<article>Singapore headquartered backup and disaster recovery software vendor, <a href="http://www.acronis.com/en-us/" target="_blank">Acronis</a>, will ‘consider’ an initial public offering (IPO) in 2016, its chief executive said.</article>

Singapore headquartered backup and disaster recovery software vendor, <a href="http://www.acronis.com/en-us/" target="_blank">Acronis</a>, will ‘consider’ an initial public offering (IPO) in 2016, its chief executive said.
Serial entrepreneur Serguei Beloussov, who returned in May 2014, to take the reins of the company, said raising capital will not be the primary reason behind the company exploring a listing, as Acronis was cash positive and profitable.
“Listing has multiple purposes – one of the purpose is to give liquidity to shareholders and to motivate employees. We will consider listing for Acronis, but not earlier than 2016. Now we are fully focussed on growing the company,” he said in an interaction.
The listing, if it were to happen, will also provide an exit opportunity for <a href="http://www.insightpartners.com" target="_blank">Insight Venture Partners</a> and <a href="http://openviewpartners.com/" target="_blank">OpenView Venture Partners</a>, who had invested $11.1 million in the company more than a decade ago.
Beloussov and the other founders are the majority owners in Acronis.
Incidentally, Beloussov had quit Acronis, the company he founded in 2004, over a dispute related to its listing, between management and shareholders in 2008.
Acronis has since cancelled plans for a listing on two separate occasions.
The chief executive, who is Russian born and now a Singapore citizen, also admitted that local exchange (SGX) may not be the ideal place for listing technology and software companies.
“If we list, it may not be in Singapore – I have not thought about it so much. We did file twice in the past, but it did not go through due to management changes,” he added.
Beloussov said he decided to come back, replacing former CEO Alex Pinchev, since ‘Acronis presented a huge opportunity’, and added that his target was to grow revenues of the backup and disaster recovery software vendor to a couple of billion dollars, from a couple of hundred million (dollar) currently.
“The target is a ten-fold growth in revenues,” he said.
The company is also planning to set up a 50-100 member strong R&amp;D centre in Singapore, but will take a final call on this, based on grants and other assistance from the Singapore government.
Listing the strengths of Acronis, he said the company had created a niche for itself and had bright prospects, as it had hundreds of million (USD) of very profitable license revenue, about 700 employees worldwide, including 300 top-notch engineers, 30,000 strong partner ecosystem in 90 countries with over 300K businesses and five million consumers using its products.
Beloussov also pointed out that the data protection and storage space is expected to be a $30 billion dollar market by 2016.
Acronis competes with players such as <a href="http://www.symantec.com/‎" target="_blank">Symantec</a>, <a href="http://www.ca.com/" target="_blank">CA Technologies</a>, <a href="http://www.bmc.com/" target="_blank">BMC</a>, <a href="http://www.ibm.com/" target="_blank">IBM</a>, <a href="http://www.hds.com" target="_blank">HDS</a>, had moved its headquarters from Boston in the US to Singapore in 2014.

Exclusive: Acronis to consider IPO In 2016

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