Ingram Micro hires global cloud VP Richard Dufty as distributor tops 13 million cloud seats

Australian Richard Dufty has been named senior vice president, worldwide sales, services and support at Ingram Micro Cloud.

Dufty, who is based in Ingram's California head office, joins after five years at AppDirect, where he was most recently senior vice-president for worldwide sales.

Previous to that, Dufty spent eight years at Symantec, starting in a channel role in Australia and ultimately being promoted to US country manager in 2012.

Ingram Micro Cloud now lays claim to 13 million seats under management, with 40,000 channel partners transacting on its marketplace around the world. The platform supports 13 currencies and is active in 43 countries.

The central technology is based on Odin, the cloud marketplace platform that Ingram Micro acquired from Parallels in late 2015 as well cloud automation, orchestration and provisioning vendor Ensim, which Ingram acquired in 2016.

"Ingram was the first distributor in the world to realise several years ago – hey, the world is moving to cloud. Our resellers need to adapt and be able to offer cloud solutions. We need to be able to provide that for them," Dufty told CRN during a visit to Sydney this week.

"You need scalable and agnostic technology to be able to take advantage of that, to allow resellers the ability to very easily have access to cloud applications, provision cloud applications, manage cloud applications. So Ingram built out their Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace on Odin, and it became apparent very quickly that this was such a core part of the offering and capability that Ingram decided to acquire Odin as a business."

The Odin deal transformed Ingram; not only does the company remain the world's biggest distributor, Ingram is now a significant software vendor in its own right. Ingram employs more than 700 software engineers, many of whom joined as part of the Odin deal.

Ingram's highest-profile Australian platform customer is Telstra – the telco's portal for its multi-cloud infrastructure-as-a-service strategy was standardised on Odin, having been implemented by Barcelona-based IT provider Mamasu. 

Telstra's public cloud offering includes its own CSX cloud platform, along with VMware vCloud Air, IBM Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure.

The Telstra cloud service store also offers a host of other solutions, including NetApp virtual storage, EMC managed backup, RightScale cloud management, AWS DirectConnect and myriad Telstra services, including cloud gateway, web and email protection and even its IoT platform.

Dufty is no stranger to Telstra, having led the team that sold AppDirect to the carrier for its revamped Telstra App Marketplace, which launched in April 2015 to replace T-Suite.

"Telstra has a multi-vendor strategy today in terms of platforms to take different solutions to market, leveraging AppDirect for their SaaS marketplace and Odin for the infrastructure," said Dufty.

Beyond Telstra, some 30 percent of the world's telcos use the Ingram's IP, Dufty claimed.

Australia remains a significant market for Ingram Micro Cloud. The distributor's Australian cloud team, led by general manager Lee Welch, is second only to the US in cloud revenue, and the division is growing 60 percent year-on-year.

Welch sees numerous opportunities for the Ingram Cloud marketplace among Australian channel partners.

It is a procurement hub where resellers can buy and deploy cloud services from vendors such as Microsoft, Dropbox and Symantec. Resellers can also reskin the portal as their own cloud store.

"Say we've got a three-man band, they can leverage our Ingram Micro marketplace to provision services to their end customers, or we can embed our marketplace onto their website and rebrand it under their logo," Welch told CRN.

A new win is Datacom, Dufty told CRN. "Datacom's been a very close partner on the Odin side for a number of years. We've worked very closely around managed services' capabilities on the Odin platform.

"Datacom recently decided to standardise on the Ingram Micro Cloud Platform to take core and third-party solutions to the market," Dufty added.