Ingram Micro Debuts New Seismic Services and Tools
Four new offerings are designed to not only expand benefits to Seismic partners, but provide them with business advantages.
By Cecilia Galvinalvin
At its annual managed services partner conference in Dallas last week, distributor Ingram Micro Inc. announced four new offerings to its Seismic partners in the U.S. and Canada. They are: Seismic Epicenter, Seismic Business Intelligence Dashboard, Seismic Global NOC (network operations center), and Seismic Instant Recovery on Demand by CA.†
The first new service, Seismic Global NOC, is described by Justin Crotty, vice president, services, Ingram Micro North America, as “an enterprise-class offering built on the follow-the-sun model.” Through support locations around the globe, partners can now offer end-user customers “a high level of technical and process functionality” regardless of where customers are located. NOC services are priced to be competitive with other offerings in the market, from the lower end to the high.
“Solution providers have a choice,” says Crotty. “Do they build their own NOC, staff it, put all the tools and processes in place to support it-and do a good job of it-or do they offer enterprise-level capability at a very competitive price point and not have to make the investment to get that up and running?” Most solution providers do the analysis and realize they can step away from monitoring tasks and drive more profits for their company, explains Crotty.
The second new offering, Seismic Instant Recovery on Demand by CA, is a hosted business continuity service that provides SMBs with uninterrupted access to critical applications and data during a system failure, unplanned outage, or disaster, with no capital investment. “For every server at the end-user environment, there’s a virtual server in the data center,” says Jason Beal, director of services sales, Ingram Micro. “If the physical server on the end-user premise were to fail, then it instantly fails over to the virtual server in the off-site data center.”
Seismic Epicenter, one of Ingram Micro’s new tools, is a Web portal that enables Seismic partners to access and manage all of their Seismic services from a single administrative interface. “Solution providers deploy multiple offerings, tools, and applications, and they had to manage the application interfaces by jumping from one console to the other,” says Crotty. “Seismic Epicenter allows a managed service provider to go to one place to see all the applications and interfaces and manage them from a single place.” Epicenter also maintains all of Seismic’s education, training, and business resources, with additional functionality planned for later this year.
The Seismic Business Intelligence Dashboard tool enables partners using the Seismic hosted remote monitoring and management software to analyze their end-user customer base along several key performance indicators. “These tell solution providers how they’re performing, and then benchmarks their performance against the Seismic base to see how they’re performing in relation to their peers,” says Crotty. “It’s a good business analytics capability to help partners grow and recognize opportunities to sell additional product and services to their customers.”
The new offerings are designed to not only expand benefits to Seismic partners, but provide them with business advantages. Says Crotty: “Back when we launched this service division and decided to focus on managed services as a core competency, a big part of the reason VARs wanted to partner with us is the additional value we wrap around not only the tools and technologies, but around all the partner value-added benefits we bring to the table.”
