Ali Baghdadi urges partners to maximise cloud prospects

Ali Baghdadi, SVP and Chief Executive, Middle East, Turkey & Africa, Ingram Micro, discusses the company’s recent initiatives in the cloud business.

Ingram Micro’s primary focus at the 35th edition of GITEX Technology Week was on cloud solutions and related services.

Over the last several months, the regional distributor has invested significantly in building its cloud business.

The firm has announced the launch of its cloud platform, Ingram Micro Cloud marketplace, which enables channel partners to maximise prospects in the cloud space. According to the company, it is a vendor to user platform, where the user can log in and buy what he needs as a cloud service, irrespective of if it is server, power, storage or applications. The distributor aims to introduce it in the region by early 2016.

Ali Baghdadi, SVP & Chief Executive, Middle East, Turkey & Africa, Ingram Micro, says, “All these services are now available on the Ingram Micro Cloud and can be managed by the reseller or the distributor on behalf of the reseller or the end-user himself; and we can bundle services along with that.”

The distributor has also launched a comprehensive range of education initiatives such as Cloud University and certifications.

Baghdadi says partners have a huge opportunity in the cloud space.

“There are so many different aspects for partners, and we have a whole range of education programmes to complement these opportunities. We have to entice and educate them on the benefits of undertaking cloud offerings. Partners need to join our Cloud University to learn more on how to sell a cloud solution and retain customer loyalty.”

The regional distributor is one of the few global players who have been appointed by Microsoft for its Cloud Service Provider (CSP) programme

“We are now a Microsoft CSP for the Gulf and Middle East region. We are growing our CSP programme with Microsoft in November. We are excited about that as it gives us the ability to enable our partners to start introducing new solutions.”

Over the next few months, Microsoft CSP is going to be the distributor’s main play.

“We are setting up in every single country what we call the console, which will allow us to push and serve the customers and partners, we are doing this in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and UAE. It will be rolled out to the whole region.

“We have nearly 70 vendors plugged into our cloud offerings. We are doubling in size almost every year and we are growing by over 30 percent,” adds Baghdadi.