you think Veeam. It’s a market leader, it’s for large enterprise. They compete with HP, Veritas, EMC, everyone. Us, we don’t like competing, we want to be different. At Acronis we take what other company offer and add on top safety, security, accessibility … If you go on the edge, outside of the enterprise, you have so many devices and applications, countries and languages, so many people that the problem we’re trying to solve is enormous. Next March we will add something missing in our solutions, a DLP solution against data loss prevention and/or data leak prevention. 

Veeam has problems doing work with US companies because of the number of Russian people they employed. As it’s also your situation, do you have the same problem?
There are several subtle differences between us and Veeam but the main one is that we do not sell core IT. So, most of our customers don’t care where we’re from and they just don’t have that kind of concern. The second difference is that we’re not really a Russian company, I founded the company in Singapore. I was born in the Soviet Union, but I don’t have a Russian passport.

Why did you choose to be a Singaporean citizen?
I like Singapore. It’s independent, neutral, friendly. It’s also very wealthy and we have a very strong army so we’re able to protect ourselves. And because it’s politically stable we can do business with anybody in the world. A lot of other wealthy countries do not offer that kind of freedom. France for example is politically independent but part of NATO so it’s often pressured to do things a certain way. And because it’s part of the European Union it also has to compromise with the NATO with the US, with the EU …

Your hobbies?
I play tennis a little bit.

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