Acronis Global Partner Program to Focus on Demand Gen

Acronis is looking to offer its channel partners opportunities to grow their market share and improve customer satisfaction with the introduction of its new global partner program.

The disaster recovery and data backup solution provider said the program will put a premium on demand generation and high value selling to incentivize partners to deliver Acronis solutions to their customers. Partners will be rewarded for their commitment through a series of sales and readiness resources aimed at strengthening competencies and differentiating their businesses, according to the announcement.

“We’ve rebuilt our program from the ground up based on partner feedback. Our partners want to be rewarded on a shared commitment to generate demand, close sales, and plan for future business growth,” said Chris Hilderbrand, vice president of Global Channel Sales at Acronis, in a statement. “We are also introducing new tools throughout the year to make it easier for partners to leverage our sales and marketing assets to drive deeper relationships with existing end-customers, and accelerate the acquisition of new ones.”

Partners will be grouped into a standard three-tier format consisting of Authorized Partner, Gold and Platinum levels, with specific requirements for each new tier as well as tier-specific rewards. As expected, partners will have access to program-specific benefits, including boosted margins for selling growth products, partner-specific renewal managers, access to market development funds and more.

Acronis also announced a new partnership with Ingram Micro (IM) that is expected to simplify partner billing and provisioning to help resellers deliver cloud services and solutions.

“By working with Ingram Micro’s Advanced Solutions and Cloud organizations, Acronis is simplifying success for its channel partners by making it easier to market, sell and support business recovery and data protection solutions as part of a broader services engagement,” said Bill Brandel, executive director of Advanced Solutions at Ingram Micro. “The combination of Acronis’ new Partner Program and the growing pool of resources and support within Ingram Micro will help channel partners advance their services practices with greater ease and efficiency.”

The new partner program will be rolled out in several stages, with North American partners eligible to sign up immediately. Acronis said it expects the program to be available for its EMEA partners in Q2 and for APAC partners in Q3, although no specific dates were announced.

Earlier this week, Acronis revealed the results of a new study on digital responsibility, in which respondents confirmed that their personal data is more valuable to them than the devices it is stored on. They survey was released in conjunction with World Backup Day to remind users to back up their personal data.