Ingram Micro SVP: The Channel Isn't Winning Today In Infrastructure-As-A-Service
Ingram Micro has invested heavily in sales and technical tools around Infrastructure-as-a-Service to help the channel expand its subpar footprint in the exploding market.
The Irvine, Calif.-based distributor said solution providers are doing quite well in the overall cloud ecosystem, with more than half of total cloud revenue flowing through a channel partner. But it's a very different story around public cloud, which the distributor said represents more than a third of the cloud market today and will account for nearly half of all IT spending in 2020.
"When it comes to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, the channel represents less than 20 percent of the revenue," Renee Bergeron, Ingram Micro's senior vice president of global cloud, said Thursday during Cloud Summit 2017. "So today, the channel is not winning when it comes to Infrastructure-as-a-Service."
Ingram Micro hopes to reverse the channel's meager IaaS reach using a new orchestration tool. The new tool allows channel partners to deploy and manage Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and IBM Bluemix from a single screen, as well as the Infrastructure Your Way program, which is focused on enabling solution providers to start, grow and scale their Infrastructure-as-a-Service businesses.
"I believe that Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the biggest untapped opportunity for channel partners," Bergeron said. "Enterprises are now looking at the cloud as a viable option to run their core business applications."
Hyperscale providers such as AWS, Azure and Bluemix have a combined annual run rate of $30 billion, Bergeron said, and today account for more than 60 percent of the global Infrastructure-as-a-Service market. Azure has just about doubled the size of its business over the past year, Bergeron said, while AWS enjoys a year-over-year growth rate of 47 percent.
"When they first launched in 2006, I don't think any of us could have predicted that an online bookstore would become a leader in the new technology consumption models," Bergeron said.
The dominance of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service delivery model has had a far-reaching impact, Bergeron said, especially since the hyperscale players manufacture their own servers and storage devices rather than buying them from a third-party provider.
"That's a lot of workloads that are migrating to the cloud, and a lot of server and storage business that is disappearing," Bergeron said.
Easy guides are the first component of Ingram Micro's Infrastructure Your Way program, which is available today for Azure and will soon follow for Bluemix and AWS, Bergeron told more than 1,300 Cloud Summit attendees at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort & Spa in Phoenix.
Easy Azure includes pre-packaged, turnkey solutions built on Azure, Bergeron said, as well as pricing, step-by-step blueprints, how-to-videos, and webinars. These deployment guides are intended for partners who are ready to get into IaaS but don't know where to begin, Bergeron said, as well as solution providers in need of simple cloud services.
Automated one-click solutions will be coming later this quarter, Bergeron said, where the channel can deploy basic and repeatable solutions with a single click from the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace.
Bergeron said one-click Azure enables the channel to: create customizable virtual machines for Windows or Linux; create a hosting environment and host WordPress, Linux, Apache or Windows websites; offer backup and recovery capabilities around Acronis and Azure Backup Vault to help partners protect client data for long-term retention and recovery; and provide database and network solutions.
"It's not just about deployment," Bergeron said. "It's about the entire cloud infrastructure lifecycle, from business development and partner enablement, to proposing and closing the deal, to deploying and managing the solutions for your customers."
Partner recruitment is another component of the Infrastructure Your Way program. Bergeron said Ingram Micro is offering beginning, intermediate and advance sales and technical training focused on helping partners build a business plan and identify opportunities for growth.
The program also provides solution providers with guidance around navigating vendor partner programs, Bergeron said, speaking to the value and benefit on each vendor solutions.
Demand generation is also a key element of growing a partner's Infrastructure practice, Bergeron said, with cloud assessments and proofs of concept serving as the single best marketing tool available to the channel. Ingram Micro also offers more traditional tools around identifying leads and templates for email, webinars, case studies and white papers, Bergeron said.
Ingram Micro has additionally developed a comprehensive, nine-step Infrastructure-as-a-Service lifecycle framework, which Bergeron said provides partners with the necessary tools and experience to successfully migrate customer workloads to the cloud.
The first three steps focused on sales and demand generation techniques, Bergeron said, as well as devising a rich enablement program through both proprietary technology and pre-built solutions. From there, solution providers need to address the specific opportunity by getting acquainted with the customer's technology ecosystem, designing a solution, and pricing and proposing it to the customer.
In the end, Bergeron said it comes to execution around the deployment, back-office operations, and ongoing monitoring and management of the technology.
Socius has seen triple-digit growth in its Infrastructure-as-a-Service practice over the past year while nearly doubling its partner count, according to Daryl Hall, a cloud development delivery manager for Columbus, Ohio-based Ingram Micro partner.
Ingram Micro's new orchestration capabilities should make it easier for Socius to spin up new resources, Hall said, and provide the solution provider with greater transparency into how much migrating an end customer into AWS or Azure would actually cost.
The orchestrator addresses the missing piece in Ingram Micro's cloud strategy, according to Justin Nevins, vice president of engineering for Harlan, Iowa-based Oxen Technology.
"There's a need to simply the back-end of cloud to where it's closer to ordering a set of servers," Nevins told CRN.
Oxen Technology has been able to do enterprise-level IaaS projects without any problem, but hasn't been able to make IaaS working from a pricing perspective in the SMB space given the amount of labor that goes into spinning up an account.
Rapid technological changes are also a barrier to IaaS adoption, Nevins said, especially since the platforms are built for the enterprise and therefore entail a steep learning curve for solution providers serving the SMB space. Nevins said Ingram Micro's new IaaS sales and training capabilities should therefore provide partners with an easier path to mastering how to use these public cloud tools.