Acronis confronts rivals on price
Vendor says new online backup product has left its competitors scrambling
David Blackman: Product developed specifically for channel
Storage vendor Acronis claims the aggressive pricing of its first foray into the SMB online backup market has caused uproar among rivals.
Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 Online, which was unveiled to partners at the VMworld conference in Copenhagen this week, is designed to allow data to
be backed up in physical, virtual and cloud environments.
The vendor has billed it as the final piece in its integrated data recovery jigsaw.
End users can back up 250GB of workstation data for £33.59 a year and 1TB of data on a server for £299.
David Blackman, general manager for Northern Europe at Acronis, said the pricing of the product has left its competitors scrambling.
“No one else is doing online backup as inexpensively as we are and, compared to our competitors’ offerings, our product is a fraction of the cost,” he said.
Blackman said the product is one of only a handful on the market developed specifically for the channel.
“Most of the traditional online solutions have been sold direct to customers,” he said. “But for us, this is a channel product.”
The vendor hopes the product will enable channel partners to provide customers with an alternative to tape and disk backup and build recurring revenue streams.
“A lot of companies have data retention and compliance policies, which require lots of tape. Storing it in the cloud just makes things easier,” added Blackman.
Oliver Marshall, a partner at VAR G2 Support, said the Acronis name will stand out against vendors offering white-label backup products in the market.
“The price is very affordable and it is a well-known vendor, so other online backup providers will really need to raise their game in order to compete,” he added.
“Lots of IT departments will have heard of Acronis and this move could net them a large slice of the market.”
Shane Herath, Acronis product manager at distributor Interactive Ideas, said: “By offering the online backup and recovery option as an add-on to the traditional software licensed product, this should prove an attractive option for SMBs.”