Hurricane Ike devastated the Texas coastline, leveling residential neighborhoods and ripping through the skyscrapers of downtown Houston. The more than $8 billion in damage could have been worse if the public, government and businesses didn’t take precautions against the worst-case scenarios.

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning and execution are about preparing for the worse-case scenario. Enterprises to small businesses are increasingly seeking guidance and support for BC/DR. Recognizing this trend, Ingram Micro is rolling out a new program to help solution providers adopt and develop disaster recovery services or resell its hosted services.

“With this new line of on-site professional services, we’re providing a BC/DR blueprint that makes it easy for our partners to take advantage of the growing awareness and demand of end users for business continuity services and disaster recovery solutions,” says Jason Beal, director of sales of Ingram’s Services Division. “Equally important is the fact that our partners can also use these services to ensure their businesses are protected as well.”

The new BC/DR program, announced this week at Ingram’s VentureTech Network in San Diego, is available to U.S. and Canadian solution providers.

Ingram says new service offerings enable solution providers to quickly expand upon—or build—a BC/DR practice without making new infrastructure or personnel investments. Leveraging ITIL, Six Sigma and other well-known TQM (total quality management) process models, Ingram’s BC/DR services provide a repeatable, consistent approach to service that can grow and change with solution providers’ and end users’ business needs. Solution providers can both secure these new BC/DR services for their own businesses, as well as resell the services to their customers.

“Our job is to accelerate the success of our VTN members by providing them with the visibility, tools, training, technology and resources necessary to grow their businesses faster, smarter and more profitably,” says Ingram’s vice president of channel marketing, Kirk Robinson, in a statement.

Partner collaboration is another focus of the VTN event, says Robinson. More than 90 percent of the 470 VTN members partner with one another as a means to grow their business and extend their reach and expertise.

Ingram’s debut of an expanded Innovative Technology Solutions corner, which consists of VAR-led live technology demonstrations of manufacturers and solutions exhibitors are using to successfully drive business opportunities, is one way the distributor encourages partners to share with and learn from each other, Ingram says.  Partners showcase new and emerging technologies such as virtualization, unified communications/VOIP, security, digital signage, data capture and POS (point of  sale), digital home, and mobility, among others.