Ingram Micro Inc. has added new self-serve sales, marketing, and support features to its cloud computing marketplace, as well as a new tool for integrating with third-party CRM, billing, and PSA solutions including ConnectWise Manage.
The Irvine, Calif.-based distributor made the announcements today at its tenth annual Cloud Summit event in San Diego.
The expanded sales and marketing resources are delivered through a hub that officially entered general availability today in the U.S. The new site, which draws on capabilities in the Partner Connect demand generation program that Ingram introduced last October, provides free white-label collateral and proposal generation tools, as well as systems that partners can use to plan and execute digital marketing campaigns.
“The sales and marketing hub helps partners increase brand awareness and drive more leads,” said Renee Bergeron, Ingram’s senior vice president of global cloud, during a keynote this morning at the Cloud Summit.
Ken Bock, owner of Leading Edge Solutions, a provider of helpdesk services, computer support, and consulting in Northbrook, Ill., likes what he knows about the hub so far. “I’m looking for all the [marketing] help I possibly can get,” he says. “I do bits and bytes, not flash and bling.”
Also new to the cloud marketplace is a self-serve support portal that lets resellers check the status of previously submitted help requests. “In the past, they might have had to call back later that afternoon,” said Bergeron in an interview with ChannelPro. “They’re avoiding having to make an extra call by getting all that information at their fingertips.”
To streamline integration with the tools resellers use to run their businesses, Ingram has introduced a new Marketplace API that directly links its own cloud ordering, provisioning, and invoicing systems with external CRM, accounting, and PSA solutions. Managed services software vendor ConnectWise will be the first vendor to use the new tool, which will allow MSPs to buy, deploy, and bill for cloud subscriptions directly from within the ConnectWise Manage PSA solution.
“It simplifies everyone’s life,” said recently appointed ConnectWise CEO Jason Magee during a brief appearance in Bergeron’s keynote this morning. Imagine, he told ConnectWise users, going into the Ingram cloud marketplace and placing an order. “Next thing you know it’s already flowed down to your instance of ConnectWise Manage, has updated your customer agreements, and the invoices are being sent out without having to have human interaction.”
During his time on stage, Magee also discussed the vendor’s plans for the future following its acquisition two weeks ago by private equity investor Thoma Bravo.
Bock, whose company uses ConnectWise Manage, is looking forward to the easier invoicing the new API promises to enable. At present, he notes, billing customers for cloud services is a largely manual process that his team begins almost a week before the month ends. “The more efficient we can be at that, the more it frees them up for other avenues that could be more revenue driven,” he says.
Dan Blumenthal, a principal at North Light IT, a provider of cloud and managed IT services in Stoughton, Mass., sees similar potential in the ConnectWise integration’s impact on his fast-growing company’s productivity. “I used to think it’s not that big a deal,” he says of cross-platform connectivity. “We’ve slowly crossed over to the scale where I can now see that it could save us a lot of time, so I’m interested in a way that I wasn’t maybe a year or two ago,” he says.
SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, and Datto’s Autotask PSA solution are three of many solutions that will utilize the Marketplace API in the future. Partners can use the API to link not only vendor platforms but their own custom-developed management solutions to Ingram’s cloud infrastructure. “The beauty of it being an API is that if our partners have a homegrown system, then they can program to our API and still have that level of integration,” Bergeron says.
To benefit partners that develop solutions, as opposed to sell them, Ingram has rolled out a new onboarding system named Connect that’s designed to reduce the cost and complexity of publishing and managing cloud services. The system offers ISVs eager to reach Ingram’s extensive reseller base a variety of publishing, digital contracting, multi-marketplace targeting, and sales and marketing content creation tools.
“With intellectual property like the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace and with intellectual property like Connect, we are one step closer to achieving our vision where vendors and ISVs can actually self-onboard onto our platform,” said Bergeron this morning.
Getting new solutions onto the marketplace faster is a win for resellers as well as ISVs, according to Deepak Thadani, president and CEO of SCO Cloud LLC, a provider of cloud hosting, backup, and migration services based in Armonk, N.Y.
“The big benefit is it shows me what else is out there that’s already been vetted as a decent solution,” he says. “I don’t have to worry about is it a viable solution, is it a viable company? They’ve already taken care of that.”
Bergeron dedicated time in her presentation this morning to highlight cloud marketplace enhancements that debuted last year. Those include a revamped user interface featuring a bigger, more visible search bar, a banner carousel and product page that highlight new offerings, and the ability to save pre-configured orders for quick re-purchasing.
“It made [the marketplace] a lot easier to manage,” says Bock of the new UI. “You had a couple of different views. Now you have one.”
According to Blumenthal, the new interface requires less training, making it more accessible to more employees. “It’s gotten to the point of user-friendliness where we can have more people on our team use it,” he says.
Bergeron also discussed Ingram’s recently-introduced “infrastructure as a service center of excellence,” which allows partners to augment their in-house capabilities by outsourcing assessment, design, proof of concept, migration, cost optimization, and other tasks to Ingram. According to Gartner, global spending on IaaS will climb some 28 percent this year to $39.5 billion.
“The partners that are successful and have the competencies and bandwidth to do [IaaS], they don’t need us, but as they run out of bandwidth or as they need new types of competencies, they can use our infrastructure as a service center of excellence and can white label it as an extension of their own business,” Bergeron told ChannelPro.
All of Ingram’s past and present additions to the cloud marketplace are designed to help partners mimic the best practices of the distributor’s most successful cloud resellers, all of whom run high-volume, low-overhead operations that emphasize client acquisition and strong customer service.
“The partners that scale are those that leverage automation every step of the way and focus their investment in sales and marketing and in the delivery of customer experience,” Bergeron says.
The number of partners utilizing Ingram’s cloud marketplace is up more than 22 percent in the last year, from about 45,000 to over 55,000.
