How Ingram Micro Sees Its Future in the Cloud Age

Ingram Micro cloud strategy

While competition across the channel remains fierce, Ingram Micro is investing heavily in cloud services. We examine the distributor’s cloud strategy.

In the last four years, Ingram Micro has invested approximately $1.5 billion in building out its cloud platform and has made it clear it wants to own the intellectual property it uses to deliver cloud services. Ingram Micro also revealed it has more than 700 engineers working on its cloud platform.

Ingram Micro already has 30,000 partners operating across 18 countries registered to transact on Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace. It has 10 million seats under management. On average, an Ingram Micro partner is managing seven subscriptions on the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace. By the end of this year, Ingram Micro predicts the average partner will be managing 20 subscriptions across 400 seats.

Recipients of Ingram Micro’s 2016 Cloud Partner Awards include InfiniIT Consulting, Adapture, Aqueduct Technologies, Arterian, Altrion, TechQuarters and Interlinked.

Most recently, Ingram Micro acquired Ensim, a distributor of cloud applications and related IT services. Previously, Ingram Micro acquired the Odin cloud platform from Parallels in addition to Softcom and SofCloudIT to bolster the range of cloud service expertise it makes available to its channel partners.

The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace now provides access to more than 500 cloud services. Solution providers can either expose a branded or white-label version of the marketplace to their customers, or they can opt to download a version of the Odin cloud platform to host an instance of the store on their own private cloud.

Ingram Micro has revealed it is building an integrated platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment through which partners will be able to integrate cloud applications and services more easily.

Ingram Micro plans to bundle various services along with helping solution providers target specific vertical markets. In addition, Ingram Micro is creating playbooks that partners can follow to sell different classes of cloud services.

Ingram Micro also announced a Cloud Referral Program through which traditional resellers can market cloud services via their own Websites. Ingram Micro has also created Ingram Micro Cloud Echo, a marketing service that will make it simpler for solution providers to reuse marketing content across multiple social networks.

Ingram Micro’s Q4 sales were $11.3 billion, down 19 percent in U.S. dollars and down 13 percent on a currency-neutral basis, compared to worldwide sales of $14 billion in Q4 2014. In this interval, non-GAAP operating income of $239 million was down from $247 million. GAAP operating income for Q4 was $196 million, or 1.73 percent of sales, compared with $201 million, or 1.44 percent of sales.

Once the acquisition of Ingram Micro by Tianjin Tianhai is complete, the company will join HNA Group. As such, Ingram Micro for all intents and purposes will become a private entity.