Acronis CyberFit Summit: Partners Gaining from Acronis' Aggressive Growth
Acronis is growing in the high double digits every year.
![CyfitCover CyfitCover](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blted470df80d1239d7/6524110511c6ce55bef47189/CyfitCover.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Channel Futures: Will the new EDR solution create new opportunities for partners?
Alex Ruslyakov: Absolutely. This is the response part. Once you detect the threat, this is how you respond to it. And again, when this response is integrated with the whole journey of detection, prevention, response and recovery, that’s where it’s an integral part of the overall protection of any type of workload. And what it also represents is a huge upsell and cross-sell opportunity for the partner. If you’re an MSP business, if you’re doing whatever vulnerability patch management or antivirus protection for your customers, what happens if still the attack hits you? You cannot have a 100% guarantee that it doesn’t hit. No software will give you a 100% guarantee. So what happens then? You should be able to respond. And this is a great cross-sell opportunity. OK, we’re offering you this stack of services, the base services. Now we can upsell you to the next level of protection. And I think it’s not only the technical capability, but also a great business opportunity for the partners to do this natural cross-sell and upsell.
CF: Partner integrations with Acronis are increasing. Can you give some examples of the latest integrations and how they help improve security?
AR: Based on our MSP benchmark survey, 78% of MSPs believe that services integration is driving higher bottom-line profits. So it’s not only about the level of protection for an MSP. It’s also about the profitability and overall operational efficiency. So what we do is we now integrate with 40-plus different platforms now, including ConnectWise, NinjaOne, N-Able and others. So we integrate with all the major players in the market, with all the RMM systems and PSA systems in the market. And from that perspective, if I’m a service provider and I’m using any platform, I want to have everything integrated so that I have the unified billing and unified provisioning mechanism. And that is actually giving me a competitive advantage, that is actually giving me the operational efficiency. That is how I increase my overall margins because they have less costs associated with management of all my services. And that’s what we help them to achieve with this type of service. And obviously, due to our multiple services on our platform, with this integration, the partner and their customers can get a better protection because through, let’s say the ConnectWise platform, they can get all these different services as their layers of protection in a seamless experience.
CF: What’s the latest with Acronis’ CyberFit Partner Program? Any latest opportunities for partners? Anything upcoming?
AR: First of all, the Acronis CyberFit Partner Program today offers, I would say, the best set of benefits in the market. And in particular when it comes to service providers, we do really put a lot of focus on service providers there. And what we’ve done is we’ve eliminated the revenue thresholds for attaining the gold level in the program so that even medium size or small service providers could attain the gold level. And what it gives them is the ability to receive financial and marketing benefits, so MDFs and rebates through the program. And the way we do it is we’re providing a substantial rebate for those partners who are compliant with the program requirements and who are hitting their targets. And with the program requirements, we have our so-called CyberFit score, which is basically a measure of focus of a partner towards Acronis. We measure how well are we doing the post-sales, if we have a joint business plan, if they have trained personnel sales and technical people trained, if they have joint marketing with us. And with all that, we score them and if they comply with the level, they can get access to those financial marketing benefits through the program.
And on the gold level, we’re offering a 10% rebate for those who hit their targets. So we motivate people to have joint business plans with us. And this is what the program was all about. We want our partners to be focused and engaged. And at the same time, our major advantage is that we’re offering partner account managers. Of course part of it is support, but it is mainly about joint business development. And the objectives of our partner account managers, our regional marketing managers is to grow partners’ revenue. For that, they need to understand partners’ business very well and set the joint targets, and work together on joint marketing and sales activities, and put them into a very granular quarterly plan and project manage this plan. So consider it as an external business development resource, a team that works with those partners.
CF: With economic uncertainty and talk of recession, are there things in the CyberFit program that can help partners get through potential tough times?
AR: That’s exactly where the financial and marketing benefits play an important role. If you want to develop your business, if you want to attract more customers, if you want to increase your footprint within existing customer base, you have to invest there. And this is where Acronis is basically ready to co-invest. But the only condition is that the partners are really focused and are really working with us closely on that. So that’s where I’m saying that we’ve removed this revenue thresholds for partners to be able to get access to these benefits. This is a big change. This is a big step up. Moreover, we’re helping partners to save costs. And with that, we’ve just recently launched a partner demo lab so that a partner can spin off a demo lab with the Acronis products pre-installed in the cloud just with a click of a button through our partner portal. With that, they don’t have to spend their resources on deploying, maintaining and basically allocating virtual machine resources in their internal infrastructure because that costs as well. You need to have a certain amount of virtual machines, update them constantly, and have someone looking after this demo environment. Now you can get this demo environment up and running in seconds through the partner portal. That’s a relief on your infrastructure tasks and your operational tasks. So that’s what we do.
CF: What sort of feedback are you receiving from partners? What are their latest needs and pain points?
AR: The main pain point of our partners is the complexity they have to deal with. And when you have that many different solutions with different features, nobody buys on features anymore, what people are buying for is the completeness, and the ease of consumption and the efficiency that that integration provides, that unification provides. You don’t want to have 20 different agents installed on your customer system to do 20 different tasks. You’re going to have one agent that will be able to do all these 20 different tasks. If you want to do a vulnerability assessment, patch management antivirus, you want to do EDR, you want the backup and the disaster recovery, you don’t want to have six different applications running on the system. And that’s how we help them to address the complexity. So we want it to be in one click, one single agent, one single UI, one single point of contact when it comes to reaching out to your vendor for support, for business development help and marketing help. That’s a big deal.
CF: What do you hope partners can take home and make use of from this CyberFit?
AR: My main message to the partners I see here at the summit is for them to talk to us more. We have thousands of service providers with us and we offer them this extended business development team to work with them. And what some partners don’t realize is that they’re actually underutilizing these resources that we’re providing. We want them to talk to us. We want them to set up regular cadence with us. We want to know more about their business, what they do, whom they sell to, how they sell, how they operate, so that we can basically leverage our task force. We are a 100% channel company. We’re focused on channel. The only way for us to grow is to make our partners grow. And that’s why we allocate tremendous resources on our side towards our partners’ growth. And what many of these partners just don’t realize is that they can leverage Acronis much more to facilitate this growth. That’s why my message is connect to us and talk to us more, and leverage our resources more.
Also during Acronis CyberFit, Candid Wuest, vice president of Acronis Research, told attendees the average lifespan of a malware has fallen from 3.4 days to 2.3 days. Such a short lifespan means there’s no time to detect and analyze these threats. Therefore, machine learning (ML) and machine intelligence are needed to predict and prevent attacks, and automation is needed if the threats get through.
“We’re also seeing many software vulnerabilities, with already 20,000 reported this year,” he said. “Not all are critical, but there are a lot of others like Microsoft Exchange. Have you actually patched all of them? And there are some where there’s no patch available.”
The bad guys are also ML and artificial intelligence, and are able to compromise multifactor authentication (MFA), Wuest said.
“There’s millions of solutions you can install that protect against specific threats,” he said. “But point solutions are complex and there’s no full coverage. Acronis is one solution for this.”
Acronis has more than 1 billion backups for customers this year, Wuest said. And more than 12% of customers experienced malware attacks, so it’s not if, but when. In addition, the bad guys are automating their attacks as well. With a 1,464% increase in malicious URLs, it can happen to everyone.
Acronis also introduced its new chief sales officer, Katya Ivanova (seated with Acronis CEO Patrick Pulvermueller). Originally from Ukraine, Ivanova has been with Acronis for 11 years.
She said a lot has changed during her years with Acronis, and now cloud is everywhere and threats are everywhere.
“Ransomware is now very well known because it’s everywhere, so it’s changed a lot,” she said. “We always challenge the status quo. We are security, but backup is not enough, security is not enough.”
Ivanova said she’s focused on working to ensure partners and customers’ success.
“And the overall industry, I’m super excited about IT,” she said. “It’s constantly changing and we’re constantly learning new things.”
Challenges and Upcoming Innovations
Oleg Melnikov, Acronis’ CTO, outlined the biggest challenges facing service providers and customers.
For service providers, there’s fierce competition for talent, a growing knowledge gap, the importance of productivity and job satisfaction among IT technicians, a highly distributed workforce and more sophisticated threats.
For customers, there’s more global threats, a more sophisticated IT landscape, the emergence of IT as mission critical, a growing list of compliances and no business is too small for cybercriminals.
Melnikov also outlined new solutions that will be rolled out in the coming months. For example, more automation will be coming to help partners become more automated, predictable and profitable.
In addition, Alex Zinin, Acronis’ chief cloud infrastructure officer, talked about upcoming cloud infrastructure solutions. For example, Geo-redundant cloud storage will provide additional protection for data stored in cloud storage.
Challenges and Upcoming Innovations
Oleg Melnikov, Acronis’ CTO, outlined the biggest challenges facing service providers and customers.
For service providers, there’s fierce competition for talent, a growing knowledge gap, the importance of productivity and job satisfaction among IT technicians, a highly distributed workforce and more sophisticated threats.
For customers, there’s more global threats, a more sophisticated IT landscape, the emergence of IT as mission critical, a growing list of compliances and no business is too small for cybercriminals.
Melnikov also outlined new solutions that will be rolled out in the coming months. For example, more automation will be coming to help partners become more automated, predictable and profitable.
In addition, Alex Zinin, Acronis’ chief cloud infrastructure officer, talked about upcoming cloud infrastructure solutions. For example, Geo-redundant cloud storage will provide additional protection for data stored in cloud storage.
Acronis is growing rapidly and that growth is directly benefiting the company’s channel partners.
That’s according to Acronis CEO Patrick Pulvermueller. Monday marked the start of Acronis CyberFit Summit 2022 in Miami. The theme of the conference is “cyber protect the future.”
Acronis is working with over 20,000 partners and 750,000 businesses in over 150 countries and 26 languages.
“We are growing in the very high double digits every year and have been growing for quite some time now, especially in the area of service provider business,” he said. “There, we are actually three digits. The primary benefit to partners is, on the one hand, our algorithms, the more workloads we are protecting, the better we can predict certain behavior models, so we are quicker in protecting others and detecting attacks better. And second, we do significantly invest in research and development, which we can do because of our growth, and that has led to new products, new features and much more opportunities for our partners to succeed.”
Finally, through Acronis’ larger base, it can attract more integration partners, Pulvermueller said.
“I really helps because it makes life for everyone easier and reduces complexity,” he said.
During Acronis CyberFit, Acronis unveiled a new, simplified endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution for MSPs. Acronis Advanced Security + EDR for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud reduces the complexity present in other EDR solutions. It allows IT teams to detect and understand advanced attacks, and then recover using features like attack-specific, one-click rollback.
The Acronis Advanced Security + EDR early access program will be available in December for Acronis partners and will be generally available during the first quarter of 2023.
Core Message for Acronis Partners
Alex Ruslyakov is Acronis’ channel chief. He said there’s a core message for Acronis partners at this year’s CyberFit.
“I think the core message that we have for partners is that with the increase of cyber threats, the utmost importance is the way you prepare yourself for these threats to hit you,” he said. “And it’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when, obviously. And I think everybody realizes that now. So for you to be fully prepared, you have to have multiple lines of defense. That’s what we’re doing. That’s the essence of our platform, is to give our partners multiple levels of defense, which they can bring to their end customers. And it’s not enough to just detect the attacks. It’s not enough to just prevent those. You have to be able to respond and you have to be able to recover afterwards.”
Acronis’s platform delivers a stack of integrated services, Ruslyakov said.
“Integration here is of utmost importance because you might have multiple vendors in place for multiple tasks,” he said. “But what we see as a trend now is that there are too many different solutions and vendors. Our average partner would deal with 20 different vendors to complete relatively simple tasks of protecting the device and protecting the different types of workloads. They would have different solutions for different pieces of this protection strategy. And that brings in the complexity. And when you are in the MSP space, you can only be competitive if you’re efficient. If you’re not efficient, you’re out of business very soon because one of the trends is for automation. And we see a lot of bigger players buying out smaller players in the market and basically winning through their operational efficiency because that’s important for an MSP to be efficient. That’s where we help a lot.”
Scroll through our slideshow for a Q&A with Ruslyakov and more from Acronis CyberFit.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Edward Gately or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like