Ingram Micro Launches Healthcare Partner Network

It's the first initiative stemming from Ingram's health-care program announced last April, said Mike Humke, senior director of vertical markets for Ingram Micro U.S.

"When I started [last fall], we pulled partners together to talk direction, talk solutions. The gap they felt that was in the market was that it is hard for one partner to deliver everything you need in health care. These are some of the best [health-care] partners in the world but as complex as the rules driving health care are, not one partner out there can deliver 100 percent of everything," Humke said.

So Ingram began developing a program where health-care VARs could collaborate and leverage each other to go to customers with a more complete solution, he added.

"At the end of the day , you see best practices, improved revenue, business growth," Humke said. Ingram Micro has about 50 VARs committed to the network at launch and Humke said he'd like to get to around 300 members for full coverage, initially in the U.S. only.

"We don't want to saturate the market. If you get to that, you have pretty good reach. We don't want have so many partner numbers for the sake of having numbers. We want the U.S. covered, to have the major metropolitan areas covered but not step on each other," Humke said.

To join the netwok, VARs must do at least $100,000 in health-care related revenue each year and have specific skills to complement the existing base of partners, he said.

"We ask them to fill out areas of practice, areas of expertise. Is it RFID, or data consolidation, or document management, or digital signage, or multiple areas of expertise? Then we're asking for references to some of the accounts you have and a commitment [to help other members when called upon]," Humke said. "Also, to not compete against each other and not to steal each other's customers."

Vendors are interested in driving sales through the network, but Humke said the group, at least initially, will not be a community like VentureTech Network where vendors supply specific benfits or incentives to members.

"The benefit is to be one of the first to get touched when looking for resource support. The vendors have a lot of interest in helath care. They can't invest enough to drive the business there. This is that partner opportunity," Humke said.

Hugo Perez, managing director at Datacorp, a Pembroke Pines, Fla.-based solution provider, joined the network to find "a network of trusted firmst that would save my firm years of stress, research and dating to yield priceless new client and 'eco' partner relationships."

Health care comprises about 15 percent of Datacorp's revenue today, but the firm is raising capital to fund a new venture called HealthCore to drive a set of private cloud services to health-care firms.

"We focus on advanced infrastructure services and support so we lack deep expertise and solutions across health-care-centric applications and services," Perez said. "Ingram’s health-care partner program does a great job of ‘flushing out’ firms that don’t fit the model, which is based on trust, excellence, integrity, and commitment."