Ingram Micro Targets Top Health-Care Partners With New Programs

The driving force behind it is Mike Humke, who after joining Ingram from his longtime post at HP last fall, is coming to market with solution provider resources he says will bring willing partners to the "next level" of consultative health-care sales, especially as they relate to security, mobility, compliance and other red-hot health care channel focus areas.

"A lot of the energy we're trying to bring plays on the strengths that Ingram brings to the table," said Humke in a recent discussion with CRN. "We have the reach to go from IBM to HP to Apple to a lot of different vendors that can build the best solutions, from health care and EMR and practice management to the whole networking and data center play. I see a huge explosion [of interest] that's going to continue to drive this market."

Well known to solution providers and the broader public sector channel for his previous role as HP's public sector channel chief, Humke parted ways with HP in early November after 12 years there.

In mid-December, he was confirmed as senior director of business development for health-care and vertical markets at Ingram, responsible for building Ingram's vertical-oriented business and programs for solution providers.

Humke acknowledged that plenty of solution providers have health-care market expertise, and plenty of vendors and rival distributors have strong health care-oriented resources.

But the leap toward true, consultative-based health-care solutions selling from sales into the vertical is what separates the good from the great in the channel, he said. And rare is the partner who can square all of the converging trends in health care -- from the EMR demands placed on physician practices to regulatory headaches like the move from ICD-9 to ICD-10 coding schemes -- with the IT solution selling techniques familiar to VARs.

"It's almost impossible to find a partner than can do 100 percent of the things that are done in health care," Humke said. "And not a lot of them are great at ratcheting it up to say, I'm not here to sell you hardware, I'm here to help you improve your business, and address the need to share information and provide tools to physicians. We're going to help them fill gaps where they have them."

Ingram's health-care program will focus on pairing "the right partners with the right vendors," Humke said, while driving health care specific lead generation, marketing, market development and services into the partner community, and putting resources behind RFID, security, low-end EMR targeted at ambulatory care settings, mobility and other technology areas key to the solution provider sell.

The resource themselves will include an Ingram-funded assessment service -- specific feedback on partners' health-care strengths, which will be available starting in about two months -- and access to field-tested health-care experts that Humke and Ingram are hiring as staff consultants who can tell VARs "here's what you need to bring to the table."

"These are guys who come from health care, from ex-CIOs looking to do something else to EMR sales folks," Humke said. "The best way to be successful is to ask a customer. So we will have an advisory council and we will have these professionals available [to partners]."

Broader partner resources will include a Healthcare Partner Network, which will be an extension of the existing Ingram Micro Services Network (IMSN), but specific for health-care partners.

Humke said Ingram will gate admission into that network, limiting it to 200-or-so Ingram Micro solution providers who are strongest in health care and would benefit most from an area where they can register their expertise in health-care areas and see their peers' specialities, too, to collaborate on market opportunities.

"They will be strategically laid out across the U.S. and really strong in health care," he said. "I'm not here to blow smoke. This is for the [partners] that want to come in and make the difference here."

This year will be spent making the investments, Humke explained, with an eye toward solution providers profiting using Ingram's health care resources by 2012 and 2013. Humke declined to identify how much Ingram is investing specific to the health-care programs, but described it as "significant."

Humke said Ingram is at work on building similar programs for its other vertical market units, too. That opportunity -- presented to Humke by Ingram Micro North America President Keith Bradley and North America Senior Vice President of Sales Brian Wiser, he said -- was a big part of what brought him to the distributor.

"Keith and Brian came to me with a vision to build verticals," he said. "And I have to tell you, I'm a kid in a candy store with this."