Chicago – Renee Bergeron, vice-president of cloud computing and managed services at Ingram Micro Inc. (NYSE: IM), took the stage on Monday to talk to partners about Ingram’s role in the cloud and offered advice on how the channel can be relevant in this fast-growing space.
Bergeron started off by outlining the differences with on-premise, managed services and cloud services offerings.
With an on-premise solution, the client owns the hardware and software, it’s a fixed-cost model that’s capital-expense intensive and the client owns the risk, Bergeron said. With managed services, the client or the provider owns the hardware and software, there’s a predictable monthly recurring fee and the client and the provider share the risks. Lastly, with cloud services, the provider owns the hardware and software, it’s a shared infrastructure environment that’s provisioned based on utility-based pricing and the provider owns the risks, she explained.
While cloud benefits such as agility, utility and ubiquity are known by many, Bergeron said there’s still some uncertainty in the marketplace around which cloud model to implement, whether it’s a public, private or hybrid cloud environment.
To help ease some of this confusion, Bergeron offered some key considerations that partners should take into account when they’re working with customers.
First off, partners should build a proposal and consider the size of their end-user customer. “Large enterprises seem to lean more towards private clouds and SMBs tend to lean more towards the public cloud,” she said.
Partners should also consider what their customer’s security and business requirements are before they select a specific cloud model, she added.
“If partners understand their customer’s business requirements they can look at alternative solutions to put in place to meet the customer’s requirements. Resellers shouldn’t automatically build a cloud service offering into the proposal. Instead, as they think about the value proposition of the cloud and recognize some of the requirements of the customer’s business, they can figure out what the best solution will be for that particular customer,” she said.
Third, partners must also consider the budget of their customers. Traditionally, a private cloud solution is more expensive than a public cloud environment, Bergeron said.
Lastly, Bergeron said partners should also think about what sort of relevance they want to play when it comes to offering cloud services. Do partners want to just resell the solution, partner with others, or do they want to offer their own cloud service?
Ingram’s cloud vision is to be the “leading cloud aggregator for the channel,” she added.
Bergeron also addressed the managed services opportunity as it relates to the cloud.
“We don’t anticipate that the cloud will replace managed services. Instead, it’ll likely be a hybrid cloud model,” she said. “There are a number of managed services that can’t be put in the cloud,” she said. “The easiest way for resellers to get into the managed services and cloud business is to get into service desk and e-mail-as-a-service offerings. These are easy entry points for partners into an end-user environment.”
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