Ingram Micro To Buy Odin Service Automation Platform
Ingram Micro is buying the Odin Service Automation platform from Parallels Holdings Ltd. in a deal announced Wednesday that will shake up the cloud services provider market.
Distribution giant Ingram Micro is one of the most important players in the emerging cloud services provider market, including Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. In Microsoft's strategic CSP model, Ingram is one of the handful of 2-Tier distributors that serve as intermediaries for cloud service subscriptions between Microsoft and thousands of Microsoft partner resellers in each geographic market.
With Odin, Parallels developed a cloud marketplace technology infrastructure that provides APIs and storefronts to enable the provisioning, billing and managing of hundreds of cloud products by individual distributors, telcos and cloud services providers. In Microsoft's CSP ecosystem, Odin, AppDirect and Ensim Corp. had emerged to fill this technology niche.
The move toward vertical integration by Ingram Micro raises the stakes for other distributors, such as other U.S. Microsoft CSP 2-Tier distributors AppRiver, Intermedia, SherWeb, Synnex Corp. and Tech Data.
Ingram Micro expects to retain about 500 Odin employees when the deal closes later this month, assuming it meets closing conditions. Ingram Micro plans to keep using the Odin brand and to run the business as its own division led by executive vice president Nimesh Dave.
With the Odin business sold, Parallels will restructure itself as three business units owned by Parallels Holdings Ltd -- Parallels, Plesk and Virtuozzo. Parallels will be the name for the cross-platform solutions business unit, Plesk is the business unit for Parallel's Web management solutions for small businesses and hosters, and Virtuozzo will be the name for the unit for the container virtualization technology.
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 02, 2015