The changing face of PC distribution

Matthew Sanderson Director of product management and marketing at Ingram Micro




Throughout 2007, Ingram Micro Australia experienced growth in unit shipments in the PC sector overall, comprising a 10 percent growth in desktops and 32 percent growth in notebooks.

In the commercial market segment, notebook sales continued to pull away from desktops, with notebooks accounting for 57 percent of the overall units sold. This was up four percent from 2006. We continue to see a major role for the desktop platform in the commercial space, but the gap between the two will continue to increase going into 2008 and beyond.

Although PC sale activity through our channels is a key part of day-to-day business, there’s a firm understanding that ongoing success in this area is dependant on our ability to provide channel partners with more complete offerings.

When discussing the changing face of PC distribution, the question of ‘channel versus direct’ model always comes up, however there is no comparison. Ingram Micro, as an example playing the role of a value-added distributor, delivers a complete range of PCs, regardless of whether they’re desktops or notebooks. Additionally, we can SOE, attach almost any device and wrap a complete solution around the offering.

We have found that the trend is now moving beyond the “commoditisation” that we’ve been hearing about for the last decade. Instead, we’re now becoming well established in the era of “componentisation”. It’s an era where PCs are components – important ones, admittedly – of much broader solutions.

We need to appreciate that “the changing face of notebook and desktop PC distribution” is being influenced primarily by the needs of our resellers and solution provider partners and their customers.

Distributors can no longer afford to only broadcast to their partners that they’re a selected distributor of X-brand notebooks and desktops. Rather, they should be sending out the message that their distribution rights for Y-brand handsets/barcode readers, etc. and Z-brand printers/routers, etc. are complemented by X-brand notebooks and desktops. In an ever-growing number of instances, that’s what our partners want to hear.

Vendors are constantly evaluating the abilities of their current and potential distributors to position their products as integral components of modern IT-based solutions and they are supporting partners who proactively implement those solutions. As a result, there’s a distinct possibility that those distributors lacking the willingness or ability to establish a portfolio of complementing technology vendor partnerships will command less focus.

As technology has matured and become more sophisticated over the years, so too have customer requirements.

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