Is Acronis nuts? It’s developing a general hyperconverged infrastructure appliance for a market that has already matured and consolidated around the Dell EMC and Nutanix duopoly. But it just might have an edge with service providers.
The company has built a hyperconverged backup appliance and looking at a general HCI appliance, Ronan McCurtin, Acronis senior sales director, said in a briefing in London today.
The thinking is that the appliance will use the Virtuozzo (KVM-based) hypervisor.
Acronis sells idata protection and cyber security products in two markets: on-premises business kit and cloud service providers. McCurtin says on-premises is Acronis’ core market, with five million or so users, while cloud is its newer and faster-growing market.
He said Acronis hasn’t really fulfilled its potential but is determined to do so in both markets, albeit with different growth rates; ”Growing 10 per cent in the on-premises market would be huge. Growing 10 per cent in the cloud market would be a disaster.”
McCurtin said Acronis was not going to go head-to-head with Nutanix or Dell EMC. But a software HCI appliance represents a new growth opportunity and Acronis thinks its channel partners can help it find a niche in a market owned Dell EMC and Nutanix. Service providers will sell services based on existing products, managed through a single Acronis facility and supported by Acronis.
Comment
It ought to be relatively easy to graft an HCI product onto its existing service provider business, so long as it supports multi-tenancy, quality of service, and simple management.
The Acronis HCI represents an incremental upgrade for service providers.would be managed and can be supported through already existing arrangement.
An Acronis HCI would also represent an incremental extension of existing business for Acronis’ on-premises customers.
McCurtin acknowledged the duopoly’s dominance but said it was early days in the HCI market and there was a long way to go. In other words, there is room for new entrants, despite suppliers like Maxta failing and exiting the market.
So just to be clear, Acronis is not nuts.
