In July of 2022 industry veteran Patrick Pulvermueller joined Acronis as there CEO. With an extensive background in product development, a stint at GoDaddy and many executive positions in his career Pulvermueller is a great fit. Harry gets a moment at the Acronis Cyberfit conference to chat with Patrick about the three things he is focusing on in his new role and what he sees for the future of Acronis.
Interview Transcription
Harry Brelsford
A nation nation back with you from the Acronis. Cyberfit summit 2021 at the Fontain Blue hotel in Miami top shelf. And I'm with Patrick, the new CEO of Acronis. How're you doing?
Peter Pulvermueller
I'm good. Thank you for having me.
Harry Brelsford
Good. Good. So let's let's talk about you first. you're relatively new enroll. When did you join a Cronus? What do you do?
Peter Pulvermueller
Yeah, so I joined Acronis July 1, so that's 130 40 days ago, feels like ages nowadays. But yeah, good things. And what I do a CEO, I'm pretty much in control of everything and run the whole show. So I'm glad to be here.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, absolutely. And you and I were talking during the conference that you came from GoDaddy, we were friends with GoDaddy. So that's pretty interesting. What made that experience help you be qualified to run Acronis.
Peter Pulvermueller
So frankly, as you know, the major challenge for Acronis is the service provider. Right. And as I was part of the service provider for the last 20 ish years, that made me a good candidate to really know what our customers need. Yeah, that was really about to know what your customers need, so that they can help their end customers to be the best.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah. Can you lay out what are a couple of initiatives that you have underway moving forward in your new role now that now that you've gotten settled,
Peter Pulvermueller
so I don't feel settled yet. But okay, it's really a very nice run. And I very much enjoy that one. But the three things I'm currently focusing on first is really providing the right tools and services to all service providers to train to learn to market the services successfully to the end customers. Yes, so much change continuously, that they need the material to really be successful. We have seen tremendous success through our academy, which is our second topic. Yeah. Where Julio Academy everyone was joining the Academy has an average 103% more revenue, were do I sign up? online.com? Very, very simple. And third, really, it's about extending our infrastructure to even be closer to the end customers to closer to all the verticals, we are protecting everywhere. Yeah. On the road.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about the conference. So a very capable and robust conference. Like a lot of organizations he took last year off, obviously, with the pandemic. What are your thoughts on the conference? I really enjoyed it. What are your thoughts?
Peter Pulvermueller
So first, thank you for the compliment. Thank you so much. We actually decided to have a hybrid conference. So there are many hundreds of people here in Miami, but just create an parallel depot virtual conference. Yeah, because it wants to give our partners, our service providers the choice to pick what they feel most comfortable with. And this is really recreate a group of very well for us. Huge attendance rate. Yeah. All the other areas, huge participation, and frankly, also very creative feedback. From the populace. Yes, perfect.
So, let's talk about the segmentation of your, your partners that Acronis said, I believe there's five segments or so yeah. So
when I look at the service provider market, obviously, there are many, many different sub segments, not every service providers the same around the world. And in each of the regions. So for example, you have managed service providers, cloud service providers, network service providers, hosting service providers, and then other sub parts, which we can also talk about later. But it's important to understand that each one of these categories actually have very specific needs, what they need to be successful in their part, a managed service provider is very much focused on the achievement, a cloud service provider gives you all the compute power in the cloud, to do whatever you want to do with it. So it sounds all like the same, but they're really very different.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, yeah. No, it's, that's, that's very true. Finally, the push to enterprise, let's talk about that initiative, what's going on there.
Peter Pulvermueller
So Acronis has always been business fair, 20 ish percent has been in the enterprise market, okay. And we want to continue on that direction. For a simple reason. If you really provide enterprise, cquality to the SMB, it's a win win for both the SMB Wilborn, and server spot open, because they can offer the best solution possible. Yeah. And that's what we're going to continue to do today. And in the future.
Harry Brelsford
Well, and I would offer with Acronis. That's my observation is it's bottom up, that you've been in the SMB market understood, you have a footprint enterprise, but you're not a fortune one company and enterprise trying to come down in the SMB, because that that doesn't work very well, usually,
Peter Pulvermueller
frankly, doesn't mean I think about my own service about history. Yeah. If you really want to make things simpler and more cost efficient, you don't know really what to cut out, so that the remaining part is still compelling. On the other hand, if you have a very basic good inefficient product, and you add more and more service layers on top, it's much easier because each single layer, you put on top you see doesn't work does not work, if not great, use another layer and you work your way up much, much easier than the other way around.
Harry Brelsford
Alright, Patrick, great show.Thank you so much. Stay in touch.
Peter Pulvermueller
Yeah. Likewise, and thanks for having me.
Thank you.