Ingram Micro Services VP Exits Company

The Ingram Micro vice president of Services North America Friday informed his staff of 30 that he is stepping down to take a job as the senior vice president and general manager of NetEnrich, which hosts Ingram Micro's Seismic Global Network Operations. Crotty's last day at Ingram Micro is July 2.

Crotty is the second top executive to leave the $29 billion distributor in the last week. On Monday, Ingram said Alain Monie has resigned as president and COO of the company effective Aug. 22 to become CEO of a multinational industrial company in Asia.

The two departures come with distributors like Ingram attempting to play a bigger role in the cloud with services businesses. Ingram, for its part, does not break out the revenue of its services business, but maintains that it is profitable.

"I am very surprised at Justin Crotty's departure," said Lester Keizer, CEO of Connecting Point Las Vegas, an Ingram Micro Seismic partner and a member of Synnex's VARnex network. "He was gung ho on building Seismic services. He wanted to make it a force within Ingram and a grand national showcase for services."

As to the role of distribution in cloud services, Keizer said there is too much "noise and lack of definition of what a cloud is. I believe there are major VARs out there who actually have a form of a cloud -- cloudlets -- but do not have a go to market strategy."

Connecting Point Las Vegas' XiloCore unit is a private cloud offering that is gaining traction because of its "security, recoverability and reliability," said Keizer.

Large vendors and manufacturers are trying to dictate what the cloud is," said Keizer. "The VAR community has not come together as a community to set the standards and best practices for the cloud yet." XiloCore has called for a cloud-VAR summit in Las Vegas at the end of July.

Crotty, a nine-year Ingram Micro veteran, was not immediately available for comment.

Ingram Micro said it is actively searching for a replacement.

In the interim, Ingram Micro Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing North America Brian Wiser, Ingram Director of Services Sales Jason Beal, and Ingram Director of Services Operations Chris Parks will assume Crotty's duties.

Ingram said the strategy and growth initiatives around what it called its growing Services Division do not change.

Ingram said Seismic has approximately 2,000 active channel partners taking advantage of one or more of our services.