Ingram Micro Partners With Salesforce, Amazon Web Services

Distributor Ingram Micro announced a slew of partnerships Tuesday as part of its growing Cloud Marketplace program.

Chief among them is a relationship with Salesforce.com to help partners build business apps on its Force.com cloud platform and an agreement with Amazon Web Services to act as a cloud service provider for Ingram Micro’s partners.

The announcements, totaling 56 partnerships, products and services, were made at Ingram Micro’s third-annual Cloud Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz., where about 700 partners attended.

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The announcements are part of Santa Ana, Calif.-based Ingram Micro’s ongoing efforts to act as a cloud services aggregator for partners, offering the products and services to migrate their customers’ IT resources to the cloud.

’Our strategy is to be a one-stop shop for the solution provider,’ Renee Bergeron, vice president of Managed Service and Cloud Computing for Ingram Micro North America, said in an interview with CRN. ’We really want them to know that if they have a business problem, they can come to Ingram Micro for a solution. We have 80 people dedicated to the cloud for that purpose.’

Bergeron said there are now 3,000 resellers that buy cloud services through Ingram Micro and another 1,200 to 1,500 are expected in 2012.

The Salesforce.com partnership will enable Ingram Micro partners to resell Force.com, a platform for business applications.

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’Force.com has 800,000 ISVs, which have integrated applications with the platform,’ Ingram Micro's Bergeron said. ’Resellers can pick and choose among the ISVs.’

Channel partners and businesses can use Force.com to create customized mobile, social and real-time applications. Force.com also provides visual tools to build applications.

Under the partnership with Amazon, Ingram Micro’s U.S. channel partners can access Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Storage Gateway, a service enabling integration between an on-premise IT environment, and Amazon Web Services storage infrastructure.

Ingram Micro said other AWS products, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), will become available to channel partners through the summer and fall of 2012.

Ingram Micro announced cloud-related partnerships to offer products and services from several other companies, including:

• VMware’s Horizon Application Manager to secure access to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Web applications
• ConnectWise’s platform to help streamline business applications
• CA’s AppLogic platform to create cloud services
• Awareness Technologies’ Insider Threat Protection managed through the cloud
• dinCloud’s hosted virtual desktop
• DocVerify’s software to enable secure electronic signatures over the Web
• Intel’s AppUp Small Business Service, which offers SaaS and Haas (Hardware-as-a-Service) as managed services bundling

In addition, the distributor announced new managed print services offerings that are combined into three service packs. The three segments -- Plus, Advance and Total -- include a data collection and automated supplies fulfillment service, a cost-per-page model and remotely managed HaaS offering.

David DeCamillis, director of business development for Denver, Colo.-based solution provider Platte River Networks, said Ingram Micro has helped his company give customers cloud services by bundling many services.

DeCamillis said the new partnerships and solutions provided by Ingram Micro, such as Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform can only help his business. ’This gives us more options,’ he said.