Ingram Expands Services Portfolio With IBM, Intermedia, Fujitsu

The new services include IBM Smart Business Cloud Enterprise, IBM Managed Backup Cloud Fast Protect Online, IBM Managed Backup Cloud Remote Data Protection; Intermedia Hosted PBX; and a new Ingram Micro Service Desk managed by Fujitsu.

In addition, Ingram Micro is set to pilot a global management and remote monitoring service for on-premise SonicWall devices and a hardware-as-a-service model with that company as well, said Renee Bergeron, vice president of cloud computing and managed services at Ingram Micro.

Ingram Micro's services portfolio, many of which are available in its Cloud Marketplace, is up to 19 vendors and close to 30 solutions, Bergeron said.

"We want to make sure the reseller knows when they have a business problem to solve they can come to Ingram for a comprehensive set of solutions. Not everything solves every solution. It's important to have [a variety]," Bergeron said.

IBM Smart Business Cloud Enterprise is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering within the Ingram Micro Cloud marketplace that provides customers with an enterprise-class virtual server offering through IBM. It supports development and test activities as well as dynamic production workloads, according to the distributor.

"It's a compute-on-demand offering. One of the ways we see a lot of demand for it is for application development and test environments that's a cloud service," Bergeron said. "IBM has a wonderful app-dev and test environment."

The Managed Backup Cloud Offerings are a data backup solution for desktops and laptops with simple restore capabilities and an offsite data backup and recovery solution for servers, according to Ingram Micro.

"We have a large number of resellers that are IBM shops. They've basically been building solutions leveraging IBM hardware and software. There's a certain level of comfort dealing with a partner you know. I think that will be an attraction [to the new IBM services]," Bergerson said. "The cloud makes it affordable to develop full disaster recovery and business continuity for customers."

Intermedia's Hosted PBX is the first VoIP service in Ingram Micro's cloud services portfolio. It integrates with Intermedia's hosted Exchange offering through Ingram and includes click-to-call, hunt groups, OCS calling, unique extensions, voice-mail to e-mail, music hold, unlimited calling to the U.S. and Canada and toll-free numbers.

Solution providers need to be selling hosted Exchange through Intermedia to add the PBX offering, Bergeron said. "We expect it to be a very popular bundle," she said.

Ingram Micro Services Desk managed by Fujitsu is designed to complement a solution provider's managed IT and cloud-based service offerings by providing access to a team of Level 1 customer service representatives day or night to handle service requests, incident management, service maintenance, information requests, and first level support for systems and software, Bergeron said.

"They have best practices based on ITIL standards. They have a very robust service desk operation that takes 14 million calls every year in 29 different languages," she said.

Bergeron said Ingram Micro will continue to add services vendors, perhaps by the time the distributor holds its Cloud Services Summit June 1-2 in Phoenix.