Ingram's Australian cloud offensive revealed

Ingram Micro Australia has shaken up its approach to cloud with a new division that uses the distie's international weight to give it an edge over rivals.

Cloud is nothing new to Ingram – it has been selling cloud products for three years. But the structure of the local division is meant to improve the distie's ability to dominate cloud as it has in desktop and traditional IT.

The strategy comes as cloud activity heats up among Australian distributors, with Avnet, Westcon and Distribution Central all recently announcing new go-to-market plans.

CRN spoke to Renee Bergeron, vice president of worldwide cloud computing at $42 billion-turnover Ingram Micro. She said that Ingram’s cloud marketplace would beat out alternatives due to the distie’s strong relationship with partners.

“We have seen marketplaces pop up around the world but we haven’t seen any of them get real traction.

“The reason they don’t is that they’re not a known quantity. Resellers want a partner they can trust. We are focused on the channel and we deliver solutions for the channel.”

Ingram Micro Australia will launch the second version of its cloud marketplace, built on the Parallels platform, in the first quarter. The marketplace will draw on Parallels’ software aggregation to offer unified invoices for all cloud products purchased through the distie.

“Most resellers have one-time invoicing. There’s no support for an annuity business where you invoice month after month," said Bergeron.

Ingram Micro cloud partners will be able to white label invoices for cloud software so they don’t have to manage accounts receivable

Global view

Daniel Dainton, country manager of cloud & managed services, told CRN that the distie was taking a global view. “We’re aligning to the global business as one team, not on a country-by-country basis. It will enhance what we’re doing and put a lot more advance on what others are doing."

The distie's cloud outfit wants to become a master services provider, a one-stop shop for resellers. Ingram defines cloud loosely as “anything off-premises”, which means it will sell hosted Microsoft Exchange alongside Microsoft Office 365.

Ingram’s value added services will include deeper support, such as Skykick migration services that handle the move from Exchange Server to Office 365.

The cloud division includes a consultancy service team that will go on-site for training and enablement or to provide advice for heavier data migrations.

A global roadshow and cloud boot camps will help educate resellers on the benefits of the cloud software model and look at how to sell cloud products profitably.

“We will be talking to partners about how to transform their business from pure hardware to a hybrid model. Hybrid helps the transition to a scalable business,” Dainton said.

While most people know how to buy, sell and deal with hardware, the cloud opens up new opportunities as services can be wrapped around every component, Dainton added.

Ingram Micro Australia is running a pair of two-day Cloud Profitability Bootcamps in Sydney and Melbourne in late November featuring guest Ben Gower, managing director of UK-based Perspicuity, a Microsoft gold partner and "one of the top SMB partners in the world".