Ingram goes live with Australian cloud marketplace

Ingram Micro has launched its Australian cloud marketplace, allowing resellers to directly purchase, provision, price and invoice unique Office 365 bundles and other apps from a single dashboard.

The distie claims to be the first master cloud service provider (mCSP) to offer Microsoft Office 365 on an automated platform. It is also offering a suite of migration services from SkyKick.

The marketplace will host services from vendors in bundles that resellers can offer to their customers. Resellers can use the platform to provision and manage cloud services from an app store-style interface, with Ingram giving them a single point of contact. 

The marketplace also offers consolidated billing to help partners and their customers manage their subscription costs.

The marketplace supports Ingram’s Cloud Ignite support-service and Cloud Elevate loyalty programmes. For instance, Cloud Ignite is supported by hundreds of Ingram helpdesk associates trained to guide resellers when choosing product skews to offer to their customers. The lack of a ‘white glove’ service to help resellers navigate many confusing options was a failing of overseas marketplaces.

Partners can resell the Ingram Micro Service Desk and bundle with other offerings. The service has a 24/7/365 multilingual team that provides level 1 support for front office, desktop and many IT-related issues via phone, chat and email.

The Cloud Elevate loyalty program includes exclusive promotions, discounts, education, sales and marketing support, and more as partners move up in the program. New partners joining Cloud Elevate by 31 July will receive a $100 credit, which can be used for any Microsoft Cloud Solution within 90 days of joining the program.

“Resellers in Australia are seeking a trusted source for a wide range of cloud services and solutions,” said Richard Duggan, executive director, Ingram Micro Cloud APAC. 

“The new Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace enables our resellers to lift their customers’ businesses to the cloud with confidence and ease while elevating their own profitability and footprint in the cloud.”

Australia is the eighth market in which Ingram has launched the service. The distie will introduce another cloud marketplace in New Zealand in "coming weeks".

Ingram revealed plans to launch the marketplace in Australia back in November 2014, announcing the platform would go live in the first quarter.

The marketplace is based on Parallels architecture. The vendor signed an agreement to support Ingram Micro worldwide in April last year.

DC, Avnet, Westcon in the race

Today's announcement comes on the same day Distribution Central will host a launch event for its own DC CloudSelect Marketplace. The distributor opened up access to the marketplace to 1,000 resellers last month, including services from AWS, Azure and IBM Softlayer.

Meanwhile Avnet, which has been enabling resellers to self provision cloud services since mid-2014, yesterday announced its Cloud Toolset for managing multiple clouds.

Westcon launched its cloud marketplace in mid 2014, dubbed Westcon Cloud Distribution Services. The distie planned to include infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, network management, storage and backup and unified communications.

Meanwhile Dicker Data has partnered with NextDC, offering quarter racks up to several full racks.

Analyst IDC says Australian organisations will spend $3.5 billion on cloud services (excluding private cloud) by 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 18.5 per cent or eight times that of traditional IT services.