Backup software specialist Acronis has signed a deal with Iomega to bundle its new Backup & Recovery 11 software with Iomega’s new StorCenter PX range. The agreement will allow EMC (NYSE:EMC) partners taking the SMB-focused NAS range access to the Acronis off-site backup service instead of EMC’s own rival Mozy service which it recently transferred to its VMware (NYSE:VMW) offspring.
“We are very pleased with the agreement,” comments David Blackman, general manager, Northern Europe at Acronis. In his view, its online backup service allows channel partners a simple way of getting into high value business continuity services with minimal upfront investment. However, Blackman is vague about how many users the service that launched in October last year actually has or how many partners are selling it as vendor deems the information as “sensitive”.
The Acronis backup service costs around £30 per Terabyte per month for servers and is maintained in the UK by an unnamed “tier one” UK hosting provider. The equivalent EMC Mozy service costs around £250 to £300 per moth for 1TB of data. Although Blackman stresses that its online backup will be sold through the channel, Acronis like Mozy, is also available direct via an online shop. Channel partners can expect around 20 percent margin on the service for the lifetime of any customer contract.
The deal between Acronis and Iomega is exclusively for the UK and both firms will be kicking off a joint roadshow later this month to try and recruit partners and generate sales for both new products.
Iomega had previously used Roxio Restropsect, a technology formerly owned by EMC which it sold to Sonic Solutions last year. It had been assumed that Iomega would use the EMC Avamar software for its new NAS solution but the selection of Acronis is an acknowledgement that in the sub-£5000 area where its new PX series is aimed, the higher-end EMC software was probably not well suited.
