Ingram Micro Cloud Summit: Celebrating the Cloud’s Stickiness

In my mind, stickiness is good for two things: adhesive tape and customer retention. Luckily, I’m not at a conference for duct tape enthusiasts. I’m here at the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit in Phoenix, the distribution giant’s annual confab for its cloud customers.

The theme of this year’s event, “Where Rainmakers Thrive,” signifies the opportunities for channel partners in the cloud (although I have to say it evokes images of Jimmy Fallon throwing dollar bills into the air during a Capital One commercial. But I digress). This being the fifth year, cloud obviously is showing its stickiness with partners.

“According to IDC, 50 percent of all companies adopted some form of cloud last year,” said Renee Bergeron, vice president of Cloud Computing at Ingram Micro and opening keynote speaker. “With an annual revenue stream, cloud services can be your rainmaker.”

Bergeron noted that companies with some form of recurring revenue are considered annuity businesses, which typically are valued at four to eight times their annual revenue. “You don’t need to have 100 percent of your revenue recurring to be recognized as an annuity business,” which helps increase the value of your company almost instantly, she said.

In addition to announcing new vendors to the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace and new services to help partners accelerate their cloud services adoption, Bergeron and host of others waxed poetic about the opportunities in SMB, vertical markets and more, all with the sticky goodness the cloud provides.

Here are a few fun facts and pearls of wisdom from the lineup:

Bergeron:

– The SMB market is growing 32 percent CAGR.

– Ingram Micro’s goal with its cloud services and its cloud value proposition is hyperscale selling – the ability to shorten the sales cycle to increase customer acquisition cost-effectively.

– The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace serves eight countries, is available in three languages, accepts seven currencies, features 10 vendors with 55 solutions and is used by 2,000 resellers.

– “We want to help address the complexity of implementing cloud solutions. The challenge is integrating a solution which could be running on-premise, managed or in the cloud. The reality of simplicity of the cloud is realized at the end-customer level. The complexity is with the channel.”

Judson Althoff, President, North America Sales & Marketing at Microsoft:

– Microsoft Azure is in 140 countries.

– “SMB is not just revenue growth, but also usage growth. Cloud utilization in the SMB space is nearly 2:1 of the enterprise space. Growth opportunity in SMB is like nothing ever before.”

– “In cloud services, as customers consume more they will be a customer for life. The cloud is sticky. If you create your own differentiated cloud services and provide monthly statements of value, the stickiness factor is there.”

Executive Panel with CEO Alain Monié, president of Ingram Micro North America; Paul Bay and Nimesh Dave, executive vice president of Global Cloud Computing:

– Monié : “We are still very much the beginning [of cloud adoption]. Last year we closed $46 billion of business, and cloud was a little above $100 million.”

– “Cloud allows new opportunities to be created. Businesses will be born in the cloud that couldn’t before, so cannibalization of on-premise by cloud is only a small part of the opportunity. We are at the beginning of restructuring. … There won’t be a total shift from on premise to cloud—both will exist. This whole ecosystem is still being stabilized and defined.”

– “Cloud doesn’t necessary kill completely the other way of doing things. Integration of the two, though, needs to happen. We are trying to bring to market ease of doing both and for quite some time will need to do both.”

– Bay: “Software and system sales were at an all-time high last year. It’s about the hybrid opportunity. We are setting up a platform to operate ubiquitously in any environment.”

– “Five years ago we met here and then everyone was going to be in the cloud, and the channel and distribution would be disintermediated. That has not really happened.”

– Dave: “We are seeing a lot of hardware refresh happening, and we will see the complement of cloud to extend capabilities.”

– “The risk of transitioning your business model is people may be sitting around not doing anything. But the risk of not taking that first step is someone else takes that first step. Once the customer starts working with you on the marketplace, they’re going to stick around.”

– “Partners have to be active in sales and marketing to find those opportunities. Take the initiative and spend the time doing sales and marketing and let us take care of the technology.”

– “We are seeing that we’re building a new sales force as well. For people in the services organization, the first question is, What problem can I solve for you? Those who lead with product will have to change their mindset.”

Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of IBM Cloud:

 – “In the era of the cloud you’ve got to be looking at what happened and in real-time to see what is happening.”

– The power is shifting to individuals – employees, clients and consumers.

– The cloud is impacting mobile and mobile is impacting cloud.

– Seventy-nine percent of CXOs have initiatives to respond more quickly to emerging trends.

– The No. 1 priority of CIOs in three to five years is to be a critical enabler of enterprise strategy.

– Ninety-one percent of net new software in 2014 was built for cloud delivery.

– “The cloud is at the nexus of forces enabling business to innovate and pursue new opportunities.

– Seventy-two percent of business leaders say cloud will be extremely important to their business success by 2016.

– “You will be a disruptor or you will be disrupted.”

– “I think most of what will see if hybrid cloud. That includes cloud-to-cloud, so we will have to find a way to build integration. We want clients to be able to mix and match services. “

– “It’s not about the technology, it’s about what it enables.”