Zillion

November,  2006

Powerful Corporate Solutions

Catering to the needs of both home and corporate users, US-based Acronis is a global leader in file system-related software tools, including disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning, boot management, privacy, data migration and other storage management products. With its Acronis True Image Enterprise Suite backup product line, the company is currently pushing to strengthen its position at the top end of the corporate user market, as Julie Grivel Delillaz, Marketing and PR Manager for Acronis EMEA in Paris, emphasises.

Founded in the US in 2000, Acronis today is a global technology company with offices in Russia, Europe and Asia. Sales and distribution of its software tools are managed through a network of retail outlets, resellers, distributors and on the web. The company has had a presence in Europe for two years now, with sales and marketing centralised in Paris and Munich, and a Brussels office offering support services. ’Our European strategy in the short-and-mid-term targets is the strengthening of our corporate business,’ says Ms. Grivel Delillaz. ’We already hold a strong position in the small and medium business segment but the ambition now is to target the European upper mid-market segment.’

The company offers four Acronis True Image product solutions for corporate users, who can upgrade from the basic workstation to the enterprise server, server for Windows, or server for Linux. This modular product approach allows companies to upgrade their Acronis True Image storage management platform in tune with the growth of their business. Ms. Grivel Delillaz admits that the upper mid market segment, at the higher end of the corporate market, is highly competitive with strong global players such as Symantec; the latter offers the Ghost range for the retail market and Backup Exe for the corporate market. Ms. Grivel Delillaz emphasises, however, that Acronis does manage to differentiate itself from the solutions competition with a product line that is both priced competitively and of the highest quality in technical terms.

One key quality of the Acronis True Image line overall is its user friendliness, according to Ms. Grivel Delillaz; users always have the choice of being guided through the process by the wizard function. This has helped the industry to conclude that Acronis True Image’s overall functionality, reliability and UI are more robust and more understandable than those of competing, similar products. And while the product line is considered superior as superior on functionality and presentation alone, as the many awards it’s won suggest, it is the quality of support offered by Acronis that often swings the buying decision in their favour from the end user’s point of view. ’Our clients want total protection and they want it quickly, and that’s what we aim to offer through Acronis True Image,’ adds Ms. Grivel Delillaz. ’Server downtime is costing companies a lot of money, so it’s important that they can rely on a server protection and recovery solution that allows them to get back to business as quickly as possible.’ Particularly interesting for the corporate user is that Acronis True Image Enterprise Server, unlike other Acronis server backup products, boasts Acronis Management Console, a feature that offers great flexibility for corporate IT departments. From this console you can install the product, manage backup tasks, and recover remote servers located throughout your network. ’We believe we have a product line here that truly appeals to the corporate user,’ concludes Ms. Grivel Delillaz.