Ingram Micro Adds Enablement Tools, Gets 'Cloudy' with CenturyLink

INGRAM MICRO ONE — Ingram Micro continues to roll out new partner enablement tools, with the launch of the distributor’s new Partner Now and Partner Connect.

The announcements came at Ingram Micro One, which kicked off Monday in Washington, D.C.

Using automation to speed up the sales cycle, Partner Now is an online, on-demand business management portal for U.S. partners. Cisco is the first vendor to go live on the platform, but expect to see it expand to more vendors in 2019.

Partner Now is designed to help partners engage, transact and manage their product sales, IT services and solutions from multiple vendors. The secure online business management portal is available anytime, from anywhere.

Ingram Micro’s Kirk Robinson

“The decisions, actions and investments we make at Ingram Micro work to improve the partner experience and uncover new and better ways to help grow their businesses,” said Kirk Robinson, senior vice president and chief country executive, U.S., at Ingram Micro. “Partner Now is the first of many digitization projects underway, and a great example of how we’re using technology to speed the sales cycle, simplify transactions and scale the success of our channel partners and providers.”

The Cisco Partner Now portal provides partners with anytime and real-time online access to their Cisco business. It enables channel partners to originate, change and track Cisco products and services seamlessly and with greater visibility throughout the transaction process. Partners get access to order management, instant quoting and quote to order.

“We’ve listened to our customers, and what we heard was that for those of you doing business with Cisco, it could be complex — the ordering, the products, the services. We listened, and we heard you,” Robinson said.

With the help of a third party, Ingram Micro applied the lean methodology on its Cisco team. Things got uncomfortable.

“The gentleman we hired basically came in and told our Cisco team, every day, that your baby is ugly,” said Robinson. “That’s because we had applied many processes on how to run that business.”

Once the Cisco team got beyond that, it saw the light about using technology and automation to simplify things. The portal slashes the time to take hundreds of emails and days of phone calls into minutes.

On the marketing front, Ingram Micro announced Partner Connect, a new software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based digital marketing program.

Partner Connect streamlines the intricacies of a digital marketing campaign by helping channel partners establish a digital presence to promote their company brand, solutions and services to a wider end-user base. The new platform makes it easy to quickly automate, customize, personalize and launch digital marketing campaigns within minutes and includes a personal dashboard, domain name and the ability to receive real-time analytics to help assess lead activity and ROI.

“Making the move to digital marketing is a must for channel partners looking to build their brand and grow their business,” said Dennis Crupi, executive director, marketing, at Ingram Micro. “Supported by Ingram Micro’s … digital marketing team, Ingram Micro Partner Connect addresses this gap and simplifies digital content marketing, making it easy for resellers to enhance their digital presence with …

… personalized content, targeted Google Ad Word campaigns and real-time analytics.”

Some highlights of Partner Connect include:

Partner Connect was first launched in beta with Ingram Micro’s TrustX Alliance community members and is now available to U.S. and Canadian partners.

Also Monday, Ingram Micro announced a new private cloud solution powered by CenturyLink.

The new CenturyLink single-tenant hosted private cloud sits in Ingram Micro’s hybrid solutions portfolio. It’s build on enterprise-grade technologies including VMware Cloud Foundation and HPE Gen 10 Proliant servers.

The new offer targets managed service providers (MSPs). It’s managed via a single interface that provides MSPs with complete control as they deploy, expand and manage their clients’ virtual machines, networking and applications. As a customer’s business grows, scaling the solution is straight forward, requiring the seamless addition of integrated servers to the private cloud, allowing users to maintain peak performance and accessibility at all times.

Ingram Micro also announced the RenewVue portal designed to help partners streamline the license renewal process. And, last week, Ingram Micro Ingram Micro invited partners to explore its custom Integration Center.