Ingram Micro is tapping its Cisco channel partners across the U.S. and Canada to use its Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), a platform that allows partners to create subscription-based, as-a-service offerings around Cisco Collaboration technologies, including Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco Customer Collaboration and Cisco WebEx. The offering includes the full range of Cisco collaboration functions along with the tools to deliver those functions to the end customer in an automated, standardized way.
The cloud solution has been in beta with some Ingram Micro channel partners for several months and is set to be demonstrated live at Ingram Micro’s 2013 Cloud Summit April 7-10 in Scottsdale, Ariz.
“By design, Ingram Micro’s hosted HCS enables our mutual Cisco partners to successfully sell and deploy Cisco collaboration technologies and wrap additional services around these technologies to increase their value and recurring revenue potential,” said Renee Bergeron, vice president of managed services and cloud computing for the Ingram Micro Services Division, North America.
The value-added distributor is also taking advantage of the Cisco Advanced Services team to help its channel partners provision and deploy the solution, it said, as well as offer 24/7 service management, monitoring and Level 2 and Level 3 technical support.
“Cisco and Ingram Micro recognize the tremendous opportunity to offer cloud-based services through the channel as the demand for pay-as-you-go collaboration services grows,” said Richard McLeod, senior director for worldwide partner collaboration sales at Cisco. “This new HCS service allows Ingram Micro to add value by reducing complexity associated with building and selling cloud collaboration solutions. In addition, offering collaboration services through Ingram Micro’s innovative Cloud Services Marketplace enables Cisco channel partners to provide choice to customers in terms of how they consume collaboration solutions, be it from the cloud, via a managed service, on premise or some combination.”
