Cloud growth in Australia is currently experiencing a promising upward tick. Gartner reports that end-user spending on public cloud services alone will grow to A$18.7 billion by 2022, up more than 30 per cent from last year. Though software-as-a-service (SaaS) accounts for nearly half of the total cloud market in Australia, the fastest growing segments are platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

As Australian cloud markets grow, Ingram Micro Cloud’s reseller partners need to build deeper, holistic engagement by gaining more insights into their business model. To do so, they must have the tools, expertise and flexibility to offer their solutions at scale while also driving customer success.

At Ingram Micro Cloud Australia, our core business objective is to help local partners sustain and grow their businesses. Let's take a closer look at how Ingram Micro Cloud can help you exceed your customers' expectations, increase profit margins and grow your market share. The "5 P's" of customer success in the cloud include people, portfolio, platform, programs and partner success. Let's explore.

1. People: The power of complementary skills

An experienced and knowledgeable team is essential to any successful cloud customer strategy. This includes everything from IT through to sales and marketing, but building an end-to-end team in-house isn’t so straightforward. Finding the correct skills matrix in a restricted labour market is a steep challenge that requires investment of time and resources to match increased competition for the best talent. The Tech Council of Australia predicts that Australia will need one million workers in tech jobs by 2025, which means that around 260,000 new workers will need to enter the Australian tech industry during this period to meet demand from companies.

For these very reasons, building a collaborative network and relying on external expertise is essential. Ingram Micro Cloud has an Australian-based, dedicated team of more than 70 cloud experts with extensive knowledge and experience in the cloud ecosystem. We'll show you proven ways to improve your practice in sales, marketing, vendor management, business development and more.

Our dedicated, customer success-focused team provides a tried-and-tested structure that can support your cloud services. Our primary mission is to help all authorised partners grow their cloud revenue by developing business plans, data and best practice analyses tailored to their industry, regional characteristics, and specific needs.

2. Portfolio: A curated collection of the most popular solutions

Global enterprises need global solutions. That's why you'll find a comprehensive offering of more than 200 global cloud solutions at Ingram Micro Cloud for selling, re-selling, and up-selling services to your customers. In addition to major players like AWS, Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Fortinet and Cisco, our portfolio also includes homegrown solutions from Australian providers like Switch Connect, Dubber, and CT4.

Global and local IT solutions are key to a successful customer success strategy. Customers are looking for a partner that can proactively identify and address their unique needs and provide an ongoing support system for new business eventualities that will undoubtedly arise in the future.

Taking customer success and the Ingram Micro Cloud portfolio further, the company is continuously expanding its availability of hybrid solutions, aiming to provide the best of both private and public, on-premise and off-premise, cloud offerings.

To help you excel in these areas, our customer success managers can advise on business transformation applications, customer retention and growth on a global scale. These on-demand cloud solutions enable you to solve your customers' problems, reduce capital costs, improve business performance, and overcome organisational challenges.

3. Platform: An automated cloud marketplace platform to make more connections

The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace is a leading solution that lets you start selling new cloud services immediately and develop a one-stop shop for your customers with a user-friendly, self-service platform. Vendors and products are easily accessible to let partners create winning solution bundles. In addition, interested partners can opt to use a white-labelled marketplace service to take advantage of marketplace-as-a-service models. The marketplace platform provides valuable vendor insights and API integrations for customer relationship management, professional services automation, e-commerce, billing systems and more.

A key focus of our technology efforts on the platform for our partners is business intelligence. We track business between baselines and recurring baselines. In addition, the platform collects and analyses all telemetry data and provides actionable information to make crucial decisions quickly.  Finally, your assigned Platform Success Manager will ensure that you can understand, adopt and fully leverage Ingram Micro Cloud’s technology.

4. Programs: Help your business grow with partner training

Ingram Micro Cloud continually produces and executes a comprehensive range of channel programs supporting your business. For example, Ingram Micro Cloud has ramped up its Australian cyber security offerings for partners via a new unit dubbed the ‘Cybersecurity Practice Builder.’

Further programs we offer are the CloudMovers Program, Ingram Micro Activate, Partner Marketing Services, and the Go to Market Hub.

Through our skills and training programs, we invest in a culture that promotes the right use of technology and people skills for continuous value creation, promoting business depth and technical credibility. This is achieved by helping all partners develop their own set of business KPIs that can be measured, evaluated and optimised continuously.

5. Partner Success: We invest deeply to improve and streamline your experience

What does true partner success mean to us? In short, we believe that it requires a continuous, proactive and tailored approach that focuses on our partners' short- and long-term success. We leverage partners’ customer success by developing a defined strategy and a proactive analysis of potential obstacles and how to overcome them.

Especially in recurring revenue markets related to the as-a-service model, companies often experience new requirements for customer success. Large organisations often lack personal contact, which is essential to customer retention. Without the right people, processes and technology, the customer experience falls by the wayside.

That's why Ingram Micro Cloud Australia has wholly redesigned its customer care operations by way of:

• Significantly improved the customer experience
• A dedicated team handles the onboarding of new customers and partners
• Specialised teams take care of specific customer groups based on the primary technology focus of those customers.

In addition, our dedicated customer success team in Australia provides a single point of contact for cloud partners, helping them drive cloud profitability. Leveraging the expertise and skills of our IaaS and SaaS teams, we provide you with the sales and technical resources to reach customers effectively. In doing so, we focus on solving tactical problems for partners and end customers related to their existing business.

Why Ingram Micro Cloud Australia?

Australian solutions for Australian partners are an essential factor to the success of every player in this market. We focus on customised and credible consulting, technology, and skills to help you optimise the customer lifecycle and positively impact efficiency, scalability and customer success. By tailoring our solutions and support to each partner, we can help achieve controlled client retention and business growth results.

Why is the success of our partners so crucial to us? The answer is simple: when our partners gain a profitable and stable business, this enables rapid and joint growth.

Would you like to learn more about achieving customer success? Check out this podcast episode of Kiss my SaaS.