Acronis: We're snatching Symantec market share

Why can't backup SW vendors import customers' backup data from competing leggy products, such as BackupExec? After all Microsoft developed Excel to import Lotus Notes spreadsheets. Why isn't this kind of attack marketing happening in backup?

It is probably forbidden. Backup formats are proprietary, like ours. It's also because Backup software has lots of extensions and APIs that are unique. The effort would be huge and simply hasn't been undertaken.

What is the revenue picture at Acronis?

We don't communicate revenue details. Our funding is by private investors and a few Venture Capitalists but it is not VC-dominated and there is no VC push for a crystallisation.

We are extremely international, with three regions; Europe, the USA, and Asia, with each representing significant revenues.

So what do we think? Acronis is extremely close-mouthed about its financial performance and simply won't talk publicly about its size and how that is changing over the years. A press release (in German) from a company that appointed an ex-Acronis CEO Walter Scott as its CEO, mentions Acronis earning $120m in 2008, a big jump from the $20m three years earlier.

Replacement Acronis CEO Jason Donahue confirmed that revenues at that time were "Well north of $100m". He said they had grown by 20 per cent from calendar 2007 to 2008, with the final 2008 quarter being the firm's highest-grossing quarter ever. ®

Bootnote

Privately-owned Acronis was founded 2001 by Serguei Beloussov, Max Tsypliaev, and Ilya Zubarev. It was officially incorporated in 2002 in San Francisco, but it its head quarters are in Boston, with the actual code written in Russia.

Acronis says it has no one large home market and has been international from day one, selling its products in 90 countries, from offices in 18 countries, and supporting fourteen languages. It says it is one of the few companies its size that can compete globally.

Acronis has an OEM channel with three categories. There are HDD OEMs like Netgear, Seagate, and Iomega. Seagate, for example, ships Acronis software with external hard drives.

A second and smaller category is PC manufacturers, and third is vertical market OEMs shipping Acronis software with medical devices, point-of-sale products and printers. Oce, recently bought by Canon, is one of the largest of these.