Your business challenges are unique and so are your relationships with public cloud vendors. In my previous blog, I called out what those needs are and the challenges you face when meeting them. If you don’t have the right resources to address them, these challenges become blockers to your business growth.

The Ingram Micro Cloud Activate program can help you overcome these obstacles to success. These obstacles fall into three core areas. Now you can utilize Activate to overcome these challenges and ensure your cloud business grows and thrives.

Understand your challenges

1. Build: While vendors like you are adapting to changing customer demands, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are also evolving their platforms by introducing new functionality—driven by new approaches to build and solve your technical and business problems.
   But it’s challenging to keep up with emerging technologies and methodologies while designing and architecting your solutions according to best practices. Whether you have a legacy application and are still on-premises or have natively built-in cloud, accessing the right guidance is critical to efficiently manage modernization or build your applications on public cloud platforms.
2. Go-to-Market: Most vendors constantly seek new and more effective ways to reduce customer acquisition costs, increase brand awareness and expand product reach in their target markets. But the budget and resources required to scale marketing campaigns and land new logos often become barriers to growth.
   As an entrepreneur, you likely know that successful marketing relies on sales grit, word of mouth and referrals you receive from existing clients. While this is an effective process for a scrappy startup, it can be slow and difficult to scale as you continue to grow.
3. Sell: Building, accelerating and increasing revenue is always top of mind for SaaS business owners. Software sales cycles can be long and sometimes costly; finding the right customer at the right time is one of the most challenging tasks of a growing company.

Uncovering new ways to accelerate your pipeline is tough when you’re still a growing company. One key way to speed up is by scaling your sales organization with talented and knowledgeable salespeople, but that can be challenging and cause you to lose sleep at night. So, it’s important and perfectly okay for you to work with the team you have in place and build repeatable processes to help scale your sales.

Here’s where the right distributor comes in

You need a distributor that has the breadth of resources to help you on your journey. Ingram Micro Cloud, as a leading ISV solution distributor, offers comprehensive services such as Activate that propel your business past technology and business challenges. All public cloud vendors are fully aware of the above challenges that you deal with as an ISV. To better support your business, they’ve created and designed programs to address your technical and business needs. That way you can build your solution on their platform easier, faster and more cost-efficiently.

If you’re a managed ISV partner with one of the public cloud vendors’ partner teams, then you’re likely familiar with existing ISV parent programs, and how to use and leverage those programs effectively. But if you’re not a managed partner, or you’re managed and not aware of any relevant partner programs, you’re not alone.

Typically, most ISVs are either not aware of these partner programs or don’t meet the requirements to enroll. This is why only smaller groups of (usually global or more strategic) ISVs can leverage the numerous benefits and resources available from public cloud vendors.

To fill the gaps and service ISV partners properly and to ensure ISV partners have all the support they need—especially early in their cloud journey—public cloud vendors have started turning to the channel to nurture their relationships with ISVs and scale the delivery of support to ISV communities.

For you, as an ISV, working with a distributor with the depth and breadth of Ingram Micro Cloud means that while your direct business or technical relationships with your public cloud vendor will be replaced, you’ll still be able to access extra technical and business support through distribution—on top of what you’ve already received from your vendors.

Your software business is our #1 priority

Activate is a comprehensive enablement program Ingram Micro Cloud created to support ISVs through every stage of digital transformation. As an ISV in our program, you’ll gain access to a wide range of technical and business services. These program benefits are accessible to all ISVs that want to work with public cloud vendors through Ingram Micro Cloud. Activate follows a proven framework to guide you through key growth stages, providing needed support through relevant, technical, marketing and business services.

Activate will help you build well-architected solutions more easily and rapidly—based on best practices—and offer new and more effective ways to go to market with public cloud vendors. It also delivers opportunities in the channel to partner with a diverse group of IT service providers and software vendors to grow and scale your business.

Next, let’s look at a high-level overview of our approach to the Activate program. Activate groups your ISV based on your maturity in cloud with the following pillars to support you throughout your journey:

Build on public cloud: The Activate program starts by focusing on your technical needs to build solutions with public cloud vendors. Ingram Micro Cloud has an in-house professional services team and has partnered with top global solution and service providers to give you comprehensive services that help you Cloudify, PaaSify or SaaSify your cloud applications.

Whether you’re on-prem or already in cloud, you can partner with Ingram Micro Cloud and leverage the services Activate offers to build a more successful cloud practice.

Grow with distributors: Once you’re fully operational and functional in cloud, Activate provides services that help you define marketing activities and generate more demand for your products.

Plus, it enables you to leverage available marketing funds from public cloud vendors to help grow your business. Activate also delivers back-office support for billing, help desk and more that let you focus on sales and marketing to gain maximum exposure for your product.

Scale with distributors: You can scale your sales and business by publishing your solutions on public cloud or Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplaces. Activate helps you publish your solution on your own or, if you need hands-on assistance, offers services and solutions that help you publish your solution in different marketplaces by leveraging our CloudBlue platform.

Activate also provides you clear guidance and direction to meet all the requirements to co-sell with public cloud vendors. This helps you collaborate with a public cloud customer account team, get in front of the right enterprise public cloud customers, and close opportunities in a co-sell motion.

Innovate continuously: Cloud services keep evolving and there are new technologies such as serverless computing, containerization managed services, IoT and AI/ML that can help you adapt to market needs with agility and empower your customers to transform their businesses.
We provide a unique IoT ecosystem that lets you leverage the latest data and AI technologies while also introducing you to an ecosystem that helps you scale new and innovative solutions.

Take the first step

Ingram Micro Cloud’s Activate program provides you with the valuable resources and expertise required to help you build well-designed cloud solutions—and grow your cloud business—through our massive global footprint.

Our unique program fills in the holes of your relationship with public cloud vendors and expands on some of the existing benefits you get from them—all to take your business partnership to the next level. To take the first step, sign up for our free Activate program.