Having witnessed the soaring demand for cloud computing and
eagerness to transform into cloud infrastructure,
Ingram Micro Inc.
(
IM
) is increasing focus on cloud offerings. This week, we noticed
some new developments within Ingram's portfolio.
In its recently held Cloud Summit, an annual partner program,
Ingram's North America Services Division announced a bunch of new
cloud-based product and service offerings. With these new products,
Ingram's Cloud Marketplace (a one-stop shop for cloud offerings
from various vendors) can now offer more than 100 solutions from 40
various technology vendors across North America. The new products
and services will be made available to all channel partners within
a month. The offerings include those from tech heavy-weights
Amazon.com Inc.
(
AMZN
) and
Salesforce.com Inc.
(
CRM
).
The addition of Amazon.com's Web-services will be beneficial for
Ingram, since the online retailer, with its strong base in North
America, provides access to technology infrastructure that
developers can use to enable various types of virtual
businesses.
Amazon will provide Ingram's customers with two services, namely
Amazon Simple Storage Service and AWS Storage Gateway. These two
services are expected to provide customers with fast, cheap and
secured data storage and retrieval.
On the other hand, Ingram will resell Salesforce.com's Force.com
platform. This platform-as-a-service helps in the development of
multi-tenant applications to be run on servers.
Ingram is one of the biggest players in the IT distribution
business. The company's geographical diversity makes it a logical
choice for manufacturers seeking to increase international
exposure. The channel partners also get exposure to various
technology providers' offerings under one roof. Moreover, Ingram's
continuous product enhancement and partner addition activities will
keep it ahead of peers such as
Avnet Inc.
(
AVT
),
Arrow Electronics Inc.
(
ARW
) and
Tech Data Corp.
(
TECD
).
We find Ingram Micro's first quarter results impressive as the
bottom line was well ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate. The
company has provided a positive but cautious second quarter
guidance. But we believe that support from its Australian venture
and the improving IT spending trend will help Ingram post better
results ahead.
We remain fairly optimistic about Ingram Micro's strategic
relationship with network giant
Juniper Networks Inc.
(
JNPR
), as well as tech giants such as
Hewlett-Packard Company
(
HPQ
),
IBM Corp.
(
IBM
) and
Microsoft Corp.
(
MSFT
).
The company's growing SMB exposure and improving profitability
is encouraging, but its significant European exposure and debt
burden are concerns.
Currently, Ingram Micro has a Zacks #3 Rank, implying a
short-term Hold rating.
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