Ingram Micro Cloud Offers Digital Transformation with Confidence

In an exclusive interaction with VARINDIA, Jaishankar spoke on Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace, a leading automated cloud services aggregation platform that allows Resellers, partners and SME customers to purchase, provision, manage, and invoice cloud services from multiple vendors with confidence and ease.The portfolio of cloud services available on Ingram Micro Cloud is constantly being enhanced; more recently Microsoft Azure has been added to Ingram Micro cloud. Partners can now offer Azure in a flexible consumption-based, pay-as-you-go pricing model through the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. The Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider program empowers resellers to fully own the end-customer relationship. This enables them to manage the end-to-end subscription lifecycle which helps ensure greater customer satisfaction, higher renewal margins and top line cloud revenue.

Ingram Micro Cloud allows resellers to quickly bring the Azure suite to a wider client base by accelerating time-to-market and eliminating operational complexities. Resellers can also easily differentiate their offerings by bundling their own services with Azure and other Microsoft cloud solutions including Office 365 for greater upsell and cross-sell potential.  

Cloud Marketplace
With Ingram Micro Cloud, our partners can provide an choice of world class SAAS and IAAS solutions to their customers as they look at transforming their consumption models from on-premise to the cloud
Today, Ingram Micro is the leading cloud marketplace and aggregation platform. The marketplace is deployed globally across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. The number of solutions that are available on Ingram Micro Cloud is being constantly enhanced as more and more vendors integrate their cloud solutions on to our marketplace

Market acceptability for cloud
The cloud business is among our faster growing businesses. We are seeing quarter on quarter growth. I expect it to become a significant part of our overall business in a few years time.

Growth of Distribution Market
There is tremendous opportunity for growth in India.The PC penetration is very low and is at 8-10% in the country. The benefit that technology can bring to the common man is well known. For scaling business in India and getting more users to use technology, we have to work with industry leaders to enable compelling use cases at affordable prices and make them available across the length and breadth of the country.

Ecommerce impacting Distribution business
Ecommerce has not impacted our business because they buy from us. They are like another customer for distributors. Lot of people who are selling on the marketplace is ultimately our resellers. If the business is doing well in the marketplace then they will buy more from us. The advantage is that online marketplace is providing is larger access of the products to the whole country, anybody who has access to internet can log in to online marketplace. So they are helping to grow and expand the market to some extent. Even in mature markets like US and China, online is not 100%. It is at the most 30-40%. In India it is hardly 10% currently. Ultimately the customer will decide who will succeed and there will always be a balance between online and offline. 

Government Initiatives 
Government initiatives like Digital India, Smart City etc will expand the market for IT vendors and distributors because the whole purpose of these projects is to enable more citizens to use either government services or have access to high quality infrastructure like broadband connectivity. As people will get comfortable to use technology, they will buy more PCs, printers, networking products etc. 

Vision
With the channel ecosystem, we bring tremendous value to the brands. In a country like India, there is a very strong case for vendors to work with channels and distribution to take their products to the market in a cost effective manner.Channel partners are the most efficient route for addressing the large geography and the large SMB customer base that exists in India.

To learn more about the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace, please visit: http://ingrammicrocloud.in/