PHOENIX – At its annual Cloud Summit, Ingram Micro wants to be the channel community’s go-to cloud distributor by expanding its portfolio into the software sphere.
While its venture into the cloud space began almost a decade ago, the global high-tech distributor has ramped up its offerings with several multi-platform cloud products and services announcements at its 2017 Cloud Summit.
“Cloud has become an important element of a complete business solution, and I think we’ve done a good job making significant investments in agnostic cloud offerings to make sure we can help everyone achieve their business goals and make it the best end user experience possible,” Paul Bay, executive vice president and group president of the Americas at Ingram Micro, tells CDN. “Whether a business wants to lean on Ingram Micro for all solutions, or build specializations themselves and let us contribute some services, its all possible. Its exciting because whether its virtual or physical, we’ve built up capabilities to make sure its a seamless experience across the board.”
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The company has shifted its focus to offering cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings as well as the more traditional software as a service (SaaS) products, which it calls “the next evolution.”
“In the past few years, cloud SaaS offerings have always been easier to take to market and didn’t require a lot of heavy lifting to bring together,” explains Renee Bergeron, senior vice president of the global cloud channel at Ingram Micro. “But we’ve recently realized that resellers have been struggling with IaaS, so we did an analysis to understand what the problem is and that helped push our investment in IaaS. We had to build the framework and business transformations first, but its really the next generation of cloud for us.”
Bergeron continues to say that while channel penetration around IaaS is fairly low, with more investment, Ingram expects consumption to increase in the next few years.
“We’re seeing it already actually,” says Nimesh Dave, executive vice president for global cloud at Ingram. “Last year, we weren’t seeing many IaaS sales coming through the channel but now we’re seeing a fairly significant amount from around the globe. And the sizes of the deals are evolving as well. They’ve gone from small deals to multi-million dollar ones.”
Ingram Micro has also placed an emphasis on simplifying the education process for businesses looking to move into the cloud and IaaS ecosystem.
“We recognize that many businesses are still trying to figure out the cloud, so anything we can do to simplify the journey is beneficial for them and puts us in the driver seat,” Dave adds. “We know it’s a new way of doing business so we provide easy guides for clouds like [Microsoft] Azure, and these educational toolkits help our partners transform from traditional to virtual sales without as little fear and unknowns as possible.”
