Ingram Micro’s team of technology experts empower its partners to gain access to tools and resources to help their customers adopt cloud-based solutions at a rapid pace.
The Pandemic has forced businesses to shift to online operations and there has been a massive migration to the cloud. This has thrown open the wider gates of opportunities for Cloud Vendors as well as Distributors. As we usher into 2023, it’s time to look back and take stock of the channel performance of leading cloud vendors and distributors, and their key channel achievements. More than this, it’s pivotal to get a hang of the key cloud predictions for the Channel Market for the year 2023.
While the industry is agog over to know what all technologies would majorly impact the cloud market, we would take you through the cloudscape to listen directly from the horse’s mouth as to what the top vendors and distributors are thinking and reflecting, what are their premonitions about the shape of things to come in 2023 and their plans to turbocharge the Partner ecosystem.
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“We can help bring in the right set of capabilities at every stage of the partner’s cloud journey, as they are starting, growing or accelerating the business. “
Jyotil Mankad,
Director and Head of Cloud Business,
Ingram Micro India Pvt. Ltd
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In a series of interactions with the poster-boys of the cloud industry, SME Channels embarks upon understanding the cloud dynamics; what drives the cloud growth engine; the key milestones for 2023 set from the channel perspective; key mega trends in the cloud market in 2023, predictions for the New Year; direction for channel partners and the growth roadmap of the cloud players for 2023.
We spoke to leading IT Distributor IngramMicro to get a sneak peek into its performance in the cloud Industry. Here, Jyotil Mankad, Director and Head of Cloud Business, Ingram Micro India Pvt. Ltd., reveals his company’s key Cloud Predictions for 2023, major achievements and the unique matrixes that design his seminal vision for the Partner Ecosystem. Edited Excerpts:
How are your Cloud offerings enhanced to cater to changing business requirements?
Our biggest focus area is to elevate the experience of our partners and customers when they do business with Ingram Micro Cloud. We have built a team that is spread across the globe to provide world-class experience and support to our ever-growing community of partners. Coupled with our existing team of technology experts, our partners will have the access to tools and resources to help their customers adopt cloud-based solutions at a much more rapid pace.
The second area of focus is to continue building depth and competency in multi-cloud, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions. The continued acceleration of digital transformation is providing a large opportunity for partners to meet the need of their customers as they further a cloud-first deployment of workloads. The rapid growth in this space coupled with the scarcity of resources to address assessment, migration, and management needs provides a wealth of services and rich opportunities for partners. Ingram Micro’s flight academy is a proven holistic IaaS development program designed to help partners build a successful cloud practice.
The third area is to help our partners with the rapidly expanding opportunity in the cyber security space. The continued acceleration of securing all data, endpoints, applications, etc. As digital transformation accelerates and workloads are deployed in multiple deployment models, the security challenges also rapidly expand. Customers are demanding partner competencies increase to meet this challenge. We are building a wide range of security solutions that will help our partners with the solutions needed today and with a focus on innovation to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
What all a channel partner needs to have to adopt Cloud business and what are the steps to start Cloud practice?
Every channel partner has the potential to start and successfully scale the Cloud business. It begins with the commitment to consistently invest and build the organization across functions to support the cloud business. That includes creating a strong sales capability and capacity with resources that are well-trained and certified to help their customers choose the best cloud solution suited to their needs. It is also important to have a robust technical capability i.e., pre-sales and managed/professional services especially if the partner wants to participate in the fast-growing IaaS opportunity. These resources are the differentiator as cloud adoption is not a single sale but working with the customer to build and execute a digital transformation journey over a long period.
A couple of areas that are generally ignored when partners build the structure is focused teams on customer lifecycle management (CLM) and customer success. Both are critical since the cloud is a recurring business and having a great retention strategy is necessary for scaling the business. Customer success on the other side helps their customers extract full value from their cloud investments and also as an advisor that helps customer build their roadmap towards deeper cloud ad, options.
The good news is that we can help partners at every step of the way in their journey towards building a successful cloud business. We can help bring in the right set of capabilities at every stage of the partner’s cloud journey, as they are starting, growing or accelerating the business.
Please brief us on the kind of service support you extend to your channel partners.
At Ingram Micro Cloud, we believe our partners deserve the best and we are putting our partners amid all that we do.
We have kicked off some new initiatives which include Modern support, a dedicated customer success team, a pricing desk and the grievance redressal desk to resolve billing support issues. These improvements enable us to aid our partners quickly and efficiently. All of this allows our partners to focus more on running a profitable cloud business.
What kind of Partner training programs are run by your company to upskill your partners?
Ingram Micro Cloud over the year has built a team of experts that help our partners fast-track their capability building in the areas of IaaS, Collaboration, Security and RPA to name a few. We have also created a Cloud & Security Centre of Excellence (CoE) that develops a wide range of use cases on emerging technologies across vendor lines. We have a variety of structured enablement programs for our partners to help them expedite skill development and capability building.
In addition to standard training, certification and enablement interventions, we also work with our partners to create an enablement plan that is customised depending on the existing business and skills landscape. The enablement plan includes active learning as well where our team of cloud experts work with the partners to architect a solution and extend our services in deploying and managing these solutions should the partner need this assistance.
Services are rapidly growing opportunity areas for our partners and to enable them to leverage this opportunity we have got a large catalogue of professional services for our partners to choose from across multiple technologies.
