Acronis looks to recruit VMware resellers with major bonus to margins

Woburn, MA- based backup vendor Acronis has a major campaign under way to recruit VMware resellers to sell its flagship Acronis vmProtect solution.

Its latest initiative is a significant bonus to margins, with a large additional bonus when their solution is sold with VMware.

“In 2009, we launched our virtual backup and recovery product and our first all virtual product last year,” said Izzy Azeri, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Americas & Business Development, at Acronis.

Acronis restructured its channel program last year to try and drive more channel business in the virtual space, and they have added 350 new partners in the U.S. since then.

Now we are offering the channel something much more lucrative, Azeri said.

First they are raising overall margin by a maximum 10 points — to 30 — on all products.

“We give that 30 points to distribution, and what a partner is paid depends on their tier,” Azeri said. This is paid up front.

The real plum with the new program is an additional 30 points given when selling Acronis products alongside VMware

“That extra 30% is not dependent on tier,” Azeri said.

Azeri said they have grown their VMware business significantly since VMprotect was launched, but that the growth has been disproportional among their larger partners.

“We have good overlap with VMware on the large DMR community, but once we move beyond that, that s where we are looking to recruit partners, on the VAR side,” he said.

Acronis vmProtect is specifically designed for pure VMware vSphere environments and uses all available VMware API s to perform in virtual environments with little or no IT support, with all backup and recovery tasks able to be managed remotely through a web based interface, and requiring little training to get up and running.

“We will also be providing great marketing collateral for partners to use as well as part of the promo,” Azeri said.