Ingram Micro Australia chief Tim Ament laid out the vision for the distributor's upcoming fourth quarter launch of its Xvantage platform to hundreds of partners in Sydney yesterday.
Speaking at the distributors’ Ingram Experience partner event, the Ingram Micro senior vice president and chief country executive for ANZ touted the move as a “big pivot” to platform-based automation for the way it does business with partners.
His pitch was about streamlining and simplifying transactions, which he argued was “our collective strategic different differentiator, helping all of our team sell more."
"This is how we're going to help you go from transactions to interactions, adding value to your customers.”
Complexity had slowed down quotes and transactions, Ament said. “95 per cent of customers we do business with transact both traditional hardware and some types of cloud subscription service,” he noted.
“The average order includes six different technology solutions, and can be both hardware purchase traditionally, software licensing and subscriptions, and all of that has to go through different processes and systems.”
He noted the volume of messages this creates.
“In Australia alone, we receive over three million emails from all of our customers for things like the quotes, an order, a special price, a deviation, a deal registration, and ‘where's my order status? what's the ETA?’”
“In fact, 60 per cent of our transactions include some type of special prices or deal registration from the vendors that we serve.”
Ament focused on the work this creates for vendors and partners.
“Sometimes it can take a day or even weeks to complete a complex transaction or quote.
That's a significant amount of time that all of us are spending and brainpower from our teams before we even get to entering the deal into the pipeline.”
Speaking to CRN Australia, Ament talked up the way Xvantage will connect vendors and partners.
“Being able to have APIs that go in and connect and do things like pull special pricing from Cisco, then be able to provide that special pricing to the partners."
"Today, a lot of that’s manual work.”
“Customers can go into our platform and they can self-service and do their things in that platform."
"But some customers are going to say ‘well, I want to connect Xvantage directly into my systems with APIs. I don't want to go into your platform, I want to use my platform to connect the APIs into that.’"
“That's a very different thing in a B2B environment, to be able to have APIs that people can use into their systems and or use our platform."
"So I think that's one of the big differences, it's just not a simple ecommerce engine.”
Insights engine
“We've been using data and analytics for many years with a centralised team that uses our data insights to really help direct our activities,” Ament said.
"This has been used to help point vendors to customers’ propensity to buy certain offerings based on their purchases."
These insights will be available through Xvantage.
“So it's not a just a system that you can go run reports, it's actually, you know, a machine driven, artificial intelligence type platform that will continue to evolve and grow,” Ament said.
The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace has also been integrated with Xvantage.
“So today, customers have to go to different tools to buy hardware or software, and then subscriptions or cloud services are in our cloud platform."
"In the future, that's all on a single platform.”
“It's really listening to the end user customers that are really wanting to consume technology in a different way, or at least have a choice where they spend capex or opex."
"So I don't see that changing, I see it accelerating more than anything else.
“And that's why, to me, the platform conversation is so important, because those are not easy transactions to facilitate."
"They require a different type of support and administration to manage the multi-year nature of those contracts, the recurring nature of those contracts.”
Australian partners can expect to hear about Xvantage in the coming months, he said.
$10 million invested in people
The arrival of Xvantage will follow the reorganisation of Ingram Micro’s Australian business, a project launched in 2022, which brought together its cloud and traditional businesses.
Since the reorganisation, Ingram has four divisions: cloud, cyber security and hybrid business applications, advanced and specialty solutions, commercial solutions and consumer solutions.
“These are specialised teams that can show up and support the technologies in those groups and also the customers that are buying those technologies as a primary route to market. That allows us to be very specialised, but at the same time very broad in what we do.”
The Australian business had invested in more than 100 new people in its go-to-market customer and vendor-facing resources.
“That's a $10 million annual investment in the resources that we've got in the Australian business,” Ament said.
At the time of speaking to CRN Australia, Ament said the company had 42 open requisitions across Australia and New Zealand.
Yesterday’s Ingram Experience event had more than 700 registered attendees and 47 vendors.
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