Xvantage is well-poised to play a critical role in transforming customer experience and enabling Ingram Micro’s partners digitally in the days ahead or the new digital era of doing business.
As the IT distribution landscape has undergone rapid transformation over the past few years, top distributors like Ingram Micro have upped their games by focusing on multiple aspects that can help them stay relevant in the face of stiff competition. Ingram Micro is focusing on some key areas like accelerating the digital transformation, improving customer experience, expanding its cybersecurity portfolio, offering cloud solutions, and embracing sustainable practices.
The company has well embraced digital transformation and is leaving no stone unturned to empower and enable its partners and customers digitally. As a solid testimony of its commitment, it introduced the much-vaunted Ingram Micro Xvantage last year with an aim to completely redefine the way its partners and vendors interact and transact with it. Ingram Micro’s intelligent, self-learning Xvantage platform leverages the power of AI, ML, and analytics to simplify the overall process of tech acquisition, order placement, shipment tracking, and even making the right choice for business by leveraging the power of intelligent recommendations and analytics. Xvantage is well-poised to play a critical role in transforming customer experience and enabling partners digitally in the days ahead.
Riding on the unprecedented uptick in demand for Cloud and Cybersecurity solutions over the last few years, Ingram Micro has taken a sure-footed approach to add a rich portfolio of Cloud and Cybersecurity Solutions to its product basket. Starting from scalable and flexible cloud hybrid cloud services to Managed IT and Professional Services, the company offers a comprehensive portfolio of Cloud-based services that can help businesses accelerate their digital journey, thereby driving innovation and growth. Similarly, the company’s robust cybersecurity services enable businesses to protect their infrastructure and end devices with an advanced level of threat detection and prevention framework.
To better understand the inner matrixes that design Ingram Micro’s unique growth engine, SME Channels had caught up with Navneet Singh Bindra, Senior Vice President and Country Chief Executive, Ingram Micro India, and Diego Utge, EVP and Group President – Asia Pacific, Ingram Micro Inc.
In a special interaction with SME Channels, Navneet and Diego discussed their organization’s channel strategy to address growing demands; what constitutes Ingram Micro’s holy grail of success; its key focus areas; its most innovative Xvantage platform, and how it elevates partner experience; channel expansion plans; cloud strategy; and much more.
Edited excerpts…
Ingram Micro has been a leader in IT distribution space. What would you rate as your holy grail of success?
Diego Utge:
I firmly believe it’s our people and the reputation that we have in the market through our people. We’ve been in the market for more than 45 years, worldwide. And it’s not uncommon to see many of our executives and associates staying associated with our company for more than 15-20 years. That creates a sense of trust in the market towards our business partners. So, the people, and the innovation that we have been bringing to the market throughout these years from the distribution point of view, the value addition we have made, the way we have reinvented ourselves and disrupted the market—all these have cast a very positive impact on the industry. This has catapulted Ingram Micro from a very small company at one point of time to a multinational giant that it is today, with a business presence in over fifty countries. And we have also become a major conduit to bring technology to the market. We are the connector between the OEMs and the market.
If you drill down further, you will find all our focus is on customer centricity. We are making heavy investments in digital to help our partners to have a better and frictionless experience with Ingram Micro. When you look at our business, because of the fragmentation of our business and the different pricing per cube, per customer, per geographic location, etc., there exists a back end that no one sees, which is very complex, fragmented, and quite hard to manage. And because of that our value add is to bring in more simplicity to bring a B2C experience in a B2B environment and interact more with our customers aside from the technology investment that we’re doing to make our business more digital. We have got our Advanced Solutions group, where we invest in several elements of cybersecurity, AI, data analytics, infrastructure, networking, and the new concept of Zeta-1 and high-end performance computing. We have our client and endpoint solutions for use in either a corporate or consumer environment like notebooks, peripherals, etc., and all the elements around cloud consumption and services. Also, you can also take into account how we support our partners to consume these services and bring them to the market and end customers.
Navneet Singh Bindra
Customer-centricity is one of our key obsessions and that’s something which, going forward, will take us to a very different level of business because we are looking at how our customers and partners are able to service the end customers better and solve the customers’ problems better. This is where we talk about our people and the empowerment of our people, which will enable us to really deliver that experience to our partners and through our partners to the end customers. Thus, customer-centricity holds the key for us.
Recently, Ingram Micro came up with the Xvantage platform, and there is a buzz in the market that it is all set to be the Netflix of distribution. So, how is this unique platform going to benefit and help elevate the experience of X Generation Partners?
Diego Utge:
Well, it is very much related to what I said earlier. The complexity of our business and the fragmentation of our business throughout the years have made us develop and effectively use lots of tools to facilitate different types of interactions with our partners. What we’re doing now is to bring in everything under one experience, with an aim to bring a B2C Netflix-like experience in a B2B segment. So, all that is behind it is a platform where our partners will be able to quote the special pricing live.
We use Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to help our partners sell more and provide insights and recommendations to partners on how we take friction out of the businesses, and how partners can buy and fulfill hardware, software services and cloud solutions in one invoice. Other than these, the platform has many more functionalities around digital marketing. It can guide you on how our vendors can generate ROI-associated marketing campaigns to be more effective. We are also bringing all the control of subscriptions, which brings the concept of annual recruiting revenues. We have specific functionalities within the platform that help partners control that, and many other functionalities, which are helping our resellers to have one experience in a single pane of glass to better cater to their end customers.
Navneet Singh Bindra:
So, ultimately what we are doing is bringing that experience to our partners and helping them grow their business, which means it’s not only frictionless transactions but what more they can do with Ingram Micro. Xvantage also allows our partners to choose from a wide range of services and solutions, including Professional Services, Cloud Services, cybersecurity solutions, financing solutions, verticalized solutions, or asset disposal services. So, it’s about how we empower our partners to go and do more business with the customers, how we help our partners grow their businesses, and how they can track their business growth through this platform. The platform also helps them identify or spot areas where business is happening in the market that probably they are missing out on. If they want to get into that area, then they can work with Ingram Micro to make a joint business plan and go after those areas. Thus, Xvantage gives all those helpful insights and additional engagement points 24X7.
Xvantage also helps partners book an appointment with Subject Matter Experts, at the time of their convenience, though a simple click of a button. So, this functionality helps the customers grow their business and serve the end customers much better.
Diego Utge:
We provide a consumer experience in the B2B market. There is a new generation running our customers, our resellers. There is a younger generation in India that uses their mobile for everything, complementing the windows, making India a mobile-first market.
We also have Xvantage on mobile and it’s a native platform in the phone. It’s a native platform that provides the same experience to users as that of a desktop version. People these days don’t work from 8:00 am to 7:00 pm. They work sporadically, even on Sundays or Saturdays. Xvantage mobile app will help them have everything on-demand, as and when they need it at whatever time of the day.
The onset of COVID triggered an increasing collaboration across the verticals between OEMs and cloud MSPs. Against this backdrop, how is Ingram helping its partners as well as customers to March on their cloud transformation journey?
Navneet Singh Bindra:
We have our cloud marketplace where we do business and partners do business with us, whether it is Azure, AWS or is other cloud providers. When the traditional OEMs are coming together with these cloud service providers and offering cloud-like services on their own, such as subscription-based services, consumption-based services or the HP Green, etc., there comes a technology gap. We are effectively bridging that gap for the partners between the OEMs and these cloud providers. For example, the on-tap applications of NetApp that go on the cloud, say in AWS, and Ingram Micro being there, we can engage both on the NetApp side as well as on the AWS side. Partners who have been traditionally selling that same storage service on the cloud to their customers, even though they don’t have any expertise on that, Ingram Micro can provide the support, the migration, and so on and so forth. Thus, Ingram Micro becomes the pivot there to get both these worlds together. Similarly, for born-in-the-cloud partners, we extend help on how they can expand their business and service their end-customers’ requirements better by accessing the hardware that they can buy from us as standalone hardware. But how do they access that functionality; that storage piece in a cloud-native format? That’s where Ingram Micro’s support comes in handy. We support them with how they can compute and calculate how much storage capacity their customer requires because they are service providers who will migrate one application to another. So, how do they get that expertise? That’s where, again, Ingram Micro helps. Similarly, if you look at AWS and Nutanix, it’s again the same story. Thus, that is a meeting point of the traditional world, OEMs and MSPs. Hence for us, customer centricity being the key, our top priorities are how we enable both partners on the traditional side as well as on the cloud side to access the other side of the world and make a winning proposition to their end-customers and solve their end-customer’s problem.
Given the kind of massive digitization that is sweeping India now, what sort of opportunity you guys are viewing in the India market and how you want to leverage that? Do you have any kind of association to tap into the demands in the government sector when it comes to technology implementation on such a massive scale?
Diego Utge:
In India, you can see the use of technology in almost everything and it starts with policies from the government. We have teams specializing in dealing with the government, and we have participated in projects like smart cities, 5G rollouts, and many other projects, which is our bread and butter. We have helped partners and the governments or the big telecoms to consume technology to bring high-speed Internet, high-speed mobile signals, RFID, etc.
Navneet Singh Bindra:
There is a distributor body called the Technology Distribution Association of India that works very closely with NASSCOM and the other influencing think tanks to advise the government on what should be the way forward on both digitalization and digitization. We are actively engaged on this front to help on how the government should take the forward path. So, while we do a lot of business, we are also enlightened corporate citizens thinking of how we can use more and more technology to make the lives of citizens easier, and that happens through these bodies.
Are you planning any major investments towards Channel expansion in the Indian market?
We always think about how we can expand our business. We work jointly with our OEM to see how we can bring more technology to the market; how we can funnel more technologies; how we enable partners and now as the technology advances, help them to become specialized resellers to capably provide good solutions to an end customer or enterprise, since it’s mostly outcome-based now. They need that expertise. With our model for aggregation of knowledge, services or products, our resellers can leverage it more than us and can be more efficient at that. But in terms of expansion, we really like to be in every segment or every geo-location and in Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. We keenly observe the continuing growth of the Great Indian Middle Class and how even small villages continue to gain more access to technology. You need to have different people and different companies to reach out to those small corners of this great country. Expansion plans are part of our regular discussions. We do discuss how we can do this better and how we can extend our reach to more and more resellers to deliver more technology to our far-off customers. We already reach 90% of the population in terms of technology that we bring to the market. We take that job quite seriously.
Would you like to quote any figures that you want to invest in India?
Navneet Singh Bindra:
The pace at which technology is moving and evolving makes the plan for the next three years obsolete within two months. So, it’s always a moving target. So, as a framework, you know what you want to do and how you want to do it. But when it comes to those specific numbers, the numbers change the weight of different components of the framework. Two years back, for example, machine language was possibly one of the big things to be invested in. Today, it’s no longer the case. Today, it’s AI all the way. So you can’t make a three-year plan and the technology may change in one year. Second, when we talk about investments in India, apart from business, we also look at how we can give back more to the country in terms of turning India into an engine for the development of technology, which Ingram Micro itself consumes, say, Xvantage. I mean we have a large setup in India where the engineer sitting there developed this platform. Thus, the investments are on both fronts: how to engage and grow the market and also how to get back by putting in more investments in India and hiring more engineers and skilled people who can develop the technology, which we then take to the market from the business unit. So, we operate on both sides.
Diego Utge:
Thus, putting in a number would be unfair because there is a lot more to it. This is more about the stocking location where our footprint is there; it’s about whether we have the right financial services to enable our customers to buy enough credit, do leasing, or specific financial modeling; whether we have the right capabilities around data and AI to serve our customers; or where we have the right coverage in the market. It is so varied that It’s hard to identify a number.
Navneet Singh Bindra:
We are also focusing on Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Today, we are having a lot of these SMB roadshows where we physically go to those small towns because customers in those small towns require technology as much as a large customer in a large city. We focus on how can we enable partners there, and therefore we go to those cities and organize roadshows, inviting end customers and partners. however, at the end of it, can you put a number to that? Not really!
Similarly, the Xvantage platform we have developed is a key vehicle for us to go deeper and deeper into the country and empower more and more smaller partners. Can you put a number to that investment for India? You cannot! So, it’s not that we don’t want to put a number. It’s not easy to put a number there.
Nowadays, newer smarter solutions like edge computing, AI, ML, are doing the rounds. How focused is Ingram Micro in promoting and pursuing the New-Age solutions in India?
Diego Utge:
To start with, there is one common denominator which is data. Data has become the liquid gold of our times. Because of access to data and massive amounts of data, you can find very quick solutions to things that took a lot of time in the past. Look at the healthcare vertical, where you know machine learning and other analytical tools are providing a faster diagnostic solution. Look at citizen services, earlier you had to go to a government entity to get your driving license. Now you can probably do it digitally. Instead of going to a hospital and waiting in the reception, now at least for a first screen, you can have a video call. In the field of defense, you can move one product from one point to another, and it may involve an airplane, truck or boat. For that you need data, and in order to make data run, you need hardware and a huge amount of processing power and ways to drive the data towards a specific device; the networking; the Super Fast Ethernet and Wi-Fi., even 5G or 6G. In the end, it is always about moving data around.
So, the access to data needs to be followed by hardware that can really manage that huge amount of data. You need the processing power to leverage the actual potential of AI. Ingram Micro operates at every point of the data journey, from the gathering, to how you receive, secure, store, compute and deliver data as well as the network in Wi-Fi. So, the common denominator for me is data, and I think we are in every single stage. I’m proud to say that Ingram Micro plays in every single stage of the life cycle of data – starting from when data is created, computed, stored, and secured.
