Ingram’s CloudBlue launches platform to streamline go-to-market
CloudBlue, an Ingram Micro business, today announced the global launch of CloudBlue Connect, an omni-product platform aimed at helping vendors and service providers expand their reach and decrease time to market with minimal overhead costs.
The CloudBlue Connect platform is capable of helping a company use only one system to manage its go-to-market channels – direct and indirect – supporting both traditional and recurring digital products and services.
Furthermore, the platform automates many of the time-intensive tasks of managing a go-to-market channel, including contract management, maintaining product information, fulfilment, usage management and subscription services.
"Vendors and service providers have long been struggling to manage multiple integrations for their partnership and channel programmes and have been forced to invest a huge amount of resources in development and maintenance," says CloudBlue vice president Tarik Faouzi.
"CloudBlue Connect alleviates these issues, freeing up vendors to focus on what they do best – innovate – while service providers are better-enabled to deliver more value to their customers.
CloudBlue Connect is a single platform that centralises relationships and standardises integrations with the entire partner base through RESTful APIs.
It runs 24/7 with automated processes to support the recurring revenue business of vendors and service providers across the globe.
In addition, this commerce-agnostic platform can integrate with a company's own or any third-party commerce system, which obviously includes the CloudBlue Commerce platform.
Key benefits include:
Unified channel management
CloudBlue Connect centralises a business' fulfilment operations with its partners and reduces integrations development and maintenance efforts to a single system.
Increased scalability
Businesses can reduce the time and resources spent on establishing an indirect channel presence and managing channel fulfilment requests with innovative go-to-market automation and a hyperscale platform, allowing them to build a scalable business.
Exponentially broadened reach
Vendors and other IP creators can boost their connections in any market around the globe in less time by tapping into CloudBlue Connect's ecosystem of more than 200 service providers and a potential reach of more than 2 billion end customers.
Fast-tracked time to market
By simplifying and streamlining your multichannel fulfilment, businesses can cut down on back-office operations and get to market faster.
Reduction of channel maintenance costs
The total cost of ownership to build and manage integrations with multiple channel partners can be cut by upwards of $2 million over three years, according to a study by Forrester.
In addition to supporting independent software vendors (ISVs), CloudBlue Connect's capabilities extend to other vendors, including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and other partners looking to digitise and monetise their own IP.
These vendors can use CloudBlue Connect as a channel enablement engine to go to market with their own IP services and products, expanding into any business or consumer markets at low costs.
On the downstream side of the platform, service providers can start transacting with vendors in CloudBlue Connect or integrate new vendors with a few clicks.
This allows for additional bundling and cross-selling opportunities with their customers, creating stickiness and reducing churn.
The versatility of CloudBlue Connect allows service providers to more closely define anything as a service for any product they have now or anything they dream up in the future.
Service providers can also white-label Connect as their onboarding platform to onboard any additional vendors.
"CloudBlue Connect is the perfect companion for the CloudBlue Commerce platform, along with Go-to-Market Automator, and allows vendors and service providers to enable the end-to-end management of their subscription business," Faouzi adds.
