Acronis is one of the leading companies developing backup software, solutions for disaster recovery and protected access. It focuses on individual users, small and medium-sized businesses as well as large entities. As of now, over 5.5 million people and one and a half million companies use Acronis’ products, mentioned Nikolay Grebennikov, Vice-President for Development, at the meeting with ITMO students. Acronis have branches in over 150 countries – its headquarters is in Moscow. Its data centers are in different countries all over the world.

At the end of last year, Acronis also opened an office in St. Petersburg. Its team of programmers headed by a famous developer Sergei Ulasen, is going to develop solutions for protection and storage of data and new technologies based on AI and machine learning.

At the same time Acronis signed a cooperation agreement with ITMO University for developing new joint laboratory. According to Dmitry Raichuk, Director for the Academic Programs, cooperation with ITMO is an important part of Acronis’ activities in St. Petersburg.

The representatives of Acronis meet with ITMO students 

“ITMO is one of the leaders in IT education. That is why we looked for the opportunity to cooperate with it. It was difficult to launch projects in St. Petersburg when we had no office there. But when we did it we paid great attention to making contacts with ITMO. Moreover, when searching for a location we tried to choose an office near ITMO. Finally, we opened the office at walking distance from the university. We believe that it will be convenient for both students and our developers,” commented on Dmitry Raichuk.

According to the cooperation agreement, the educational project will include the following areas: storage and processing Big Data systems, AI, machine learning, data security as well as monitoring of information systems and processes. All these tasks correlate with fields developed by the company. The developers have already presented three AI projects for ITMO students.

“We’d like to teach the students how to collect information on user’s behavior. It is necessary to understand how to protect their data. Having determined where the user saves valuable data, we want to understand how to prevent data loss. It is a task related to detecting various breakdowns. Then there is the final step, which is to detect processes that can affect the data. It can be any process – from information leakage to a user’s mistake when one deletes some necessary data by chance. We want our student to be versed in this issue and develop a data protection field,” says Sergei Ulasen.

Sergei Ulasen

According to Mr. Raichuk there will be more projects in the future. Their main feature is a research approach. Working in a laboratory is more than boring coding, it is about solving complicated tasks that may seem impossible. The expert believes that this work has to correlate with studies – the tasks given by the experts of Acronis, can serve as a basis for a thesis or scientific article. The company already has about 40 projects following this concept.

The students can choose a topic themselves. Then they have to address a project’s head, Andrey Filchenkov, researcher at the Computer Technology Department, who will present this to the team leader – the expert makes a decision on whether a student has enough competencies and makes a plan of the work. Those who have joined the team, have to present progress reports every week – the scholarship will depend on the progress.

“More than 100 people who were our students and worked in our labs joined Acronis or other similar companies as employees. It is common for us to hire those who were involved in the projects. On the one hand, when students work on projects they understand on what the company focuses, what skills a modern IT specialist has to obtain and find the balance between expectations and reality. On the other hand, this experience helps a team lead understand what knowledge, soft and hard skills the student has,” says Dmitry Raichuk.

ITMO University is to become a communication hub where leading IT experts will share their experience. For example, Acronis already invited such specialists as Michael Widenius (known as Monty), the main author of the original version of the open source MySQL and founder of MySQL AB as well as Vitalik Buterin, founder of the Ethereum.