Ingram Micro on April 15 announced it will offer three hosted Microsoft Software-as-a-Service solutions targeting resellers and VARs.

The hosted Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 and Windows SharePoint Server (SPS) 3.0 will be offered through Ingram's Seismic Virtual Services Warehouse and can be white-labeled by VARs to increase their brand recognition and add value for their end-user customers, said Justin Crotty, vice president, Ingram Micro Services Division, North America. Crotty also said that in May, Ingram will offer hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 through Seismic.

Crotty said partners were keen for Ingram to add hosted Exchange, SPS and Dynamics CRM 4.0 as demand increases from their end customers. He said that end users are becoming more and more familiar with the benefits of purchasing IT as a service and preferred to have a VAR or solutions provider maintain that infrastructure rather buying their own software licenses and maintaining an IT staff to manage that infrastructure. 

"Resellers, VARs, solution providers are gaining lots of traction delivering IT as a service, and these hosted services allow them to add even more value into that capability," Crotty said.

He said that Ingram was focusing on two distinct types of channel partners with the Seismic offerings: current MSPs who are already offering managed services capabilities but don't yet provide hosted services and partners who are new to the MSP business model who want to get into the market. He said that Seismic offers a great opportunity for MSPs to add new functionality to their linecard and for other partners to get started.

Martin McCarthy, general manager of Synapse Information Technology, said that he looked forward to adding all the hosted services to his company's portfolio.  Of about 50 customers, he said he expected to have about 20 percent of those on at least one of the hosted services in the next six months.

"It's great to have these managed services offering for infrastructure to add to our portfolio," McCarthy said. He said many of his customers were looking to update either their Exchange Server or their SharePoint Server, and that being able to do both could lessen customers' out-of-pocket cost and increase business for Synapse.

"We have a great set of services and a lot to offer these VARs to get them started," Crotty said. Partners can self-brand the white-labeled services and also can target any customer, regardless of size. He said that the services scale from customers with a handful of mailboxes to enterprise-level organizations with thousands of mailboxes. Seismic partners receive a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for shared servers and 100 percent uptime guarantee for dedicated servers.