It’s no secret Ingram Micro has made a big bet on its cloud marketplace. The distributor last month finished its second cloud summit roadshow in Australia, spruiking and demonstrating the platform to partners eager to know how a cloud-based software procurement service will affect their own reseller models.
Ingram bought the Odin-based platform from Parallels in 2015, a transaction that saw the distie take on a 500-strong software development arm to push the marketplace to new heights and make integrating and onboarding new vendor partners all the easier.
One of the latest vendors to join Ingram on its cloud marketplace journey is Cisco, which signed a partnership to allow the distributor to provision the Spark collaboration platform through the digital portal. It’s a win that Ingram Micro Cloud’s Australian general manager Lee Welch says helps solidify the cloud marketplace’s importance in software provisioning.
“We’ve got a lot of confidence in our cloud strategy. We’ve been signing not just local ISVs in countries around the world but also global blue chip organisations, so Cisco is now the latest big vendor that we’ve signed globally,” he says.
“It means that we’ve got the right strategy, and vendors have realised this and want to onboard in our marketplaces around the world.”
Cisco has set about distinguishing Spark as an “end-to-end” collaboration solution. It provides a suite for business teams of various sizes to conduct meetings, engage in instant messaging and work on a whiteboard facility together, wherever they are in the world, using their device of choice.
Cisco Spark joins other major vendors on Ingram’s marketplace, including Microsoft, Symantec, Norton, Trend Micro, Autodesk, Dropbox and Docusign.
Welch says using the power of APIs, Ingram Micro’s cloud marketplace is a one-stop shop for leading software-as-a-service providers.
“From an API perspective, when we launch services on our marketplace they are fully integrated. Our backend systems are fully integrated and automated using the Odin standard of collaboration, which is APIs,” he says.
“A partner can provision very quickly a Cisco Spark solution using the marketplace and it’s all completely linked into Cisco’s backend, so APIs are very important for doing that.
“If you don’t have APIs, essentially you don’t have a fully automated marketplace – you have a portal to place an order, where somebody at the distributor or the services aggregator then has to turn around and place a manual order to the vendor. That’s really the difference between a true marketplace and just an ordering portal, which can be positioned as a marketplace, but isn’t really.”
Ingram Micro has been a Cisco partner in the traditional distribution sense for years, and Welch says while this relationship with the vendor and its many partners helped get the deal signed, there’s an untapped resource Cisco now has a direct line to: born-in-the-cloud resellers. New partners need only take a survey, gain an understanding of the Cisco brand and they can begin provisioning through marketplace.
“I’ve now got about 1200 transacting partners on my marketplace and we’re adding more every month. That represents a big opportunity for Cisco to broaden their partner base into partners that, importantly, have end-customer demand for products to be consumed as a service,” says Welch.
Shifting distribution models isn’t easy for every vendor. While Welch says Ingram’s cloud partnerships are growing, making the transition to as-a-service sales on a marketplace can be a challenge for some vendors. Some don't quite get it.
“There’s a wide range of readiness within our vendor base,” he says.
“There are some that we talk to that really get what our positioning is and what we can do for them. They are ready from a mindset perspective, they know that they need to build the API to integrate onto marketplace, and that process happens quite quickly.
“For our new vendors it’s the first time they’ve done it, so we help them with the type of go-to-market activity they need to have and give them advice on how to compensate salespeople and how to drive the market.”
As it goes with disruption to the classic distribution model, Welch says adjustments are necessary. This applies to reseller partners just as much as it does for vendors.
“Some partners are in denial and feel they don’t need to transform their business models to accommodate cloud and as-a-service models, and those partners aren’t going to be around for very long, as predicted by various analysts and organisations,” he says.
“[Then there are] value-added resellers that are starting to transform their model from a traditional business, then including cloud services, before transitioning more and more over to cloud services.
“Lastly, there are true born-in-the-cloud partners, and all they’ve known has been transacting services through marketplace. They are very nimble because they have business models attuned directly to an as-a-service model and a monthly recurring revenue model.
“Our job is to help partners transform or improve at whatever stage of that maturity curve they are on.
“With the traditional VARs we do lots of workshops, enablement programs and one-on-one sessions to help them understand what the opportunity is and how to position and provision services to their end customer,” says Welch.
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