Ingram CEO touts cloud leadership

Ingram Micro's chief executive officer has flagged his intention to take the distributor's cloud computing offering to top spot confirming that a local strategy is underway.

Speaking to CRN during his Australian visit, Greg Spierkel said the cloud was two to three years away from hitting "prime time" but the distributor planned to be at the fore of hosted offerings.

"There will be some new players or some that are going to come in and change their business models against a company like ours because we've got a good cross section of exposure to those players," Spierkel said.

"There will be people putting more applications sitting on hosted structures and I believe that we're going to have a role to play there, there's no question. But, we're going to work pretty hard to be on the edge of testing things and trying things - maybe before some companies will."

Spierkel, who opened the local office in 1997 when he was Asia-Pacific president was in Sydney last week visiting partners, vendors and local offices.

He said Ingram was working with companies that are "cloud enablers" such as those providing infrastructure in storage, applications and networking. Ingram was in discussions with Cisco, he said.

He detailed "leading-edge" services that Ingram runs in the US: "We have 14 to 16 different apps that we're running in a hosted context for smaller companies providing a store front for them".

"We're making a monthly fee structure available to our VAR [resellers] and we've signed up over 1000 VARs in 18 months on these hosted solutions. They're starting to get some traction.

"It's not a non event, but it's not a big event yet [either]," he said. "It's early days we're at the early adopters stage of the cycle that maybe a bit more protracted than people expect, but it's going to get momentum. This stuff is going to take legs in the next year to two years for sure."

VARs

Resellers were integral to Spierkel's cloud plans and he said a lot of the discussions will go ahead with a view to "hopefully enhance" Ingram's offerings to its broad base of customers.

"A lot of people still want to reach the small to medium business and retail through us. And they'll try to bring those types of business products or consumer products through our infrastructure," Spierkel said.

He said resellers will have a role in IT even when the cloud advances. Corporations may be able to knit together technologies but the "small business or the high-end home market will need someone else with the technical skills to bring all the elements together".

"This market is not going to be a simple plug-and-play world. No one's delivering a complete solution today so what the VAR needs to do is combine on-premise elements with hosted solution elements and right now we're in an on-premise world."

He said a reseller or systems integrator is the trusted IT department  for a small business that might say 'I want to use salesforce.com for a CRM management or inventory management app... but I still have storage needs, I still have enterprise computing requirements and I still have structured cabling'.

"You still have to push that stuff through a network, I still have a client level requirement or some device could get that standardised in a hosted solution, but you will not be able to put it all in place without a VAR doing most of that work."

He said resellers without service capabilities or a commitment to evolving their portfolio will be at risk.