IT distributor Ingram Micro is partnering with integration application company SkyKick to offer channel partners automated Office 365 migration combined with and post-sales support, all under the monthly subscription model of Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program.
The new solution, offered through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace, and is meant to help resellers who may lack the expertise in migrating new customers to Office 365 or the resources to provide post-sales support.
“The majority of the market doesn’t have the skills and capabilities to do this,” said Jason Bystrak, executive director of the Americas at Ingram Micro Cloud. “I think some of the managed service providers have some of these skills, especially in the post-sales side, but not so much the migration. It’s thousands and thousands of our channel partners.”
With these services offered by Ingram and SkyKick, partners can concentrate efforts on sales and building value-added services on top of their cloud offerings such as SharePoint, Lync or CRM, he added.
On the Office 365 page of Ingram’s cloud marketplace, the company has three offerings, depending on how comprehensive a solution they require. At the basic level, the company offers Office 365 license purchase option where any and all migration is done by the partner. This, according to Todd Schwartz, one of SkyKick’s CEOs, is likely more useful for new companies.
From there, the provisioning ramps up.
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Through integration with SkyKick, Ingram is able to offer two options that use email to provide environment discovery. While one is designed mainly to inform a purchase decision to the client by showing them details on their IT environment such as users and permissions, the other goes much further to essentially automate migration, including sales, provisioning, licensing, user setup, data migration, and email migration.
“It reduces about 90 per cent of the time that would be spent on migration,” said Schwartz. “You just need to know the customer’s email address, put in the password. You don’t need to be an advanced power user. Behind the scenes, SkyKick technology does the search and discovery work and finds the technical information that we need to do real-time migration.”
“We’ve made it very easy,” he added.
According to Schwartz, the solution works for both SMBs and enterprises. While SkyKick technology would migrate customers, Ingram will be providing the post-sales support. The offerings become generally avaialble today.
“They had a team dedicated to this and we had a team dedicated to this,” said Schwartz. “It’s a great implementation. I think we’ve done something really special.”
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