Ingram Micro Australia reveals evolution priorities

Ingram Micro Australia has outlined its plans to alleviate partners' pain points.

The distie's local leadership team, chief country executive Felix Wong, director of advanced solutions Brett Armstrong, cloud vendor onboarding manager Tasha Soltonovich and commercial sales director Aidan Fitzgerald, together gave partners at the Ingram Micro ONE APAC conference last week an insight into its future plans.

The company is in the midst of an internal program called reIGNITE aimed around making it easier to transact with Ingram while improving operation efficiencies.

“We’re trying to make sure that we address the needs of our customers,” said Armstrong. “One of the things that I always found being a customer of Ingram for so long was sometimes it was quite hard to find where the entry point was and where the right person to talk to was within the business. We’re trying to make that much simpler from an external perspective, but also an internal perspective.”

Armstrong said partners have complained in the past about the length of quote times. To ease the issue Ingram is setting up quote desks with SLAs attached, powered by a new system built in-house that tracks quotes as they turn into orders, as well as revisions and order times.

Another pain point causing partners strife is Ingram’s Manila-based customer service desk. Soltonovich said while there’s no immediate fix, a dedicated team member based in Australia has been assigned with realigning the customer desk’s resources and working with global teams to solve the issues.

Ingram has also been busy hiring, with Wong bringing in people from outside distribution to bring a new perspective.

The biggest addition is that Ingram is bringing on more domain specialists, particularly in the SMB and mid-market space to relieve pressure from account managers to be technical experts. Fitzgerald added that account managers will be empowered to make more decisions, particularly at the back-end around post-sales.

Armstrong revealed that Ingram wants to act as an extension of its partners' marketing teams.

Ingram has been working with its marketing team to utilise its already existing demand-generation capabilities to help partners that struggle with spending their marketing funds by assisting with designing marketing programs and go-to-market strategies.

Ingram also wants to help partners struggling to get boots on the ground for implementation as their customers grow to a national scale. The distie has partnered with an implementation services provider for deployment and engineering specialists that will help fulfill projects.

Brendon Foye travelled to Ingram Micro ONE APAC as a guest of Ingram Micro.