CloudBlue, an Ingram Micro business, enables service providers to accelerate time to market, while monetizing and automating operations for “anything as a service” through its unique, cloud-native, carrier-grade, digital cloud commerce platform. The platform, powered by Microsoft Azure, supports a wide-ranging group of businesses including telecoms, national and multi-national service providers, large managed service providers managed service providers, IT resellers, e-tailers, direct market resellers, distributors, and independent software vendors (ISV).

Modular, scalable, and extensible, CloudBlue provides end-to-end delivery of services, including onboarding, automation, provisioning, aggregation, distribution and go-to-market. CloudBlue also accelerates how partners adapt, compete, and grow in the as-a-service economy.

Anything as a service

CloudBlue has over 1,500 employees in more than 68 countries. It powers more than 200 of the world’s largest cloud marketplaces, enables over 80,000 global resellers, and manages more than 30 million enterprise cloud subscriptions.

The ability to easily scale services as needed is business-critical for CloudBlue to operate a highly-available commerce platform for their vast ecosystem of cloud providers. CloudBlue connects Microsoft to Ingram Micro Cloud’s entire global reseller community and helps Microsoft efficiently reach small midsized businesses (SMBs) on a worldwide scale. In addition, CloudBlue provides access to its established infrastructure of cost-effective order management, credit management, and order delivery.

Ingram Micro is more than just a distributor–it is a technology innovator, launching the annual Comet Competition to discover talented B2B ISV startups. Ingram Micro is also a marketing engine that targets and supports SMBs through seminars and events to integrated digital and print campaigns, and enables resellers to target SMBs with its Sales and Marketing Hub. A solid partnership with Ingram Micro can open doors to unrivaled channel exposure.

Ingram Micro enables Microsoft to focus on what it does best, including research and development, while providing the partnership support to take care of everything else.

At its core is CloudBlue’s commitment to ensure data privacy for all customers. A traditional data center setup—requiring constant maintenance and upkeep—is cumbersome, limiting, and cost prohibitive as more customers and countries adopt compliance policies.

The cloud is key

To enable the full capabilities of the CloudBlue Commerce platform and ensure its customers grow in the as-a-service economy, CloudBlue launched a solution that solved for the time and cost-intensive nature of the traditional rack and stack.

Service providers are looking to capitalize and grow their cloud businesses, but many don’t have the capabilities and can experience challenges scaling their computing needs to meet market and customer demands. This is why CloudBlue launched its cloud commerce platform on Azure, creating a scalable, simplified, cloud-native solution for its customers.

Without the cloud power behind Azure, significant CapEx and OpEx investments would be required by the customer. These extra investments would lead to underutilization of multiple systems as demand fluctuates. In addition, deploying traditional infrastructure to support high availability and best-practice security is costly to setup and maintain.

Powered by Azure, CloudBlue enables partners to successfully launch a true cloud commerce platform that offers the right cloud solutions and the right technology to rapidly scale. Customers have the flexibility to bundle, up-sell, and cross-sell their own cloud services, managed services, and even hardware in a one-stop commerce and fulfillment experience.

Business accelerated

By partnering with Microsoft and leveraging Azure, CloudBlue has been able to free itself from the data center limitations to provide unlimited, on-demand scalability anywhere in the world. Additionally, CloudBlue can now take advantage of many new capabilities such as SQL on Demand and its enhanced security feature set to deliver a more flexible, secure, and hyper-scalable platform.

Leveraging Azure Application Services and Functions in their internal app development, as well as Azure API services and Azure SQL, CloudBlue has developed a platform that essentially delivers a workforce multiplier so one engineer can do the work of five. This provides significantly more value to CloudBlue customers. The Azure platform provides Ingram Micro with the ability to focus on the CloudBlue platform development and Cloud Marketplace operations, rather than on infrastructure. Removing infrastructure obligations frees up critical capital, time, and resources that can be refocused to drive customer business outcomes.

CloudBlue customers are provided with a best-of-breed, turnkey, digital commerce platform backed by an industry-leading infrastructure as a service that provides trusted reliability, scalability, and security. Customers can easily launch SaaS, IaaS, and IoT services. In addition, customers can add their own vendors and value-add services for simplified selling, enabling them the flexibility to bundle, up-sell, and cross-sell their own cloud services, managed services, and even hardware in a one-stop commerce and fulfillment experience.