Acronis has raised US$250 million on a US$2.5 billion valuation to increase recruitment and support around the cyber protection vendor’s service provider channel.
The Switzerland-based company wants to double the size of its channel community in the coming years, which today consists of 10,000 active partners and another 5,000 under contract, said Founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov. The company also wants to increase the share of business flowing through service providers – MSPs, CSPs and telcos – from 50 percent today to 80 percent in the future.
“Everybody in our service provider channel is profitable,” Beloussov told CRN. “Everybody is growing. And so it’s a great time to start a service provider practice inside your company if you don’t have it yet.”
Acronis plans to roll out better training, education, and certifications so that solution providers can more effectively sell to and support their customers, he said. The company counts on its service providers partners to not only sell product but also manage virtual machines, servers, routers, desktop, mobile devices, and cloud applications, Beloussov said. Acronis sells exclusively through the channel, he said.
Beloussov expects in the coming years to see many of Acronis’ classic resellers convert to service provider business models to increase customer stickiness and their addressable market. Roughly a third of Acronis’ sales today are to large enterprises, and the company expects large enterprises to make up a larger portion of the company’s customer base over time, according to Beloussov.
Acronis is looking to recruit new MSPs who have expertise around protecting network infrastructure, hardware and users as well as delivering services, Beloussov said. The company’s most recent funding round was led by CVC Capital Partners, and comes 20 months after Acronis raised US$147 million in a Goldman Sachs-led round on a valuation of greater than US$1 billion.
From a technology standpoint, Beloussov said Acronis is looking to form tighter integrations with management tools that are used by MSPs like ConnectWise, Kaseya, NinjaRMM and N-Able. And even though Acronis offers its own security technology, Beloussov said the company wants to give its customers choices through integrations with Sophos, Webroot, Bitdefender, McAfee, and Symantec.
Outside of that, Beloussov said Acronis wants to use the funding to provide deeper support for Microsoft products as well as deeper integrations with Cisco and Juniper network devices and mid-market ERP (enterprise resource planning) tools like SAP, Oracle and Acumatica.
From a go-to-market standpoint, Beloussov said Acronis plans to track annualized recurring revenue growth as well as the rate of channel growth and the margins channel partners make on product sales. Acronis also hopes to increase the number of workloads its protecting from several million today to hundreds of millions in the future, according to Beloussov.
“I don’t think in the future we will see many IT people working in-house, especially in small and medium businesses,” Beloussov told CRN. “Most of it will be managed by service providers, and that requires service providers to be better than internal IT people.”