Ingram Micro announced it has extended the availability of IBM Cloud to five additional Cloud Marketplaces around the globe, providing companies increased access to infrastructure capabilities from SoftLayer. Building on its existing distribution relationship with Ingram Micro in the U.S., IBM Cloud is now available through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K., with plans to extend the offering into additional markets soon. The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace is an ecosystem of buyers, sellers and solutions that allows channel partners to purchase, configure, provision, and manage cloud technologies with confidence and ease.

It removes the complexity in procurement, management, and support that is often characteristic in cloud technologies, while helping channel partners simplify success in the cloud. The Cloud Marketplace provides efficient management of the complete end-customer cloud subscription lifecycle from a single, automated platform, offering a portfolio of vetted solutions that covers all major business categories including: infrastructure, security, communication and collaboration, business applications, and cloud management services. View a live demonstration of the Cloud Marketplace here.

Through this extended relationship, channel partners worldwide have additional tools to provision and manage IBM Cloud and other cloud offerings through a single online portal. The Cloud Marketplace also delivers fully-automated pre-packaged IBM Cloud service plans which include Virtual Private Server, Bare Metal Recovery, and Network Gateway Appliances. IBM Cloud offers a high-performance cloud delivery model that includes bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking.

These services can be deployed on demand with full remote access and control through a customer Web portal or API, allowing customers to create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. The SoftLayer infrastructure from IBM is an automated IaaS platform, which currently extends to data centers throughout the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe and beyond, and embraces a comprehensive range of cloud computing options that are connected to an integrated private network and management system. The platform's modular infrastructure facilitates rapid and cost-efficient deployment and extends complete user control to quickly scale cloud offerings on any IBM Cloud data center, worldwide.