Ingram Micro Delves Deeper Into Managed Services Arena

The Santa Ana, Calif., distributor is exploring several models that would help solution providers enter the managed services market without having to invest in significant infrastructure and also will protect those that have already made the investment.

“We need to be doing things that ultimately grow and raise the profitability for all of our constituents and allow them to differentiate themselves,” Crotty said. Ingram is still mulling several ways to go to market, but it is an area that it needs to invest in, Crotty said at Ingram’s VentureTech Network conference last week in Montreal.

“You look at our product business and it’s grown because we helped VARs reduce an inventory infrastructure that was a duplicative investment. The same economies exist around managed services,” Crotty said.

“We’re in the early stages of this, so you see a lot of duplicative efforts. We have a lot of solution providers that have done a great job putting in that infrastructure, and they’re doing a great job selling it. But do they all need to do it? We believe we can be uniquely positioned to help everyone,” he said.

Several solution providers that have already invested in managed services infrastructure said they would still welcome an Ingram initiative.

“It’s long overdue. They couldn’t move fast enough to fill that void in the marketplace,” said Mike Novotny, president and CEO of InterTech, a Phoenix-based solution provider who uses N-Able as a managed services platform. “I don’t know if I would cut my [investment] right now, but for the next life cycle, we’d do that.”