Acronis bolsters Singapore presence with new R&D center, will tap into local talent

Data protection, backup, and recovery company Acronis will be establishing a new research and development center in Singapore, where its international headquarters is already located. The initiative is one more step in Acronis’ continued growth in the region.

“Data used to be part of large corporations’ [everyday] life,” Acronis CEO Serguei Beloussov tells Tech in Asia. “And then it became part of every human life. Our expansion plan is related to the fact that we want to make it easier, cheaper, and better to protect data in different places. In Asia, specifically, but also all over the world.”

The new R&D center is expected to commence operations in the summer of this year. Acronis estimates that approximately 25 percent of its global R&D resources will be based in Singapore. The country was chosen for this new investment because of its convenience as a location in the region, and also as a place to live and work. An additional incentive, according to Beloussov, is the investment the Singaporean government is making towards the country’s universities and research sector. “[It] is producing talent which we can hire,” he says.

By the center’s fifth year of operation, Acronis plans for it to have a staff of 120 to 150 people. The company expects about half of that personnel will be local hires. “We want to bring people from abroad, but we also want to tap into local talent,” Beloussov clarifies. Acronis hopes that a combination of talent coming out of Singapore’s universities and research centers and overseas employees incentivized to relocate to Singapore will be ideal for both the center’s operations and the country, which can reap the benefits in the long term.

The center will also be conducting joint research with local universities and research institutions, with potential collaborations including A*Star’s Data Storage Institute, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), and Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC).

More data, more opportunities

Acronis’ and similar companies’ services are becoming increasingly valuable as both business and personal life move to the cloud. As data spreads to more and more devices and the internet of things turns into tangible products and services, the need to safeguard that data increases. Acronis is in a position to scale its service accordingly, Beloussov says. “The internet of things for us is just one more data source – more devices with settings and data on them, which need to be protected.”

The company was recently acknowledged by tech research and advisory firm Gartner as a “challenger” in its Magic Quadrant for disaster recovery as a service, accompanied by companies like Columbus Business Solutions and Iland. “If you lose [your data], you lose time, value, control, power,” Beloussov says. “All we want to do is protect data better and for more people.”