As if they needed more stress, organizations are facing evolving and increasingly stringent compliance regulations from the Payment Card Industry, as well as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others. Here are a few security compliance products that can make the audit process less excruciating.
Here are 10 of the distributor's hottest new offerings winning over solution providers.
New smartphones from Sony, Motorola and the first-ever Twitter-only mobile device -- the TwitterPeek -- headline a busy week for handset makers as the holiday shopping season heats up.
VARs Get Feet Wet In Ingram's MSP Program
11:00 AM EST Wed. Mar. 07, 2007
Page 1 of 2
Ingram Micro on Wednesday said it has teamed with data center provider SAVVIS to offer VARs a hosted version of LPI's remote monitoring and management platform, adding to the portfolio that the distributor is creating with its Ingram Micro Seismic Virtual Services Warehouse.
So far, Ingram Micro has about 100 partners using the Seismic Partner Support Portal knowledge base, and some partners have begun reselling the hosted solution. The Santa Ana, Calif.-based distributor, however, declined to specify how many partners have purchased the hosted platform and how many had bought LPI licenses and were hosting it at home-grown data centers.
Ingram Micro began offering the hosted version of the platform in January.
"Our long-term strategy is [to build a] virtual services warehouse that VARs can come to and procure provisioned services for their customers that would be more costly and difficult to build and deliver on their own," said Justin Crotty, vice president of services for Ingram Micro North America. "A big part of getting into a new business, like Ingram Micro is getting into here, is making sure our customers feel very comfortable with our capabilities."
Ingram Micro will rent space from SAVVIS as needed, according to Crotty. "We don't have to build out a large chunk of real estate and then fill it. We thought that was most cost-effective," he said. "It's the same model that we're preaching to our VARs: Build it as they come, not before they come."
Ingram Micro plans to continue adding to its Seismic platform with offerings such as remote and online backup and CRM. And VARs have liked what they've seen so far, even though the transition to being an MSP takes time.
Craig Flint, owner of Computer ER, Missoula, Mont., began testing Ingram Micro's hosted managed services platform in January.
"It's one of the better decisions I made this year. It's stable. It's faster than anything that I could set up here for my own hosting. I don't have to come in on a Monday morning and have to reboot a server or anything like that. It just works," Flint said.
Computer ER is in contract for 17 customers with LPI through the end of 2007 but is buying all of its new licenses through Ingram Micro, he said.
While Flint expects his company to make a complete transition to being an MSP, it's not there yet. "I'm not putting all my eggs in the MSP basket. We use it on a daily basis multiple times a day, getting alerts and things like that. I still don't trust it as a total business model quite yet," he said.
Flint thinks VARs will like Ingram Micro's hosted offering. "If Ingram advertises it right and gets it out to the current LPI partners, I think it will fly well. I've even thought about going to the LPI message boards and saying if you're not hosting it with Ingram, you should definitely give it a shot," he said.
NEXT: More VARs mull Ingram's MSP offering
