Chicago – Ingram Micro Inc. (NYSE: IM) announced at its annual Spring North American VentureTech Network (VTN) Invitational, new cloud-based, managed service offerings for partners, made possible with its partnerships with IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Intermedia.
Renee Bergeron, vice-president, cloud computing and managed services at Ingram Micro, said during a keynote speech yesterday that the new offerings are an extension of the distributor’s already “comprehensive portfolio of cloud services” which includes service desk, device monitoring and management, business applications and infrastructure network and security offerings.
Ingram Micro first established its cloud services business five years ago and this is an area where the distributor continues to see “significant growth,” Bergeron said. For perspective, in 2010, Bergeron said the cloud represented about 25 per cent of the distributor’s overall services revenue in North America and it’s expecting this percentage to increase this year.
With its partnership with IBM, Ingram Micro is bringing to market three cloud-based managed services offerings that North American partners can deliver to end-users.
The first is called IBM Smart Business Cloud Enterprise which Bergeron said is a compute-on-demand service that enables partners to provide their end-users with access to a secure, enterprise-class virtual server environment on the IBM cloud.
The second offering is called IBM Managed Backup Cloud – Fast Protect Online. This offering is an offsite data backup solution that protects user data that’s stored on laptops and desktops. The service also comes with restore capabilities, Bergeron added.
The last services offering from Ingram Micro is IBM’s Managed Backup Cloud – Remote Data Protection. Bergeron said this offering is geared specifically towards managing offsite data backup and recovery for servers.
Ingram Micro also announced an expanded partnership with Intermedia, a hosted Microsoft Exchange vendor, yesterday to bring to market a Hosted PBX services offering. This is the first VoIP offering from within Ingram Micro’s cloud services portfolio. Hosted PBX provides users with capabilities including click-to-call, unlimited calling to the U.S. and Canada, toll-free numbers and more.
All four services offerings are now available to Ingram Micro’s North American channel partners.
In her closing keynote remarks, Bergeron said the distributor’s cloud strategy is to be the “leading cloud aggregator for the channel” and to do this, she said Ingram Micro enables its partners through its Ingram Micro Cloud, IT services strategy and its Cloud Marketplace, where partners can go to find more information and resources.
In other related news, Ingram Micro also announced a new partnership with Fujitsu America that brings to market the Ingram Micro Service Desk.
The new service desk is managed by Fujitsu and enables partners to offer their end-user customers a 24x7x365 service and support centre.
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