Interview: Greg Spierkel, CEO at Ingram Micro Inc

Resume: Greg Spierkel

Became Ingram Inc. CEO on 1 June replacing Kent Foster Corporate president March 2004 to April 2005 Led the company’s US$700 million acquisition of Tech Pacifi c – the largest acquisition in the company’s history Held positions of executive vice-president and president, Ingram Micro Europe Joined Ingram in 1997, as president, Ingram Micro Asia-Pacifi c Prior to Ingram, spent 11 years at Canada-based Mitel Corporation, a manufacturer of PBX, software and semiconductor products

CRN: What are your plans for the digital home market?

Spierkel: We made an acquisition two weeks ago in the consumer space -- all value-add solutions. [Ingram acquired Avad, a US-based home control and electronics distributor]. [The market can have] $30,000 to $50,000 or more  as a typical sale where people are buying a server, software and middleware for home entertainment solutions. In cities like Sydney and Melbourne with four and three million people is a huge market, there’s a lot of disposable income, so homes of $1 million, which are a dime a dozen around here, what’s another $30,000 especially if someone’s buying new or upgrading their home? It’s a whole new area of focus for us and that’s all value-added. It’s not taking your basic television and [adding] in a box video system – they are complicated solutions with double digit margins.


CRN: Do you think other smaller niche distributors in this country will suffer because of this acquisition?

Spierkel: Over time probably. It’s one of those things -- if their scale and capabilities don’t continue to provide the service level expectations and the price/points that we can put out, they will suffer. That’s not to say we’re going to do well in everything that we do. There are some divisions in some countries that frankly, we struggle. What vendors are seeking and what customers are seeking are two things: reliable service and good price and a technical knowledge base. If you’re not profitable through product transitions to competitive situations, over time some of these companies start cutting back and find themselves behind the eight ball. That’s when the business is likely to come to us and because we have a broader portfolio, it does protect us. Sometimes a technology or customer category is not doing all that well but we’ve got enough in the portfolio to carry us through the day and we don’t see the ups and downs. The diversity in this company is phenomenal right now -- it’s providing us a lot of protection against soft pockets of the economy or soft pockets of technologies.


CRN: What are the other areas of growth for the company?

Spierkel: Everything in the wireless domain. We’ve signed Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile on worldwide contracts with 3G services. We’re bundling hardware, software, middleware, carrier solutions combined to provide GPS applications, navigation, tracking and POS applications. We’re putting all those pieces together and the carriers don’t know any other way to go to the SMB market. Where there’s complexity there’s opportunity. Convergence, CE, storage will continue to be huge... But we are investing in ourselves through acquisitions or adding talent to the organisation.


CRN: Are you interested in any other distributors here in Australia?

Spierkel: No...I know them all...But no, we’ve got a strong position here, we’re focused on the consolidation of the two operations.

collaboration distribution greg spierkel ingram ingram micro ingram micro inc networking spierkel