Senior executives from Irvine, Calif.-based Ingram Micro Inc. met with members of the media yesterday at the distributor’s seventh annual Cloud Summit, currently taking place in Phoenix. Here are five news nuggets to emerge from that conversation:
1) Ingram Micro is working on forthcoming cloud-related service/hardware product bundles that will combine one or more cloud solutions with relevant associated devices. Possible examples include a combination of Microsoft Office 365 with Surface Pro tablets, or a pairing of Microsoft Azure infrastructure with an on-site BDR appliance.
2) Technical support has been a weak spot for Ingram Micro’s cloud business.
“We’ve had some challenges,” said Renee Bergeron, the company’s vice president of global cloud. “Our partners told us they needed more.”
Rather than simply fix those problems, however, the distributor is investing in people and resources to go a step beyond and provide deeper, more personalized support than major cloud vendors like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services are equipped to deliver.
3) Though Ingram Micro provides a host of tools to help partners resell cloud computing licenses, it cautions against basing a cloud practice around basic provisioning and configuration services alone.
“There’s a lot more profit in the middleware and business planning areas,” Bergeron said. Setup services are likely to become highly commoditized soon as well, she added.
4) Partners, or at least those working in the public sector space, don’t appear to be worried so far that Ingram Micro’s acquisition by Chinese shipping and logistics company Tianjin Tianhai Investment Co. Ltd. will entangle them in security or regulatory issues.
“There’s been nothing that’s come back as a negative,” said Paul Bay, executive vice president and chief executive of Ingram Micro U.S.
5) Perhaps not surprisingly, Ingram Micro believes that the only way for partners to deliver cloud applications and infrastructure seamlessly for customers and profitably for themselves is to buy and manage everything through one cloud delivery platform.
“They have to choose a platform if they really want to offer a single solution to their customers,” Bergeron said.
