In-depth: Miley details Ingram's ‘focused' strategy

Jay Miley, Ingram Micro's MD speaks frankly to CRN and details the path that led the distributor to the sales restructure announced late last year. John Walters, former head of commercial sales and solutions, joined the interview to share his insights.

CRN: Was the sales restructure primarily about getting the enterprise technology business side of Ingram right?

Jay Miley: Actually it's about getting both sides right. My view on it is pretty simple: I believe in two businesses, two distinct businesses that require different activities, different skills sets and different go-to-market approaches in order to be successful.

It's not a matter of one being more important than the other, quite the contrary, the volume business is the biggest piece of our business and the enterprise technology business is a big piece of our business [too]. Its bigger than any of our competitors that you would think of.

CRN: Really, Ingram's enterprise technology business is bigger than its competition?

Miley: Volume business is bigger for us than the enterprise technology business, but if the enterprise technology business was a standalone business - let's just say that it has scale that the competition doesn't have.

CRN: Can you define the difference between the two units?

Miley: I call it enterprise technology, [but] it's not enterprise in the way a vendor sees enterprise. Enterprise to a vendor is about the size of the end-user customer, typically, dependent on  X number of seats. Usually somewhere above 500 seats they start talking about enterprise end-user, between 250-500 mid-market and below 250 small to medium.

Our definition is around the type of technology. We'll call it enterprise technologies versus volume technologies. That's how we're splitting things up. In the enterprise technology area for us it's about the data centre, it's about the network, the infrastructure software that plays a role in those two things. We believe that these types of technologies play a role at all levels. Maybe not at the five-seat company but at some level our vendors that play in the data centre, networking, security or virtualisation space have a solution that is geared towards a certain number of seats.

Our volume technology business is around technologies that are more mass market. PCs, desktops, notebooks, printers and consumables we sell, everything from Tom Toms to high end data centre solutions.

We have historically asked our sales reps to care equally about all those things. Now what we're doing is about focusing the mind share of our sales organisation.

In March we put a stake in the ground and said we're going to measure ourselves along two distinct business units: one around the enterprise technology group, one along volume technologies. And David Lenz, manager national and strategic partners, ran the enterprise technology group for us post March and Matthew Sanderson, Ingram Micro's senior director ran the volume business. John [Walters] was a shared resource to both those businesses. Immediately after we made that announcement John and I said we need to align our sales resources to these businesses too, because we have a dilemma.

We ask our sales resources to care about too much. We need to get them focused and so the sales restructure announced late last year was our intention to do exactly what was on the other side of equation, which was, we aligned our vendor teams into either enterprise technology or volume technology, we're now going to align our sales team into those two classifications our well.

And the intention is that the activities and the resources we bring to market will be very, very focused along with two different go-to-markets. One set of resources, with one set of objectives for enterprise technology unit and another set resource run in different plays in the volume technologies.

CRN: Will you be investing in cloud?

Miley: Potentially. There's nothing suggesting that we couldn't have a cloud strategy in the future. You'll see us get more into what I'd say managed services and traditional services out of our enterprise technology business but I think it's a good thing for you to know that it's about the type of technology not the size of the customer.