Cloud Awesomeness: Charting a Path to new Business Profitability

If I told you we could help your business grow faster than market average, with offerings returning 40 percent plus margins, would you believe me? Would you jump at the opportunity?

That’s the sort of opportunity being presented by cloud, right here in Australia, right now and it’s an opportunity some Ingram Micro resellers are seizing – but others have yet to capitalise on.

Cloud delivered services are transforming businesses everywhere and are dramatically changing the business – and economics – of technology resellers.

When I left school and started working in the warehouse of an IT distributor some 30+ years ago, it was all about packing boxes and shipping physical items to resellers. Today, Ingram Micro might be a technology distributor, but it could more accurately perhaps be called a services aggregator.

We’re seeing massive growth in our cloud business and the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace. We’ve doubled our cloud team here in the last 24 months on the back of high demand, and now have more than 300,000 seats implemented locally on our Cloud Marketplace, with revenue expected to grow more than 60 percent this year. And there’s big growth on the offerings side, too. Vendors are all ‘SaaS-ifying’ their products and we’re on-boarding seven to 10 new services a year, with that number growing rapidly. Think about the offerings from Microsoft, Symantec, DocuSign, Cisco - who now have a SaaS first or are rapidly deploying more SaaS services.

It’s impressive growth for us, and for those resellers who are taking advantage of the opportunities cloud presents for both them and their customers. But not all resellers are embracing cloud.

And we get it. It takes a different mindset to be successful with cloud services. There’s the change in the revenue model with the dreaded profitability chasm, not to mention a change in the selling mindset and how you take cloud to market and position it to end customers. The rhythm of business is different when you have to maintain a healthy relationship with an ongoing customer and try to increase the yield from them and it can be hard to move away from a business model you’re already comfortable with.

But it’s worth it if you get it right as with cloud offerings you can gain:

-     strong margins of around 40 percent for many cloud offerings

-     ongoing revenue streams and predictability of revenue

-     easy bundling of multiple cloud services together and cross-selling

-     remote deployment and management and automated provisioning

And of course, you’re ensuring your customers are on the latest technology to help their businesses grow and expand

Should you want an exit strategy for your business, cloud also offers big benefits. While traditional businesses are valued at 5x their profit, that soars to 40x for businesses with a monthly recurring revenue model, so building in a monthly recurring revenue adds huge value to your business - not just now, but if you want to sell.

Planning for success

A recent Ingram Micro survey found 47 percent of partners have no business plan (and 50 percent of them were MSPs) and 56 percent had no sales plan. That’s something we’re seeing here in the Australian market too.

Which is why we’re working with our partners to build business plans which will help them accelerate their growth. Many of our Office productivity partners are growing at around or just above market growth – something Gartner puts at around 21 percent compound annual growth. But with our Go-to-Market services we can help partners accelerate that to as high as 60 percent growth.

Our Go-to-Market Hub, within the Cloud Marketplace, provides resellers with a single destination for a wealth of information and assistance, including sales tools, digital marketing capabilities and product information.

Each and every product on the Cloud Marketplace has its own playbook, complete with sales guides (including product features and benefits, target market and competitor information), customisable sales sheets and ready-to-use product logos and screenshots. Add to that videos and interactive demos to help train your sales teams - or to help your customers.

On the digital marketing front you’ll find the content, templates and tools you need to put together your own lead generation campaigns across all the services we have on our marketplace. While vendors may offer their own individual digital marketing services, the Go-to-Market hub pulls it all together in one easy place.

Accelerate your cloud business

Remember that growth in Ingram Micro Cloud staff numbers I talked about earlier? That’s the team on standby to help you grow your business. We have dedicated channel resources to help you build a business plan around your unique value proposition and help with training and enablement, end user demand generation, marketing capability and channel programs that you can leverage to accelerate your business in your areas of focus.

We also offer a range of Microsoft Accelerate programs: Azure Accelerate, Modern Workplace Accelerate and the newly launched Dynamics Accelerate. These are three great programs partners can benefit hugely from, offering support, increased partner margins, certification and training, free end-user support and much more.

We segment partners depending on the level they’re at from a skillset, enablement and business level perspective to ensure we’re helping you in the best possible way, whatever stage of the journey you’re on across those three clouds.

In the early days of cloud, there was a notion that it would be detrimental for distributors, eroding the relationship between us and our reseller partners. In fact, the reverse is true. Vendors, especially cloud vendors, just can’t do it all, they can’t scale to cover every partner, and they’re looking to us to help them find new customers for them and their partners. We’re firmly in the middle of the channel adding a lot more value back to both our reseller partners and our vendor partners, and creating new channels to market and new opportunities for partners.

So if you’re ready to chart your way to cloud awesomeness, engage with us today!