Credit: Ingram Micro
Ingram Micro has bolstered its Cloud Marketplace with a feature aimed at helping partners prepare themselves for a vendor landscape increasingly dominated by as-a-service players.
The new addition, Instant Cloud Solutions, is aimed at resellers looking to transform their licensing business into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service revenue-generating model, with pre-architected, vetted and licensed cloud solutions that can be delivered to customers without the burden of defining, building or deploying.
According to Ingram Micro cloud services director for A/NZ Lee Welch, the distributor has launched its first partnership with Instant Cloud Solutions with Veeam, giving partners the ability to upload their Veeam software license key and deliver backup solutions on Azure.
“This is quite a big deal, because we’ve basically got pre-built services in Marketplace,” Welch told ARN. “If you look at on-premises software, essentially, it’s going to become extinct. So, all of the new vendors that are emerging are SaaS only, and there’s going to be a million software vendors by 2025, the majority of those will be 100 percent SaaS-ified.
“Building a cloud-native product is quite difficult and the process for delivery services on Azure can take three to four weeks. So what these [offerings] are, are basically packaged solutions that provides resellers with a simpler path to purchasing traditional software licences,” he said.
According to Welch, with Instant Cloud Solutions, partners have the ability to diversify their offerings with a growing portfolio of pre-built cloud software solutions and take advantage of the programmatic deployment and provisioning capability afforded by Ingram Micro’s Cloud Marketplace.
The new offering is just one of the new or recent Cloud Marketplace additions to be discussed with partners at Ingram Micro’s Cloud Summit in Sydney and Melbourne this week, with legal agreement service ITAgree also being showcased.
According to Ingram Micro, ITAgree provides legal agreements for channel partners to use with customers. These easy-to-read legal agreements are specially designed so that partners can modify the content, as appropriate, to fit their business.
“The addition of ITAgee is another way in which we can provide support to our resellers as they find ways to help their end-user customers transform their businesses in the modern, digital age,” said Welch.
According to ITAgree’s website, Optimus Systems in New Zealand is just one local user of the company’s offering.
Additionally, channel partners can make use of Ingram Micro’s Go to Market Hub, which is now available on the Cloud Marketplace.
The company claims that the Go to Market Hub offers the ability for resellers to speed up their marketing efforts by taking advantage of a no-cost comprehensive set of sale enablement tools, pre-built marketing campaign templates, digital automation tools and more.
At the same time, the distributor’s new IMPulse App is designed to help resellers find and access all the resources available now on its Cloud Marketplace.
“We have launched this app especially for our cloud community,” said Welch. “It enables resellers to access every cloud related from the smartphone in their pocket.
“Vendors have a lot of information, and what this app does is it compiles all the information that we think is relevant for our partners ad includes all the info that we think should be understood by our partners,” he said.
