Ingram partners with Ultra Serve for managed services

Ingram Micro Australia has partnered with cloud and hosting company Ultra Serve to provide a platform for the delivery of managed and cloud services to local SMBs through the distributor’s reseller channel.

It comes after the launch last month of the Ingram Micro Services Group as the vehicle for its cloud services strategy.

Head of the new group Daren Elsby said Ultra Serve would support the delivery of enterprise-grade vendor, carrier and system integrator agnostic solutions to resellers servicing the SMB market.

Ultra Serve’s platform supports Linux and Windows with services hosted from its Australian data centre for resellers to deploy, configure and white label through a web portal.

In partnership with Ingram, Ultra Serve would deliver hosted solutions including virtual machines, dedicated machines, cloud machines and managed services.

Ultra Serve chief executive officer Samuel Yeats said it would greatly help the company extend its market reach.

“The partnership gives Ultra Serve the opportunity to reach a significantly larger pool of SMB-focused resellers and extend its reach into verticals such as Government and education,” Yeats said.

Elsby said it was the first of cloud and managed-services announcements over the next months. He declined to shed any light on them except to say that next month Ingram would announce a partnership supporting a “different style” of cloud service. He said that that although the current Ultra Serve deal would see customer data hosted in Australia, forthcoming partnerships would likely see data stored locally and overseas.

Elsby said that Ingram resellers have expressed interest.

“We’re partnering with best-of-breed suppliers to offer services that are tailored to the market, and supported by easy-to-use provisioning tools for resellers to deploy those services to end users,” Elsby said.

Ingram said it hoped to make provisioning of cloud services easier for resellers by ensuring they had configured and reliable solutions accompanied by stringent services contracts.

“That takes a lot of work in negotiating [service-level agreements], pricing and so forth that otherwise would fall on the shoulders of our resellers,” Elsby said. “What we’ve done is put in that hard work on their behalf so they don’t have to.”

Ingram hoped resellers could have confidence in the services it provisions and save time and worry by not having to go to market themselves.

Elsby said resellers could buy services using their existing reseller accounts and credit arrangements while receiving technical support and business advice.

Longhaus Analyst Scott Stewart said that removing the need for resellers to choose systems themselves would likely boost the adoption of cloud services. he said that even a 1 percent uptake would have an “immediate and game-changing effect on the market”.