Ingram Micro told the assorted throngs at its Cloud Summit that channel partners are not selling enough cloud subscriptions
Ingram Micro Cloud, director of Cloud & Software UK&I Apay Obang-Oyway, said that selling subscriptions was how you move from being a build partner to a scale partner. However many of its partners are still selling one or a few subscriptions to their customers.
“The breath customers make up about 30 percent of the base and they are selling three to six subscriptions but when you look at the cross-sell it’s only 10 percent of their customer base they are cross-selling into, which means 90% of their base they are only selling one subscription, which tends to be Microsoft Office 365”, he added.
Digital transformation customers were looking to drive greater change and were looking to digitise their business, which meant that more solutions and subscriptions needed to be sold to them.
“The opportunity to working with us is to move along the roadmap from build to scaling the business and you are able to get greater customer reach and depth”, said Obang-Oyway.
He added that some of the causes for reticence in those selling low numbers of subscriptions were due to the challenges that some partners were facing transforming their own businesses to sell cloud services.
“In many cases the partner is going through the transition from being a traditional IT player to becoming a services orientated, cloud-first business and that takes time and has its challenges and you have to work your way through that. It is all about being fast and fluid and what we are saying to partners is that you have to have a tunnel vision about that change”, he added. “It is adapt or die without a doubt.”
