Ingram Rolls Out More Managed Services
The Seismic online backup and restore service will allow resellers to package and resell the service integrated into their own managed services offerings. The Seismic print monitoring and management service will allow VARs to manage and monitor customers' printers over the Internet.
"These offerings are designed to allow VARs to quickly and efficiently offer high-margin services to their customers and to fold these offerings into their overall managed services portfolios and managed service strategy," said Justin Crotty, vice president, Ingram Micro Services Division.
"Distribution in general is best positioned [to do this] because there is absolutely no channel conflict. We are not interested in branding to the end customer. We are not interested in inserting ourselves between that VAR and the end customer. We are simply interested in helping that VAR deploy services that are difficult and time consuming and can be inefficient if not deployed correctly. We're trying to take a lot of that complexity and a lot of that cost out of the equation and allow these VARs to provide quality services to their customers where they can make a lot of money on them." he said.
For Ernie Dellamo, president of Managed Business, a Randolph, N.J.-based solution provider who recently signed up last month to resell Ingram's Seismic managed services platform to its customers, the new additions are welcome.
"In our world it basically depends on what our customers are willing to pay for but the more options we can offer our customers the better off we are," he said.
Ingram has plans to further expand its Seismic portfolio with managed security services in the third quarter and the distributor is evaluating hosted e-mail solutions. Also, within the next few months the company plans to unveil a hardware-as-a-service financing program, said Crotty. "We're constantly evaluating any one of a number of offerings out there that are either being brought to our attention by our VAR partners or by third parties that look like they're developing traction or that have a demand in the market and we'll be adding those as we get feedback from our VAR partners on what they'd like to see," he said.
Earlier this year the distributor added a managed NOC and managed Help Desk services to the Seismic platform.