CRN Impact Awards 2023: Ingram Micro helps resellers tap data treasure trove

Data insights provided to members of Ingram Micro’s ULTRA program helped the distributor earn the 2023 CRN Impact Distribution Innovation Award earlier this year.

Ingram Micro was recognised as the best in the Distribution Innovation category at the 2023 CRN Impact Awards in August.

The company’s nomination for the Distribution Award also touted its Advanced Solutions unit and Xvantage automation platform, in addition to other offerings.

The ULTRA program includes regular insights and data specific to each subscriber’s business. This includes analysis drawn from Ingram Micro’s global cloud platform, which has more than 30 million users.

Partners can use ULTRA to compare their performance with their peer group. The program also provides access to customer retention reports and whitespace analysis.

This is intended to help resellers make better sales decisions and improve planning about solutions that are in demand.

Resellers receive “custom insights aligned with their market focus” with “low- to no-overhead”.

Partners accessing Ingram Micro ULTRA achieved “growth of 30 percent YTY versus their peers”, Ingram Micro stated.

The program contributed to “many Ingram Micro partners achieving double digit growth in the past year”, according to the distributor.

The program was developed after Ingram Micro worked with partner focus groups in 10 countries.

Automating low-value tasks

Ingram Micro has also flexed its innovation muscle with the development of its upcoming Xvantage platform, which is designed to automate billing and other administrative tasks and related activities for reseller engagements.

The platform is “not a simple ecommerce engine,” said Ingram Mico Vice President and Country Chief Executive for ANZ, Tim Ament, at the Ingram Experience event in Sydney earlier this year, noting that partners will be able to use APIs to connect Xvantage to their systems, or use the platform directly.

“We really want to help our partners shift from transactions to more interactions with their customers,” Ament previously told CRN Australia.

“And so the Xvantage journey is all about digitising the way we do business, the way we interact with our vendors, the way we interact with our customers, and simplifying everything from orders to quotes to special pricing to ‘where's my shipment?’”