Ingram Micro boosts cloud play

Ingram Micro has added another service provider to its new Services Group, announcing a deal with Canberra-based web hosting company UberGlobal.

The partnership allows Ingram Micro resellers to sell, provision and manage SaaS and IaaS instances hosted by UberGlobal under their own brand and website.

The initial range of services offered in partnership with UberGlobal includes Microsoft Hyper-V virtual private services, VMWare VDS, domains, SSL security, shared Windows and Linux hosting and managed Exchange (mail) and SharePoint (collaboration).

Ingram Micro's education and support arm Services Group has taken on four new clients since launching last September: Kaseya, Solar Winds and cloud computing provider Ultra Serve.

Ingram's education and support business manager Darren Elsby told CRN there should be no competition between the cloud providers under Ingram Micro’s strategy.

“We’ve been very conscious about that and transparent between the [two cloud computing] organisations about what our plan was. This has been fairly open book behind the scenes,” Elsby said.

“Uber Global is very strong in the Microsoft space, and also in government, both local and federal. Our partnership with Ultra Serve is a little bit different: they are very strong in SMB and have a number of different segments and customers; a bit of health, a bit of education and small business.”

The Services Group is focused on helping Ingram Micro's resellers deliver cloud services. Elsby told CRN the company had conducted trials with several resellers, some of whom would move into production deployment in the coming weeks.

He said Ingram would make more cloud and managed services announcements over the coming months, with the development of a ‘cloud marketplace’ a key focus. He hinted that Ingram Micro Australia would leverage investments made by its US counterparts.

“We recognise the cloud marketplace play is one venue to market, and that suits a number of resellers and a number of types of technology,” Elsby said.