What is your sense of Indian channel market, how is Ingram Micro positioned to address the market?
In India we could see the opportunity, the fragmentation of the market, the way Indians use technology, favorability of the market and the low IT penetration per capita. The dynamics of this market are similar to the market that I used to operate in. We need to help our channel partners embrace new technology. New technologies need to be consumed by the customers. What was and is lacking is the support of the partner ecosystem in taking those technologies to the customer. So this is the deal that we bring to the table and, hopefully, in due time we will be able to get more India based partners to participate in those deals. Also, large multinational partners are coming to India because they either have relationship with some users or they have skillsets to deploy newer technologies into the market.
Most of the partners are aging. There is also a succession planning. If the companies want to maintain their presence in the market, we are here to help them to see how they can evolve and deploy new technologies.
So, our mission will be to help our partners to prepare for that.
What is the unique value proposition of Ingram Micro?
Today, technological transitions are happening at a pace faster than ever before, and you need good partner to navigate you. We are the partner who can build business for you with a great value proposition to adopt new technologies.
I can give you best example of how Ingram Micro has invested well ahead in the curve, in the cloud orchestration. Today our partner ecosystem can capitalize on best-in-class cloud platforms. We also have invested in hardware. We knew how the Indian customers consume hardware. Therefore, we have a new financial solution to accommodate the requirement of the customers from the hardware perspective. Our partners can also use our configuration services and managed services. Besides, we also announced our consulting division for digital marketing, succession planning, sales acceleration, etc. We are also announcing our vertical market focused areas for the benefit of our partners to position their product in healthcare, BFSI, education and government.
With this, we are providing more complex solution which will allow the partners to create more value addition and further help rebuild their customer relationships, which will open them to the new business opportunities.
How do you wish to see Ingram Micro’s service offerings evolve in the coming years?
We want to see 15-20% of our offerings go in the form of services, which our partners can resell. We capitalize on the scale of the partners. We can position very skilled professionals to be used several times by our partners from solutioning point of view. We want to position Ingram Micro in India with more skilled BUs like IOT, HCI, security, AI, BI, etc. Most of the times, the partners do not engage with customers to the fullest extent due to the lack of adequate skillsets. Therefore, we will act as catalysts in orchestrating peer to peer skillsets so that a partner can identify opportunity which can be fulfilled by another partner.
We are committed to skill them with the help of our skilled trainers on different technologies. They can use us or another partner for negotiation, agreement and deployment.
Who has taken up the responsibility of training, Ingram or the principals?
From training point view, the onus lies with both –the principals and us. We want the vendors’ products to be sold, as do the vendors, of course. It is a shared responsibility. Therefore, we have created BI tools and training tools, which will help our partners to be skilled and prepared to access new technologies.
Today, the traditional technology areas that they are into, are a saturated category and profitability is relatively low than the new and innovative technologies. Therefore they need adequate skillsets to sell new technologies and solutions. To be fair there must be interest and investment in both forms – monetary and resources – to really drive the initiative forward.
What is your identity now – distributor and solutions aggregator?
Ingram Micro now functions more like a solution aggregator and consulting partner for the resellers. I do not think our competition has enterprise division for the new technologies, neither do they have hardware offering as a service.
We are No.1 in the market and we will continue outperforming our competitors. This event was a testament of what we are doing in the whole region including India.
What kind of growth has Ingram Micro India been able to achieve?
We are growing more than 30% in our bottom line. We are doing a great job in operating as well as executing , which the other companies in the competition are not able to do. So, the extra profits that we are getting, we like to invest them on our ecosystem partners.
