Interaction - Rustom Hiramaneck, Country Head, South Asia, Acronis

Acronis is a data protection company. Rustom Hiramaneck, Country Head, South Asia, Acronis talks to us about its channel strategies.

What are the the key methods you provide your MSP partners to maximise profits while optimising costs?

Rustom - At Acronis, we want to ensure the success of our partners, so I’m going to take a few minutes of your time to discuss the key methods we provide our MSP partners with to maximise profits while optimising costs -

Broaden your market reach

There are several other ways to increase a business’s reach, however, depending on the industry—MSPs, for example, can take advantage of Acronis’ TeamUp Programme, which connects providers to big names in sports. This program greatly boosts service providers’ brand recognition, placing their name and logo on playing fields and even on national TV. Offering unique services and differentiating yourself from the competition is another effective way to increase your reach, singling out what features separate you from the rest, and informing potential users why they should choose your product or service.

Next, your footprint, which is how your services or products benefit your users and leaves an impression, starts with your knowledge of your current customer base. This involves how many workloads they have, which types of workloads, the state of their cyber protection, and more, and if you’re not updated on this information, assume your competitors are. To obtain this data, providers can conduct surveys or use network discovery tools, which are provided in products such as Acronis’ Cyber Protect Cloud. Using our #CyberFit score service, you can generate a personalized report and reach out to your customers, offering them your services along with Acronis’ advanced disaster recovery, Microsoft 365 protection, advanced data loss prevention, and more, increasing your overall footprint with your existing customer base.

Consolidating success

A consolidated cyber protection service such as Acronis can supply you with the necessary data and cyber protection services needed to keep your clients safe, with different packages offering certain services such as backup at no additional costs. This leads directly into the next part of the growth process, where many businesses struggle the most—optimizing operational costs.

Overcomplexity in cybersecurity is a common issue amongst businesses that believe adopting several different cyber protection models will protect them, when in fact an increase of vendors leads to increased points of failure, multiple vulnerabilities, and a consistent need for updating, patching, and configuration the services to ensure they function. By adopting a consolidated cyber protection platform such as Acronis, all their cyber security and data protection needs are integrated into a single agent, reducing operational costs and time spent managing and configuring programs while offering more effective and comprehensive cyber protection.

Finally, the final stage in this process is increasing your net margin and maximizing your profits. The average MSP margin is between 11% and 30%, according to our market research. At Acronis, we help our partners increase their profitability by offering services such as partner program rebates, where partners receive a rebate once they hit their quarterly target. We also give our partners direct access to our marketing managers, solution engineers, and account managers to help assist our partners with promoting and growing their businesses. Additionally, our partner program offers marketing development funds (MDFs), investing our own revenue into our partners’ marketing initiatives to help them achieve higher profits.

What sort of partner upskilling programmes does Acronis run to empower partners on its cyber security solutions in the market?

Rustom - Our key focus area is understanding our partner’s business model and leveraging the flexibility of our platform and Partner Program to help our partners build a very competitive and attractive offering for their clients. We’re not forcing partners to sell a particular product or service, we give them options and toolsets to compile their own packages aligned with their go-to-market strategy, and then to enable an easy up-sell and cross-sell of value-add services for their clients. Our solutions allow partners to save on operational costs, while our Partner Program enables additional profitability via various sales and marketing benefits as well as technical support. We always put our partner’s business first – we grow when our partners grow.

We tailor our approach to reach partners in all areas of their relationship with Acronis, from new prospects to seasoned veterans. Partners take training when it is convenient for them on-demand, 24/7/365, via our online partner portal, at in-person events such as Cyber Summit being held in Miami, FL November 7-9, 2022, or live via an online webinar led by our world-class delivery team in their local time zone and language. We provide training and onboarding for their technical teams, sales professionals, and business decision-makers. We also provide individual coaching sessions for partners seeking to gain competitive advantages or onboard faster.

How does Acronis’ partner programme mitigate operational costs while ensuring profitable success?

Rustom - Acronis CyberFit Partner Programme offers business development tools and financial benefits to help partner increase their operational efficiency, lower costs and drive higher margins. Those include performance-based rebates, which increase margins, marketing development funds and marketing automation tools in the Acronis Partner Portal, dedicated Account Managers, Sales Engineering Support and priority Technical Support services to offload some of the operational tasks from our partners, advise on best practices and help focus on revenue generation and business development.

What is the geographical spread and strength in the numbers of your channel partners across India? What strategies do you want to use to expand it?

Rustom - Acronis has close to 500 partners pan India and the numbers keep growing month on month.

Cloud Adoption in India is growing at a fast pace and Acronis’ single agent, holistic Cyber Security solution is attracting huge interest from end customers as well as Partners across India.

Read more from Dr Archana Verma here 

Read products news here