Announcing the acquisition at World Hosting Day Asia, Acronis general manager of cloud business Rene Oldenbeuving said BackupAgent complements Acronis's existing portfolio.

It provides hosted, hybrid and on-premises file and image backup and recovery, including the ability to use Microsoft Azure as a backup destination.

The best parts of the Acronis and BackupAgent products will be integrated in later releases, he said.

One of the company's goals is to allow service providers to provide "enterprise class backup as a service for the SMB market," Mr Oldenbeuving said, pointing to research carried out with IDC showing that SMEs have quite complex IT environments.

Among the figures he quoted were that 54% use two or more hypervisors, 65% use cloud storage, 94% store at least some of their data off-site, 78% have a recovery time objective of four hours or less, and 37% manage physical, virtual and cloud environments.

"They behave the way enterprise companies behaved a couple of years ago," he said.

Acronis Backup as a Service was announced locally in July. It is designed to be sold by partners, with either managed or self-service operation.

Mr Oldenbeuving emphasised the way Acronis Cloud separates the storage and management aspects of backup as a service, allowing service providers to give their customers the choice of using Acronis's storage (which will be available locally in Singapore and Tokyo by the end of this month) or the provider's own - and presumably onshore - storage.

Disclosure: The writer travelled to World Hosting Day in Singapore as the guest of Parallels, which has a significant overlap of ownership with Acronis.