Cloud adoption is rapidly becoming a primary focus of businesses everywhere—with an expectation that at least half of all IT spending will shift from traditional to public cloud.
But when today’s success in cloud means preparing for tomorrow’s cloud, you want to make sure you partner with the right team to drive continuous growth.
Shelby Skrhak is joined by
Joyce Hofman, director of cloud growth solutions at
Ingram Micro, to discuss:
Ingram Micro’s inspiration for global cloud growth solutions
- Where the cloud business is heading
- Setting up partners for success
Ingram Micro’s inspiration for global cloud growth solutions
For Joyce, maximizing her own business without mutually growing her partners’ businesses is a loss in the long term. In response to this need, more partner conversations have taken place, getting at the core needs of the market.
Joyce explains, “In our day-to-day conversations with partners and their customers, where they bring us to the conversation many times, we've learned a lot. There's no learning that we've gathered directly from the fields. But the research that we're constantly doing in the markets, with all the partnerships that we have, with the main market analysts out there, I think we've got a great understanding of what the market needs now, but also in the future.”
Through this, they’ve learned how vital a customer-centric culture is in an organization. According to Joyce, “Customers don't want to talk about just vendors and technology, they want to understand what that technology can do for their business, and they want more value from the partnerships.”
Where the cloud business is heading
As more businesses adopt cloud technology, and at such a rapid rate, Joyce categorizes the four kinds of growth solutions—each of which they offer deep specialization in:
- Modern cloud platforms: Focus is on heavy app modernization and on data and insight solutions.
- Seamless security: Most growth is around endpoint security, identity security and security operations.
- Connected workplaces: Improving remote and hybrid work environments for the future of work.
- Business performance: Equipping teams with CRM technology, ERP software and local platforms to drive workforce automation.
Setting up partners for success
In the spirit of helping partners grow their businesses, Joyce explains that success in today’s cloud means preparing for tomorrow’s cloud. One of the ways Joyce does this for partners is analyzing their solution portfolio:
She explains, “Before going into any growth solution, what I think is so valuable is taking the time to understand the strengths and the maturity of each partners’ solution portfolio. And that process of analyzing a departments readiness—that is very important, because that helps us to align the level of support that we need to offer.”
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