Ingram Micro joins Oracle Cloud Distribution Program

Ingram Micro has joined the Oracle Cloud Distribution Program to expand access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in Australia.

The Oracle Cloud Distribution Program is a regional program that aims to strengthen relationships with regional and country-specific cloud distributors to expand OCI into new and existing markets.

Joining the Oracle Cloud Distribution Program intends to help Ingram Micro partners expand OCI offerings to small and midsize businesses and meet what it says is growing demand for enterprise cloud services.

In addition, Ingram Micro partners will also be able to access Oracle's broader portfolio of database, data management and enterprise technologies through Ingram Micro.

Ingram Micro plans to support the collaboration with dedicated sales and technical resources, partner recruitment, enablement, demand generation activities and go-to-market investment.

Stephen Bovis, regional MD for ANZ at Oracle, said the two companies have not been in a distribution relationship in Australia previously, but it's been something that Ingram Micro and Oracle have collectively been working on internally “for some time”.

“We're both very excited about the opportunity that it presents for our organisations, for the partner ecosystem in the market and for our customers,” he said.

Hope McGarry, VP and chief country executive for Australia at Ingram Micro, said the relationship expands on the technology options that the distributor can take to market for partners, strengthening the breadth of its portfolio across cloud, AI, data, enterprise and security.

“For us, our focus with the relationship is really around giving our partners access to the Oracle technologies,” she told techpartner.news.

“We will really look to enable our partner community from a sales and technical perspective, and provide them with the resources that they need to be able to take the Oracle solution stack to market to solve for their customers' challenges, which are becoming increasingly complex.”

That complexity, McGarry stated, is manifesting in such end user needs as ensuring data readiness for AI acceleration in order to move from POC to deployment, or in use cases such as modernising infrastructure, AI applications and workloads.

“There's over 8.500 partners transacting with us regularly in any given year and we have great geographical coverage in Australia and beyond, operating in 57 countries globally," she explained.

"We can service a lot of different types of partner needs and the relationship that we will forge together gives Oracle access to a very large partner ecosystem that we service every day.” 

Bovis echoed that viewpoint, stating that one of the reasons the company entered into this relationship was due to Oracle reaching a point locally where it needed to “really grow and expand to be able to cover that opportunity that's coming from the customers”.

“Ingram Micro have a strong presence in terms of mid-market and serving mid-enterprise with their partner ecosystem. That, for us, represents a high-growth opportunity because we're getting lots and lots of requests from our customers coming through to serve that market segment better,” he told techpartner.news.

“The way that we need to do that and deliver those outcomes is through a partner ecosystem, which ultimately will give us scale and be able to allow us to expand our coverage. We need partners that have some of those specialised capabilities that we may not necessarily have today, and Ingram Micro has access to a very large partner ecosystem that also have lots of different specialties.”