Acronis Names New CEO With Plans To Expand MSP Base, Partner Investments

“I’m looking forward to really, really accelerating our growth through the partners and our research channels,” new Acronis CEO Patrick Pulvermueller, GoDaddy’s former partners business president, told CRN in an interview. “That’s what I believe in. That’s what I’ve been doing for 20 years. And that’s what I’m really passionate about doing.”

Cyber protection vendor Acronis has hired Patrick Pulvermueller, the former partners business president for web hosting company GoDaddy, as its new CEO, with a goal to grow the company‘s partner network and sales.

“We will double down on our partner program and really make it even more compelling going forward,” Pulvermueller told CRN.

Serguei Beloussov, who founded Acronis in Singapore in 2003 and has served as CEO since 2013, will stay on with the company as a chief research officer, overseeing product and technology development, according to a company statement Wednesday.

He is also still on the board and remains the largest shareholder of Acronis, which is based in Schaffhausen, Switzerland.

[RELATED: Acronis Raises $250M To Double Down On Channel Enablement]

Beloussov will focus on autonomous research, data management and other products and technologies. He will also help develop Acronis’ relations with universities.

Pulvermueller said that Acronis still has plenty of funds from a $250 million round of financing the company announced in May to increase recruitment and support around its service provider channel. He said the company has seen 100 percent growth from 2020 to 2021 and has “hundreds of millions” of dollars in annual recurring revenue.

Pulvermueller declined to provide specifics on whether his company has plans for more acquisitions following the November purchase of Israel-based cybersecurity consultancy CyberLynx to gain more capabilities around everything from IT security audits and penetration testing to post-event cyber forensics services and the July 2020 purchase of San Ramon, Calif.-based DeviceLock to improve Acronis’ ability to identify and block abnormal behaviors such as threat actors attempting to access sensitive documents or employees looking to steal data that isn’t relevant to their job responsibilities.

“What’s going to happen in the future, I don’t know yet,” he said. “Looking at the past might give you a good idea.”

The new CEO, who started on Thursday, spent more than four years with GoDaddy, ending with the title of president of GoDaddy’s partners business. In this role, Pulvermueller led GoDaddy’s expansion of its hosting, productivity and security services through agency partners and resellers. He previously held executive roles at Host Europe.

“I’m looking forward to really, really accelerating our growth through the partners and our research channels,” Pulvermueller said. “That’s what I believe in. That’s what I’ve been doing for 20 years. And that’s what I’m really passionate about doing.”

Pulvermueller wants Acronis’ products to handle more workloads and cover more environments and situations.

“We just want to give the right tools to all of our service providers to be successful and to really protect the whole environment,” he said.

Acronis now has 1,600 employees in 33 locations across 18 countries. It has 50,000 partners and service providers. Those partners, combined with a large intellectual property portfolio of more than 100 patents, will be key to capturing more share of what he called a $40 billion addressable market.

“Yes the competition is there,” he said. “But I think we have a head start.”