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Working in close collaboration with IT industry leaders including HP, Microsoft, Cisco, Symantec, CA Technologies, Ipanema, APC, and SNIA Europe, Ingram Micro EMEA has seen an ‘overwhelming’ response from its reseller partner community who are actively transforming their business models to capture the opportunities within Cloud Computing and Managed Services.
Branded CTA 2.Go, the Alliance is broadening its scope to a more solutions-oriented focus, a “Cloudaborative” technology focus from the data center to the device including virtualization, mobility, and Unified Communications.
“We have moved from the ‘What is Cloud Computing?’ and ‘Where is my data?’ questions so often asked in previous years, to questions such as “How can I incorporate Cloud into a larger technology solutions?’ and ‘When is Cloud most practical according to my end-customer’s needs, budget, and location,’ explains Alain Maquet, Senior Executive Vice President and President Ingram Micro EMEA, “The winds of time have changed. Fear and uncertainty in the channel have transformed into optimism and opportunity. Adoption rates are skyrocketing for Cloud Services vendors within the Ingram Micro Cloud portfolio.”
Last year the Channel Transformation Alliance was launched with some simple and practical goals. The Alliance set out to help resellers assess, quantify, and respond to both the threats and the opportunities arising from the emergence of IT-as-a-Service models. A goal was to take away the fear and uncertainly many felt about the Cloud. A further goal of the initiative was to help resellers understand the business model options that were available to them with Cloud Computing, broadly characterized as Cloud Services Broker or Cloud Service Provider models
“There is no doubt based on our experiences within the Channel Transformation Alliance initiative that the EMEA reseller channel has made significant progress in the past twelve months in terms of understanding of the Cloud, understanding of various new business models affiliated with IT-as-a-Services, and their ability to respond to end-users questions and business needs relative to Cloud Computing and Managed Services,” confirms Jason Beal, Senior Director for Advanced Solutions and Cloud Services, Ingram Micro EMEA. “Most importantly, we have hard data now demonstrating the increased and rapidly accelerating Cloud market adoption rates and utilization of Cloud Services in EMEA by resellers and end-users.”
In the first year of the Channel Transformation Alliance, this multi-vendor educational initiative has exceeded its members’ initial milestones, including delivering field-based training to over two thousand resellers. Additionally, over 10,000 unique visitors from within the IT channel have connected to the Channel Transformation Alliance’s multi-language website to read educational content, download practical business tools, and watch training videos. Member companies in the Channel Transformation Alliance have met face-to-face in various European cities and participated in workshop sessions (over 20 such events were organised) to develop program content, align on educational messaging, and respond to reseller feedback.
“The Channel Transformation Alliance is focused on transitioning the reseller business model and providing guidance to the channel on the pragmatic steps to achieve that within a reseller business. The leaders within this Alliance are showing us that they understand the issues that our business is facing,” noted Zaki Farooq, CEO of IT reseller Computrad Europe LTD-UK,“Channel Transformation Alliance is giving us not only a step by step approach that we need to build the managed services business, but also gives us invaluable advice, tools and practical steps on how to get started to make a successful business transformation”
CTA 2.Go aims to build on the successful first year of the Channel Transformation Alliance not only by extending the technology coverage, as outlined above, but also by bringing the initiative to both Spain and Sweden. These two countries join the initial Channel Transformation Alliance coverage in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands. Furthermore, as a result of the Channel Transformation Alliance enhancements, launched on 1st October, the website www.channeltransformation.com will include both a ‘Beginner’ track and an ‘Advanced’ track in order to address resellers in the channel who are at different stages of adoption and business model maturity for Cloud Computing and the technologies mentioned earlier, with certification for those who complete the respective tracks. Over 1000 resellers have actively used this website and our members partner portals to apply the step by step business transformation the Alliance is evangelizing. For them, broadening the technology scope is a logical next phase to help them build a healthy solutions portfolio containing not only cloud solutions but also other advanced and emerging end-to-end solutions. Understanding those new technologies will help the reseller to create own in-house solutions and to identify cross-sell opportunities ultimately helping them to become a successful Cloud Services Broker and Cloud Services Provider. Ingram Micro believes that the ultimate aim of the Channel Transformation Alliance is to help its resellers become trusted advisers and providers to their customers, thanks to the growing vendor portfolio they can access, via the distributor. Ingram Micro not only helps resellers along the path to developing and offering end to end solutions within the Cloud, Managed Services, Virtualisation and Mobile IT markets, but also takes away the potential difficulties in distinguishing between the many solutions available to them. Before any solution enters the distributor’s portfolio, Ingram Micro carries out rigorous due diligence – so resellers can be confident that the solutions they offer their customers are not going to let them down. 
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