Ingram Micro’s Thomas Bamrick said the convergence of many markets gives Ingram Micro the opportunity to provide expertise in areas that could result in the company’s growth.
Officials at information technology distributor Ingram Micro in Amherst say the company is poised to grow in two areas: cloud computing and mobile services. Growth at Ingram Micro would mean adding to the billions in revenues it already generates, and hiring dozens more at the company’s U.S. operations center on Wehrle Drive.
That facility – Ingram Micro’s largest worldwide campus-based workforce – already generates 30 percent of the company’s $36.3 billion in annual revenues, and has hired more than 150 workers in the last 12 months. As an information technology distributor, Ingram Micro takes products from companies such as Dell, Apple and IBM and resells them to customers. To get them to end users, they work with a 150,000-member worldwide network of value added resellers for whom they manage services such as customer service, credit management, order entry, tech support, global sales and marketing. Ingram Micro distributes products to big box retailers Best Buy, Office Max and Staples. The company also provides tech services including data centers, help desk and disaster recovery, to name a few. Looking forward, the company is focusing on cloud computing, a service that allows clients to access files and applications over the Internet.
“The cloud is going to be part of our growth in the future,” said Thomas Bamrick, vice president of global sales and managing director of the Amherst campus. “It’s one of our core strategies for incremental growth, and has been getting traction quarter over quarter.”
To support growth in cloud computing, senior director of channel marketing John Fago said the company has around 50 employees dedicated to the initiative. They talk with resellers, which can be small one- person tech shops to larger ones that sell to Fortune 1000 companies.
Fago said Ingram Micro has aggregated cloud solutions into one place, the way Apple does with iTunes for music, movies, videos and podcasts. Added Bamrick, “Where iTunes aggregates all those things, consumers can go to one spot.” Likewise, at Ingram Micro, that one spot is the cloud, where resellers can manage services for clients such as hosted email, disaster recovery and backup. Ingram Micro spokeswoman Geniffer Biggs said that when the company first launched its cloud offering, customers weren’t sure how to pick the best services being offered, sold and hosted by various companies.
“As Ingram Micro became comfortable with vendors, they were added to the list,” Biggs said.
As an example, on May 7, Ingram Micro’s cloud website listed 48 services from various vendors with whom a reseller could partner to provide hosted servers, backup, service desk, disaster recovery and more. “Ingram Micro is trying to be a facilitator of cloud services, ‘a cloud aggregator,’ to offer small solution providers who can not build their own solutions, a set of services to sell,” said David Stinner, who runs US itek Inc. Stinner doesn’t buy cloud solutions from Ingram Micro. He instead prefers a model where there isn’t an extra layer between his clients and their data.
“I usually engineer the same solutions that Ingram Micro offers with the same Microsoft software and the like, put it in my data center and then control all the technology,” Stinner said.
Mobility, and services related to it.
Besides the cloud, the other growth area is mobility. “As more of the workplace goes mobile, as we adopt more laptop and tablet-based technologies, they’ll need support in these areas,” Fago said.
Once a company buys devices, they need to be activated and they need service, which Ingram Micro can provide. “With more mobile people, you have an increased emphasis on secure mobile data transactions,” he said. “We can see a convergence of mobile and security as a growth area. To support those using tablets and mobile phones to run businesses, Fago said Ingram Micro looks to add to the Amherst operation.
Specifically, they look for those with experience in the mobile industry or data centers, as examples, “so that we can stay close to what’s important in those environments.” And although Ingram Micro had hired more than 150 in the last 12 months, bringing the workforce to 1,418, there’s a need to bring in even more. As of May 9, they were looking to fill 55 positions in Amherst.
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