Distributor Ingram Micro is taking its Seismic managed services offering to providers who target midmarket and enterprise business customers with the addition of Nimsoft Monitoring Solutions.

The deal will enable Ingram Micro partners in the United States and Canada to offer business service management, dashboards, SLAs, application monitoring services and other management features to their customers.

Managed services platform provider Nimsoft’s stronghold has been serving enterprise customers with its performance and availability monitoring, but has also served a small and growing set of managed service providers also going after that market.

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Under the new alliance, Ingram Micro North America will offer Nimsoft’s entire portfolio of monitoring solutions to Ingram Micro’s managed services providers.

“We’ve been evolving our offerings from small business up to midmarket and enterprise,” says Jason Beal, director of services at Ingram Micro. Ingram Micro first introduced its Seismic managed services portfolio about three years ago when it announced a partnership with managed services platform provider Level Platforms. The distributor will continue to offer Level Platforms for those who serve small business. “Nimsoft rounds out our portfolio.”

Beal says the Nimsoft managed services will be offered as a utility model, priced per device per month, enabling VARs to get into the game without a big up-front cash outlay.

Managed services are the fastest growing part of Nimsoft’s business, and the Ingram Micro partnership will open up new doors for the vendor. As for Ingram Micro, Beal says the Nimsoft offering will enable smaller MSPs to move up to serve larger customers—those with over 250 employees. Plus, the offering may appeal to VARs who have relied on Ingram Micro for hardware fulfillment—maybe Cisco routers and unified communications—but haven’t dipped a toe into the distributor’s managed services offerings yet, says Beal.

Beal says Nimsoft’s offering appeals to larger end customers because it provides service-level agreements and performance monitoring.

“There’s a huge market opportunity here that is untapped for both Nimsoft and Ingram Micro,” Beal says. “Part of the reason we decided to do a relationship is because there was a lot of synergy between the partners we were selling to and the partners they were selling to.”

Nimsoft began to make a bigger push into the managed services platform business two years ago when Dell acquired managed services platform provider Silverback. At the time, Nimsoft launched a campaign to “Save the Silverback,” aiming to recruit MSPs away from Dell.

As for Ingram Micro, Beal says the distributor, which this year announced a hardware distribution deal with Dell—hasn’t looked at Dell’s managed services for its Seismic offering.

“A lot of what Dell brings to market through Silverback—the NOC, help desk and the rest—we’ve already built out the same best-of-class services here,” says Beal. "There’s nothing to gain by adding Dell’s services pieces” to Seismic.