VARs Get Feet Wet In Ingram's MSP Program

"If we are the monitoring company, the likelihood of our monitoring equipment on-site going down is just as likely as the equipment of our client's going down," he said. "For the last year, we've had our own NOC. I've been running this out of my office in Dayton, and I haven't had problems. I just don't want to have problems."

Gerbs said another perk is having Ingram Micro pay to patch and manage the servers. But the real plus, he noted, is the robustness and speed of the SAVVIS data center.

"Performance on the Seismic platform has been faster than the performance on our own platform. We didn't expect that. We thought performance would be the same, but it has been much faster," Gerbs said.

Michael Bowman, vice president of network services at Computer Service Partners, Raleigh, N.C., said his company hasn't made any decisions about using Ingram Micro's hosted services, but it also hasn't written off the prospect of signing on.

Computer Service Partners purchased LPI software months before Ingram Micro announced the managed services partnership last fall.

"We're currently still utilizing the LPI platform that we purchased, but we've been investigating more of what Ingram Micro has brought to the table. And going forward, we're probably going to use a mixture [of our hosted service and Ingram's]," Bowman said.

Ingram Micro's Crotty said the cost of creating an infrastructure can be an impediment for some VARs looking to get into managed services. Yet Erle Williams, CFO of Protocol Technologies, Vernon, British Columbia, said that wasn't the case for his company.

Protocol Technologies bought LPI licenses from Ingram Micro after hearing about the distributor's MSP deal at last fall's VentureTech Invitational conference in Palm Desert, Calif., but for now the solution provider has created its own data center.

"It's interesting to see because we are very much in the SMB market, and the investment for us wasn't that large. It was less than the software, even at the monstrously discounted rate than they had going on at the event," Williams said. "I don't now how it scales out and how many customers that it's going to be able to handle. It's still a work in progress; it's too early to say yet. Being that we were mostly break-fix, the transition hasn't fully happened yet."

Although not all VAR partners are ready to jump on the MSP bandwagon, Ingram Micro expects most of them to eventually offer managed services, according to Crotty.

"We don't' expect that every VAR in the universe is going to offer managed services. We think a majority will. A vast majority will. This will become the de facto standard where IT services are delivered," he said. "VARs that can meet that standard and can deliver services in that way will prosper and will be competitive. Customers will start demanding their IT services in that format. and VARs will have to respond to that."