Ingram Micro Offers Disaster-Recovery Services To VARs

The new professional services are aimed at helping solution providers who may not have the resources to offer them on their own, said Jason Beal, director of sales for Ingram Micro's Services Division.

The new services are the second for Ingram Micro, following the launch of virtualization assessment and implementation services in March, Beal said. They were unveiled on the opening day of Ingram Micro's VentureTech network conference, held this week in San Diego.

In bringing such professional services to market, Ingram Micro makes it possible for solution providers with a small or even nonexistent services team work with clients who might otherwise turn elsewhere for help, Beal said.

"Ingram Micro over the last couple of years has cracked the code for productizing professional services," he said. "Most professional services offerings are customized. We've shown how to make them repeatable and productized."

The new services include typical disaster-recovery offerings such as storage redundancy and broadband, Beal said. But recovering operations is only the first step after a disaster. "If there's a disaster, what do the employees do?" he said. "Where do the employees huddle up? We want to include anything related to the business."

Ingram Micro is working with a particular member of its Ingram Micro Services Network (IMSN) to implement the services to its solution providers and provide the required business processes and methodologies, Beal said. That service provider, which Beal declined to name, can come in an provide the services while protecting the customer relationship of the solution provider that originally closed the deal.

In addition, solution providers can tap the skills and services capabilities of one or more of the 800 IMSN members nationwide for additional resources. "They can call on 800 other VARs and 10,000 VAR employee engineers when Ingram Micro doesn't have enough resources," he said.

Ingram Micro provides a professional services framework to solution providers that have different sets of skills, with some more sophisticated than the others, Beal said.

"In order to make this work, we focused on defining the scope, the deliverables at each step, and the price," he said. "So we take the guesswork out of this for the partners. The partners know what they are paying for. The customer knows in advance what the price is, and the reseller knows in advance what his margin is. We take the risk out of this."

Chris Andreozzi, president and owner of KnowledgeCentrix, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider and VentureTech Network member, said Ingram Micro has done a good job of productizing traditional consulting and services.

Andreozzi said he has seen one of the sample deliverables of Ingram Micro's new business-continuity and disaster-recovery services and was impressed by their scope.

"Ingram Micro's services seem to rival those of SunGard and IBM," he said. "Their business-continuity approach is designed around first understanding whether or not a customer needs a business-continuity plan. They asses the risk, employee requirements, and geographical data such as seismic activity. It's very complex, and very well thought out."

While KnowledgeCentrix has its own business-continuity and disaster-recovery services, IMSN brings the solution provider extra scale and capacity when needed, Andreozzi said.

All solution providers run out of resources, Andreozzi said. While his company has five engineers certified with VMware and Citrix XenServer and works with a wide range of other virtualization components, for instance, it often does not have the people to finish all its ongoing projects because of the demand.

"For example, I have a customer in Arizona where we helped them with virtualization," he said. "They might need an engineer for a day. I can work with IMSN to get help there. It protects both of us. And I don't have to put an engineer in a plane for a day."

Ingram Micro's new business-continuity and disaster-recovery services complement its virtualization professional services offering very well, Andreozzi said. "So much of disaster-recovery services today are built around virtualization technology," he said. "This service will help us get out in front of the customer when talking about virtualization."