Acronis, a Swiss back is a backup solutions provider has opened their operation in Bangladesh recently. We spoke with Maxim Mitrokhin, Senior Sales Director of Acronis while he was here to introduce the product line in Dhaka about Acronis's plan for Bangladesh. Here's the gist of the conversation:

Why are you focusing on Bangladesh now?

Up until now, we didn't focus on Bangladesh. This was due to the fact that we didn't have a dedicated distributor here. Now that we have a dedicated distributor, we are more focused on Bangladesh now. We also are spreading our operation in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. We decided that we want to move our business to Bangladesh with distributors who have already proved their efficiency. We wouldn't have been able to start our operations in Bangladesh without these distributors. We understand that it is a good time as there is a growing awareness regarding data security and people are starting to think about it. People are talking about backup data solutions to avoid incidents. We had a meeting with our customers and it helped us understand the expectations with a lot of questions from the customers. Many top businesses in Bangladesh are also not used to the idea of storage and backup because these issues are fairly new to them. We also observed that a lot of companies are generating a lot of data and they are starting to think about to store and secure all this data. We believe our solution is perfect for them.

What part of the world does Acronis has most business?

Revenue-wise it's mostly concentrated in the west like the United States and Europe. But there is growing demand within the APAC region for example, Japan, Singapore and others.

What sort of products are you guys launching in Bangladesh?

We have a bit of both; B2B and B2C products in our lineup but we can expect more customers in this region being B2B. But we are, however, going to start full-fledged operations as per our distribution contract with Dhaka Distributions. All our products will be made available for Bangladesh. We are not just a data backup company as we also offer disaster recovery, deployment software with cloud programs. Our business products are targeted towards large companies and those products do more than backup. The cloud service solution that we provide will be greatly beneficial for Telcos and ISPs. We also have a full range of B2C products lined up for general consumers who need data backup and protection solutions.

What's the most popular Acronis product?

Acronis True Image is the most popular product with customers and it has more than five million users. Acronis Backup 12.5 is popular with businesses and entrepreneurs. We are seeing interest for these two products amongst customers in Bangladesh. Some Telco companies have already approached us for our cloud platform so we can expect demand for that product as well.

What's unique about the solutions of Acronis?

There are many companies offering backup services but what is unique about Acronis is that we do image based backup. This provides a safer and faster backup. We also do universal recovery and our software is supported on 21 different platforms. We also provide anti-ransomware tools with our backup software which is unfound in most backup tools.  For Bangladesh, the retail price for consumer products is very competitive. The local dealership has enough experts to provide all the support you need. So we can guarantee you the best experience.

What are your long term goals in Bangladesh?

Although it is hard to predict the future, but we have plans to educate the market here. We need to create a channel of reliable distributors who have the expertise and knowledge of what they are selling. Our other plan is to have our channels be capable of not only introducing and pitching the product to the customer but also make successful deployments. This will ensure customer satisfaction and our customers will have a delightful experience with our products every time. So to sum up, our focus will be primarily on developing our channels here so that we can use our advents in Bangladesh as stepping stones for making improvements in other regions of the world.