Ready to create ability within the organization to develop and deliver services around the products that they distribute.
Believed to be the first distribution company from India to have won Cisco Global Award, Ingram Micro India Pvt. Ltd. wins the Distributor of the Year Award in the recently concluded Cisco Partner Summit 2015 at Montreal, Canada.
Opposite to the perception that Ingram Micro is only a distribution partner, the company has moved ahead in the direction of value added distribution business. And, particularly, for Cisco business, the company has helped the vendor to develop new markets and identify new partners for its emerging businesses.
B. Raghavendran, Director – Partner Organization, Cisco India & SAARC, says: “The decision happens at the global level. The nomination process not only looks at the revenue but also looks at other aspects like how the distributor has been investing, what are the areas that the company is focusing on – basically the evaluation is about what kind of balance of business the distributor creates for Cisco.”
Jaishankar Krishnan, MD, Ingram Micro India, says: “What we did differently last year, which enabled us to win this award, is that we worked with Cisco very closely to understand what are their key priorities in terms of strategies and architectures because the architecture-based approach Cisco adopted a few years back was very key to building a support system from a distributor to support the partners to focus and grow their business. That was one thing we did very well last year. Internally, we also reorganised our product management team and sales organization to focus on those key strategies around architecture.”
Jaishankar maintained, “We had an objective to discuss with Cisco to develop new markets in India as most of the companies only focus on the top 10-15 markets. We needed to penetrate deep in the market and exploit other geographies and we worked very closely with Cisco developed specific partners and on-boarded new partners.”
One major thing Ingram Micro did last year was that the company used business analytics to profile the customers that Ingram Micro worked with across the portfolio of products. Then together with Cisco, the company identified the partners that would be of right profile to on-board for engaging those customers for Cisco business. The company felt that these partners have the customer engagement, solution focus but they do not have access to Cisco business as Cisco never approached them in a programmatic manner. And, this strategy was quite successful in the region.
Jaishankar added, “We grew around 100% last year, where in our two tier business doubled at the same period. I think the combination of all these – working with Cisco team, understanding their strategy and aligning our organisation and approach to their strategy – helped us to achieve the award.”
He affirmed that while the company would continue to invest in distribution business, at the same time, the company will also create some ability within the organization to develop and deliver services around the products that they distribute.
As per Jaishankar, 10-15 years back, Ingram Micro started value added business in India by providing pre-sales support and some enterprise technologies, which was not being offered by many of the channel partners in the country and most of them even were not able to understand enterprise technology. Now pre-sales is no longer considered to be value-add though but point is Ingram Micro is very receptive to the call of the hour. So, as the discussions are now happening around solutions business, Jaishankar believes that Ingram Micro needs to start looking at investing in the solutions business and develop capability that could address the vertical market needs.
Finally…
All the partners cannot afford to invest in the capability development and retain qualified resources. Therefore organizations like Ingram Micro can play a crucial role to enable those partners by creating service model around the capabilities. This will not only allow Ingram Micro to have more partners to work on Cisco technologies and but also allow the partners to create stickiness with the customers.
Other companies which win Cisco Global Awards
- Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) Partner of the Year Award – Dimension Data Asia Pacific
- Americas Partner of the Year Award – Dimension Data
- Architectural Excellence Partner of the Year Award: Collaboration – Telstra Corporation Limited
- Architectural Excellence Partner of the Year Award: Data Center – WWT
- Architectural Excellence Partner of the Year Award: Enterprise Networks – Optus Business
- Architectural Excellence Partner of the Year Award: Security – Presidio Networked Solutions
- Architectural Excellence Partner of the Year Award: Service Provider Architectures – Qware Technology Group Co., Ltd
- Cisco Capital Partner of the Year Award – CDW
- Cloud Builder Partner of the Year Award – Computacenter
- Cloud and Managed Services Partner of the Year Award – Vodafone Group PLC
- Commercial Partner of the Year Award – CDW
- Distributor of the Year Award – Ingram Micro India Pvt. Ltd
- Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR) Partner of the Year Award – Dimension Data
- Enterprise Partner of the Year Award – WWT
- Greater China Partner of the Year Award – ECCOM Network Systen
- Learning Partner of the Year Award – Global Knowledge
- Services Partner of the Year Award – ATEA Norway
- Solution Innovation Partner of the Year Award – MapR
