Ingram Sets Ambitious Cloud Marketplace Goals for CloudBlue

Ingram Micro via a new independent division aims to be the provider of the online store platform that service providers of all sizes employ to market services and resell software.

CloudBlue is a new division of Ingram Micro dedicated to making the platform Ingram Micro uses underneath its Cloud Marketplace available directly to service providers.

That platform is now being made accessible by hosting it on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform rather than data center managed by Ingram Micro, says Richard Duffy, senior vice president of CloudBlue.

Hosting those marketplaces on Microsoft Azure is part of an effort to make it simpler for services providers of all types to set up their own online marketplaces, says Duffy.

“We’ve removed all the barrier to scale,” says Duffy.

CloudBlue’s software is providing the foundation for the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace and is already being used by 200 service providers, including Sprint, Centurylink, Cogeco, Telefonica, O2, Telenor, Telekom Austria, AmericaMovil, Cobweb, GTI, Copaco, PCM, and Telstra. Duffy says that as an independent division CloudBlue expects to leverage the Microsoft Azure cloud to significantly increase that base. Ingram Micro already has 2.5 million seats of software sold through its marketplace or third-party marketplaces based on its platform, says Duffy.

At the core of CloudBlue is a set of proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable service providers to automate everything from subscription billing to renewals, says Duffy. Rather than reinvent all that infrastructure on their own, CloudBlue is betting most service providers would rather leverage of cloud service. Those APIs enable Ingram Micro to pre-integrated software from Microsoft, Dropbox, DocuSign, IBM, Cisco, Symantec and others directly into the CodeBlue platform.

Based on an Odin cloud platform that Ingram Micro originally licensed and then acquire from Parallels, it’s not clear just yet how much autonomy an independent division of the now private Ingram Micro might have or whether Ingram Micro will even decide to keep CloudBlue. But what is clear is that the way software is sold and consumed in the cloud will never be the same again regardless of who builds the underlying marketplace.