The deal covers Ingram Micro in the U.S. only, but the companies are working on an agreement with Ingram Micro Canada as well.
Larissa Crandall, Gigamon’s Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Alliances
Networking visibility vendor Gigamon has made a move to strengthen their cloud partner ecosystem by signing on Ingram Micro as a distributor in the U.S. The move is intended to leverage Ingram’s cloud presence, as well as Ingram’s strong relationship with Cisco, as the Gigamon ThreatINSIGHT offering has a key strategic integration with the Cisco SecureX Platform.
The Ingram Micro deal complements Gigamon’s existing relationship with Arrow Electronics in the U.S., and will replace Gigamon’s relationship with French-headquartered Exclusive. Gigamon had an earlier relationship with Westcon/Synnex in the U.S. which is no longer extant
Gigamon sees the move to Ingram as a way to expand their business significantly,
“This is not a share shift,” said Larissa Crandall, Gigamon’s Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Alliances. “It’s to expand our MSP, SLED, service provider and enterprise business. Gigamon’s core solution is first within the market, and is having incredible growth that will grow further by being hooked into the larger system that Ingram has. I’ve worked with them before, and they fit very well with our cloud security and networking.”
Crandall emphasized that the Ingram relationship is especially focused on the cloud.
“We are looking to the Ingram Cloud Marketplace to scale our ThreatInsight NDR [Network Detection and Response] products,” she said. “ThreatInsight is part of the Cisco SecureX platform. Ingram’s strong Cisco connection will let us tap into that further.”
This Ingram deal is only for the U.S., but Crandall said that they are negotiating a separate agreement with Ingram Micro Canada. Currently, Gigamon’s Canadian distribution is limited to Arrow.
“The Ingram Micro agreement will apply to Canada in due course,” she stated.
Gigamon also intends to use Ingram to make tools the vendor has developed more broadly available to partners.
“We developed an ROI value calculator vetted by a third party, that partners can use as an assessment tool with prospects,” Crandall noted. “We have also created demand generation market acceleration bundles that partners can get with MDF, and Ingram will also be sharing those.”
Crandall also indicated that Gigamon’s strategy around recruiting Ingram partners would have a strong 5G focus.
“5G, on the horizon, is the biggest transformative change our generation will see, and it has a lot of data attached to it,” she said. “We will be putting our recruitment strategy with Ingram around that. For data in motion, 5G is a huge accelerator.
Distribution is critical to Gigamon’s Go-to-Market strategy, which has a large number of partners, who are served entirely through two-tier distribution. They have implemented a 100% model for new sales, and the 5% or so of direct business consists of legacy customers.
“We continue on our steady channel course,” Crandall said. “For everything that comes in, we bring in a partner at stage two of the opportunity, and in every area.”
Gigamon now has close to 2800 partners.
“We recruit constantly, but we are selective,” Crandall stated. “We have many transactional partners but are most dedicated ones are aligned to our core strategic partners, like Nutanix, VMware, Cisco, Fireeye, and Riverbed. We are also seeing interest from smaller, emerging IoT ecosystem vendors, who want to be part of our fabric.”
Crandall also noted that Gigamon recently revamped their training and enablement for partners to take advantage of the general move of such activities online.
“We did a complete overhaul of our certification program and increased the number of certs by 4x,” she said. “You get a wider reach online. We had 200 people show up for a training session with no incentives being given. We never would never have gotten that kind of response, and its much more efficient than a channel account manager travelling to train 200 sellers.”
