Cash Cow

virtualization backup

The company's flagship product, Acronis True Image, is a disk-imaging and bare-metal restore tool for both Windows and Linux servers. With the tool, users can create duplicate images of live disk drives on servers or workstations, including the operating system, configuration files, programs or databases, and then save those images to disk drives, networked drives, or CDs or DVDs for disaster-recovery or data-backup purposes.

"If someone already has existing big-iron backup in place, we can complement that to offer bare-metal recovery and restoration to dissimilar hardware. We also do migrations from physical to virtual environments, and we see an opportunity for an Acronis sale with every VMware sale," said Eric Dougherty, director of channel sales at Acronis, Burlington, Mass.

VARs are finding the product to be a helpful tool for system migration as its customers move to virtualized environments.

"We use it a lot to facilitate a conversion from the physical to virtual world, and we make money on it through license sales but also through consulting," said Craig Sieve, managing partner at Foedus Group, a solution provider in Portsmouth, N.H.

Among the features that differentiate the product from its competition, of which Symantec is its largest, are support for multiple operating systems, ease of use and speed in capturing images, Sieve said.

"The process of capturing images is second to none; it's really the fastest product out there," Sieve said.

Acronis acknowledges that its products alone do not provide VARs with the lucrative high services margins they're seeking. The company has chosen to forge strategic partnerships with technology companies that unlock higher services revenues for resellers in hopes that they will take Acronis along for the ride.

"A lot of VARs love virtualization because there is so much services revenue. For every VMware license dollar sold, for example, they can make something like $5 to $8 in services revenue," Dougherty said.

Besides VMware, other companies that have joined Acronis' Global Technology Alliance Program include Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft. Acronis has also teamed up with managed services platform providers, including Kaseya and Level Platforms, to cash in on the growing number of resellers moving from break-fix to managed services.

"[The Acronis product] is quick to restore, very intuitive and very flexible, and the integration with Kaseya makes it so easy," said Mark Mancini, CEO of Twisted Technologies, an Atlanta-based MSP.

Acronis conducts about 60 percent of its sales through the channel, but its goal is to move closer to 100 percent, said Leah Colern, director of channel marketing.

Acronis said that it had doubled its sales from 2005 to 2006.