While Ingram Micro reported that sales were down 25 per cent in its second quarter, and comments were made during an earnings call with analysts about getting “a little aggressive” with volume commodity product, it seems the distie hasn’t forgotten about value-add.
MSP provider Nimsoft plays in the enterprise space, providing IT performance and availability monitoring solutions. And it’s now partnering with Ingram (through the distie’s Seismic managed services portfolio) to help North American VARs provide proactive remote monitoring, managed security and business continuity to mid-market and enterprise customers.
Nimsoft is an interesting company – while other MSP providers such as Level Platforms and N-able tend to focus on building relationships with Microsoft partners, Nimsoft made an effort earlier this year to reach out to Cisco partners, who use the monitoring software to manage networks, data centres and unified communications systems.
With Ingram, Nimsoft will expand its reach further with Seismic Enterprise Monitoring powered by Nimsoft – the idea here is that smaller VARs will be able to move up-market and target mid-market and enterprise customers, since Nimsoft offers service-level agreements and performance monitoring that appeal to those customers. Nimsoft Enterprise Monitoring will be offered as a utility model, priced per device per month.
Ingram already offers managed services through Seismic from about a dozen providers, but they tend to focus on small business or the Windows server/desktop space; Nimsoft is meant to round out those offerings. Seismic has been around for about three years now, when Ingram first announced a partnership with Level Platforms (Ingram says its relationship with Nimsoft won’t affect its established business with Level Platforms).
Interestingly, while Ingram has partnered with Dell on the hardware distribution side, it hasn’t considered Dell’s managed services (via Silverback) for Seismic. Two years ago, Dell acquired MSP provider Silverback, and at the time Nimsoft made a big push to recruit MSPs away from Dell under the “Save the Silverback” banner. Ingram says it would have nothing to gain by adding Dell to Seismic because it’s already built out those particular pieces – but perhaps Ingram doesn’t want to cozy up to Dell quite so much.
Unlike the comments made in July about getting aggressive with volume commodity product, Ingram is doing the opposite with Nimsoft. Rather than making this available to a large volume of VARs, it’s targeting select solution providers that play in the high-end networking space.
