No Conflict of Interest

Dr Archana Verma

Interaction with Rajesh Chhabra, GM, India and South Asia, Acronis

Tell me about your current role in this company

I am the GM for India and South Asia. In Indian Peninsula, I am responsible for the entire region. I am responsible for revenue of the region. We are a cyber-protection organisation and, primarily we have a suite of functionalities, which are helping our partners provide holistic cyber protection to their customers.

When I talk about cyber protection, I am talking about services including backup, disaster recovery, security anti-ransomware, email security and RMM solutions, which refer to remote monitoring and management. So, it is a single unified platform which provides overall cyber protection.

What is the strength of your MSPs in India in metro and non-metro locations, in tier one, tier two, tier three?

Since we started our operations in India, which is now close to eight years ago, we have spread rapidly. Globally, we are present in one 50 countries around the world.

When we came in, because of our reputation around the world, many organisations in India were already using Acronis while we were still not officially present here. Therefore, they welcomed us wholeheartedly. We started operations here eight years back. We started obviously from metro cities, which includes Delhi, Mumbai. Bangalore, Chennai and then fast spread across the non-metro cities as well. Today, we have about 500 partners spread throughout India. In terms of segregation of the partners between metros and non-metros, I think about 50% of our partners would be in the major cities while 50% remaining would be spread across tier two and tier three cities.

So, we do cover the entire length and breadth of India.

What type of incentives do your partners get for working for this Acronis? For example, some type of training programmes and what type of rewards, awards, reward points etc?

I think the biggest incentive for working for Acronis is the fact that Acronis is a 100% partner-centric organisation or channel-centric organisation? Our DNA globally is to only work through channel. We do not sell directly to end customers. Even if end customers approach us directly, we would help them and then basically take them to one of our partners.

So, the biggest incentive for partners is that there is no conflict of interest because they do understand that Aron is a partner-centric, partner-first organisation. Apart from that, as you mentioned, we do help our partners at every level of their entrepreneurship. Right from training. We have a very evolved training programme.

Apart from having a local training organisation in the country, which is only focused on partner enablement, we als0 have a very evolved partner portal. And from this partner portal, they can attend on demand training classes, or they can also list for instructor-led training sessions, which are very regular and keep on happening every 15 days.

The can also take all the collaterals that they need for their business from the portal. These collaterals include campaign materials, like email drip campaigns. They can download the campaigns and they can send it, or they can also use our partner portal to just upload their customer’s contact and then basically send it from our partner portal.

It also equips them with other materials like white papers, comparison charts, between Acronis and other solution providers. Apart from that, we also invest in our partner ecosystem by giving them market development funds, which they can use to increase their customer penetration.

We go above and beyond, by enabling their team members by running a lot of promotional campaigns, where we go ahead and enable them on particular solutions where they feel they have a good fit.

So, we have a complete lifecycle management of our partners; overall business model and help them at every stage.

Are there any new strategic incentives that you are devising for 2025-26?

The strategic incentives we have are focused on are the pillars of growth that we have identified for 2025-26. These pillars of growth include disaster recovery, operational technology and RMM solutions. So, around these strategic pillars, we have a lot of incentives for our partners including giving them these functionalities, to use with their customers. There’s a limited period for getting these free without paying us anything. They have the freedom to charge their end customers, but the crown gives them these promotions for periods such as six months or even longer than six months.