(Pictured above: Ingram Micro’s Renee Bergeron on stage at Ingram Micro Cloud Summit X, March 13.)

INGRAM MICRO CLOUD SUMMIT — To help ISVs and partners boost their cloud business and progress along its “Cloud Awesomeness Roadmap,” Ingram Micro on Wednesday announced several new features for its Cloud Marketplace.

Addressing partners at Wednesday’s Ingram Micro Cloud Summit X, keynote session, Renee Bergeron, senior vice president, global cloud channel, talked about those enhancements, but more importantly, provided an update on partner momentum in their cloud journey.

Ingram Micro’s Renee Bergeron

“At Cloud Summit last year, I introduced the Cloud Awesomeness Roadmap, which was developed to provide our partners with a framework and set of best practices to accelerate their cloud business,” she said. “In the last year, it’s developed a life of its own.”

One year ago, Ingram Micro counted 45,000 partners somewhere along their journey on the Cloud Awesomeness Roadmap. Today, there are 55,000.

Here’s what 12 months of “Roadmap” progress looks like for partners along the four stages — build, breadth, depth, and scale.

Build partners sell a few cloud offers in a reactive and opportunistic way. Ordering, provisioning and invoicing is done manually. These partners are in learning mode, figuring out ROI in building a cloud practice.

“We find the bulk of our partners at the build stage,” said Bergeron.

She cited research from The 2112 Group: Nearly one-half (47 percent) of partners have no business plan, and another 56 percent don’t have a sales plan or sales goal.

“It’s not a problem to be in the build stage as long as it’s a transitional stage for you and so long as you have a plan to get to the next stage. But being a chronic build partner is not a strategy,” said Bergeron.

Breadth partners have a business plan and distinguish themselves from build partners in two ways: They’re rapidly and proactively growing their subscription base, and they’ve automated their back office using a cloud commerce platform.

Depth partners sell 10 or more cloud offers, with complexity of the solutions they take to market being a differentiator. This includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

“These partners want to become end-to-end providers for their customers, and the only way to achieve this is to go into the data center,” said Bergeron.

Gartner predicts that the IaaS market will reach $40 billion this year — up 28 percent from 2018. It’s the fastest growing cloud segment.

Scale partners comprise an elite group — just 2 percent today, up from 1 percent last year. They provide 10 or more cloud offers and IaaS. Bergeron said they adopt three strategies: outsourced catalog, digital marketing and a digital customer experience (customer self-service).

When Ingram Micro launched the Cloud Awesomeness Roadmap, 90 percent of partners were in the first two stages, build and breadth. Since that time, there are another 10,000 partners on this journey and Bergeron reports growth across the board.

The largest growth was the two middle stages – breadth and depth – where partners grew from 30 percent to 40 percent, and 9 to 14 percent, respectively.

“This was at the expense of build partners, who went from 60 percent to 54 percent,” Bergeron said.

There was a slight improvement among scale partners, moving the needle from 1 percent to 2 percent.

Bergeron urged partners to continue their journey on the Cloud Awesomeness Roadmap via …

… self-assessment, using the framework to inform their companies’ cloud strategies and to guide investments; looking at their companies’ investments in digitization in sales, marketing and service delivery; and turning to Ingram Micro for help with that digitization.

Here’s a closer look at the new Cloud Marketplace features: