Ingram Micro has acquired the Odin Service Automation business from Parallels for an undisclosed amount. The distributor believes this acquisition is a sea change for the company as it gets access to one of the leading cloud management technologies in the marketplace.
Renee Bergeron, Ingram Micro’s resident cloud guru, told CDN that Odin enables the company to realize the vision put forth years ago to build a cloud ecosystem.
“Ingram has really focused on delivering on the promise of cloud technology for big and small. This investment helps us stay on the forefront of that,” she said.
According to Bergeron’s figures, the addressable market globally for services being consumed through the cloud is more than $200 billion. “The numbers are staggering and this new approach to consuming technology is moving at a fast pace. If we want to execute on this promise of value for all businesses then this is key,” she added.
The Odin Service Automation platform has been primarily used in hosting environment for independent software vendors (ISVs), cloud service providers and telecom service providers. The Odin platform provides a single, centralized management console for managing cloud services. This includes delivery of those services along with a white-label option for solution providers.
“This is a feature rich platform for automation. The Odin platform allows partners to use a single portal for managing their entire cloud business. They can place orders for cloud services from different vendors, do provisioning for end customers, invoice customers for those services and manage the cloud subscriptions in an on-going basis,” she said.
Odin has been on the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace for two years already and Bergeron, a Montreal native, said that the relationship with Parallels remains unchanged.
Odin customers can now leverage the commercial relationships Ingram has with more than 1,700 vendors including cloud services vendors. Bergeron said that before this deal Odin had to license the software and establish their own relationships with all the cloud providers. “This has proven to be quite complex and there is a lot of overhead. And, in the cloud it’s about speed. Now Odin customers can take on that speed with the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace,” she said.
The acquisition also comes with 500 employees of which half are cloud software engineers. When the Odin acquisition closes Ingram Micro will sport approximately 400 full-time cloud software engineers and as a whole will have more than 1,200 associates in cloud services.
