Ingram Micro Adds IBM's SoftLayer to Cloud Marketplace

Ingram Micro just made automating the deployment of a cloud service a reality for its customers with the addition of IBM's SoftLayer to its Cloud Marketplace, as reported by our sister site, Talkin' Cloud. The new offering allows access to both virtual and bare-metal servers.

The enhancement by Ingram Micro illustrates a commitment to building its marketplace, which makes it possible to automate the acquisition and provisioning of cloud services, and fortifies its long-standing partnership with Big Blue.

"IBM Cloud's SoftLayer is a major player in IaaS, an area where competition is intensifying, quickly narrowing and growing fast," Darren Bibby, vice president of channels and alliances research at IDC, told Marketwatch.com in a recent article. "IDC expects 36 percent growth in 2015 in IaaS, which makes it an excellent fit for the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace."

Another benefit of this latest venture is that Ingram Micro can tap into IBM's in-country compliance efforts, an extremely important aspect considering the huge array of public and private clients in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, government, financial and legal organizations. As a result, the company's channel partners can now provide a secure, resilient, and scalable platform to its regional customers for placing sensitive data in the cloud.

The Ingram Cloud Marketplace is designed to provide a single portal through which solution providers can fully automate everything from provisioning those services to billing. Its portfolio of solutions covers all major business categories including: infrastructure, security, communication and collaboration, business applications and platform, and cloud management services.

After purchasing the SoftLayer brand in 2013, IBM launched its own cloud marketplace the following year and, like Ingram Micro, has invested serious bankroll in cloud computing. How serious? It's plunked down more than $1.2 billion in a global data center expansion for SoftLayer, while another $1 billion is going toward Blue PaaS. Meanwhile, the company has spent over $7 billion in 17 acquisitions.

Read the full report on Talkin' Cloud