Acronis reveals plan to bust out of backup biz, thrust growth sideways Acronis is making a break-out move from the data protection business, looking to expand sideways into file access, synch 'n share. Why is it doing this? Competing in the backup market is a bit like trench warfare. There's a lot of hunkering down, lots of noise and smoke but nothing much changes overall because the proprietary …
The few times I've paid for support from Acronis it has been totally and utterly a waste of time. Their non stop backup product isn't bad when it works but when it doesn't their support is pretty pointless and hopeless. Their advice usually consists of them telling you to reinstall the product and start from scratch (this losing all your backups) or install an upcoming new version.
Perhaps they should sort out their support before they look in new directions. I won't be buying any more Acronis products!
Could not agree more. I've gone from being a huge fan to someone who would not use at any cost. Their original software was good, but they have constantly complicated it in order to be able to remarket, but with new features. They should consider the aircraft designer's maxim 'design, then add simplicity and lightness'.
I was interested in their online back-up but when I looked at their privacy policy on their .co.uk website, they didn't actually state who the data controller was. I contacted Acronis last Sunday to ask them who the data controller was for UK services - expecting to receive a fairly quick response, but they replied asking for more information so that they could forward my request to a salesman.
Acronis want me to pay for their service and have my data stored on their servers but who is responsible for that data and under want laws will that data be stored? This should not be a difficult question to answer.
I'm still waiting for an answer.
The lawsuit with symantec. I'm guessing they know they can't prevail with that one. Even more puzzling is to move from one saturated market to another. There is ample competition in the "corporate dropbox" arena, and unless they have some form of differentiation versus the competition in that space they will be facing a new and different uphill road to travel. And lets not forget that Arconis was never a real player in the backup space when it came to the enterprise anyway. 250k customers, I'm betting thats mostly single users who picked up a copy of their imaging software.
I see several problems here. First off is that DropBox, and to a lesser extent other solutions, are integrated into tablet and phone apps which is why they are being adopted quickly. Acronis is coming somewhat late to that game unless they're going to figure out a way around otherwise root access. As far as I've seen, phone and tablet users wouldn't know their phone's file system if it ran up and bit them. [The audience here is far from typical.]
As for the patent lawsuit, I suspect that either the parties will settle or Symantec will find out just how obvious their patent is to a practitioner in the field.
I agree with the comments about Acronis support and lack of transparency.
To me, the A-1 most important factors that would weigh in my decision about a commercial file storage service are the kinds of factors that Acronis has a poor reputation at: reliability, privacy/security and support.
The last time I purchased a server system image product I went with Symantec because even if the product has inferior functionality in some ways compared to the Acronis equivalent, and even if Symantec support isn't the greatest, Acronis support and reliability are the worst. It's great when their stuff works, good luck to you if it doesn't.
And that's not even mentioning the sales team - who remind me of used car salesmen.
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