Credit: Ingram Micro
Ingram Micro’s CloudBlue division has launched its vendor management platform called Connect, as a standalone product for the first time in Asia Pacific and Japan.
During his address to attendees at Ingram Micro One in Singapore, CloudBlue director of solution consulting and professional services, YiLun Miao, said the standalone platform fills a gap in the market around the vendor buying component for service providers, and can be white labelled to take to market for vendor procurement capabilities.
Connect digitises the end-to-end lifecycle of new products and services including fulfilment, contracting, catalogue management and go-to-market.
“The idea behind separating Connect from CloudBlue is so service providers can have flexibility and choice,” he said. “We’re agnostic and we want to empower the subscription economy and transactions. It’s not limiting nor forcing you consume an entire vendor stack. You can on-board any type of service or vendors that you want to distribute to your customers.”
Miao said the distributor has previously soft launched Connect as a module within CloudBlue.
“You’re not leveraging a beta or version one product. Our current Connect platform is already on to version 17 of our code, and has been proven inside some of the largest organisations already,” he said.
The new product launch comes as CloudBlue experienced a successful 2018, Miao said, featuring more than 200 pre-integrated services, recording 27 million subscriptions with more than 80,000 resellers using the platform.
“Having this ecosystem further enforces the value proposition. We’ve seen what it takes to progress and breed success in this cloud business, ” he said.
“Cloud Blue aims to simplify vendor integration, and vendors are also given access to a whole stack of service providers through a single integration on to the CloudBlue platform.”
Miao said it was also continuing to grow with establishing new partnerships. In particular to A/NZ CloudBlue recently on-boarded partners such as iiNet, OzHosting, Telstra, Datacom and NZ-based Umbrellar.
In July, CloudBlue attracted a raft of new customers following an expanded in-market alliance with Microsoft including Colt, Office Depot, T-Mobile and Zones, joining existing agreements in place with Telstra, StarHub and Telefonica among others.
Unveiled in May 2018, the independent software division is designed to help service providers build, scale and monetise cloud and digital services.
Julia Talevski attended Ingram Micro One APAC 2019 in Singapore as a guest of Ingram Micro.
