Ingram declares cloud strategy a success

Ingram Micro’s local operation has signed up 100 partners for its cloud program, with fifty percent of those actively reselling services.

“We’ve seen a huge increase in interest and activity recently, which is very gratifying,” said Danny Dainton, Ingram’s business manager for cloud and managed services.

“Clearly Cloud Services has really started to impact in mainstream IT, and this is reflected in the increase in the services business we’re seeing. We think 2013 is the year resellers will really start to concentrate on developing and building recurring revenues from services.”

Dainton observed one of the hurdles associated with cloud reseller programs is to encourage partners to begin actively reselling the cloud services.

The key to getting partners to begin reselling is having an easily understood cloud program. “This means having services easily managed, deployed and built, and which are accurately targeted at the reseller’s customers,” he said.

Ingram has an extensive cloud app store, with offerings from Microsoft including managed Exchange, Sharepoint and cloud back up. The company also offers web hosting and domain name registration, along with a payment gateway service.

“We have an extensive product development roadmap planned for the rest of 2013,” he added.

Ingram also has a cloud training program called Cloud Advance.

“It is a structured, online-training program we’ve developed to help resellers learn about the Cloud opportunity and to help them transform their business to a monthly recurring revenue model.  Already we have nearly 300 resellers registered in the program, with many more expressing an interest in participating in future programs and signing on as a partner,” said Lee Welch, Ingram’s business manager, enterprise software.

According to Welch, the Cloud Advance program has been key to building up the number of resellers who are actively selling Cloud Services.