Hundreds of partners attended the Ingram Micro Experience event in Sydney yesterday, where Ingram Micro SVP & Country Chief Executive ANZ, Tim Ament, spoke about "a revolutionary time in our industry".
Ament spoke with CRN Australia about how the company is bringing to market a platform, Xvantage, designed to bring the IT ecosystem together to create meaningful experiences and solutions.
“It’s really important to be a part of that revolution because it’s moving very fast and we’re at the centre of all that,” Ament said. “Linear supply chains, linear channel, is changing to an ecosystem of partners working together to solve all that complexity.”
Also on display at Ingram Micro Experience was the muscle being put into helping IT partners with solutions-selling around cloud, secure infrastructure, AI and other technologies.
The event included 30 presentations about such topics as driving AI with clients, accelerating cloud work, AI on the PC, secure networking and "beyond virtualisation".
It was structured around solutions “villages” designed to mirror what Ingram Micro executives said was the company’s focus on solution-selling.
Three Microsoft Copilot "pillars"
Among the speakers was Microsoft ANZ partner development manager Daniyel McAvoy, who talked about how partners can integrate services with Copilot for Microsoft 365 (M365).
McAvoy outlined three pillars of Microsoft’s approach to Copilot for M365 and the options available for partners to offer Copilot.
The first pillar is the standard "packaged product" that "will get better over time" with new tools added constantly, he said.
The second pillar is "customisable Copilot," which provides customers the ability to tailor the tool to their needs with plugins or build their own with Copilot Studio.
The third pillar is the "deep integration" between Azure and OpenAI, which provides the ability to "build AI toolkits from scratch" and "customise your use cases," McAvoy said.
He also noted "AI on the edge" as a fourth emerging pillar.
"...how software is utilising hardware to be performant is going to be an emerging field…" McAvoy said, noting the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) in Microsoft's latest range of Surface laptops.
McAvoy’s pitch was that “partners will be able to sell Surface more now than ever before,", telling partners there were now "far less hoops to jump through to sell devices."
Security consolidation
Fortinet's cloud and alliances manager Simon Bray talked up the "incredible opportunity" to help customers reduce their risk profile by consolidating their security solutions.
He talks about the complexity customers face due to a "glut of cyber tools" and fragmented environments, with security solutions managed by multiple teams within organisations.
According to Bray, "Customers are dealing with complexity via a consolidation approach.”
He talked up Fortinet's Security Fabric Vision which he said converged security and networking together for "reduced complexity", and providing unified SASE and AI-driven security operations capabilities managed with Forti OS.
The “AI PC”
It’s been hard to escape the marketing onslaught about “AI PCs” in the last couple of months. At Ingram Experience, attendees also had the opportunity to dig into this topic.
Dell Technologies EUC field marketing advisor for channel ANZ, Majintha Weerasekera, emphasised the "COVID PC refresh" opportunity for partners to sell the company's range of AI PC laptops, notebooks, desktops and peripherals.
He talked up the AI capabilities of devices featuring Intel's Core Ultra processor, spruiking the benefits of its NPU for sustained AI workloads and to save battery life. He also talked about Dell's Optimizer software, which uses AI for network, application, privacy and audio optimisation.
Weerasekera also touted Dell's focus on sustainability, noting its efforts to reduce cardboard by packaging "up to eight desktops in one box."
Cloud pathways and growth
There is a lot of focus in the channel on helping partners and their clients take their businesses to the cloud and grow it there, including at yesterday’s Ingram Miro Experience event.
For example, Hope McGarry, Ingram Micro director of ASG, specialty and commercial, and James Harb, MD of hardware integration specialist NexGen, spoke about how the partnership between the two companies and Cisco helped NexGen evolve from selling PBX solutions to cloud collaboration technologies.
Harb said the collaboration had been a "cornerstone for growth" for NexGen, who in 2022 became the first Cisco partner to offer the vendor’s Webex Wholesale offering in its Asia-Pacific, Japan and China region.
The partnership helped NexGen evolve from selling PBX solutions to cloud collaboration technologies. The company has onboarded "over 30,000" users to Cisco.
Harb also talked about the Spirit Business Centre partner program, which was “built in six months” and has enabled partners “from all types of industries” to venture into selling Cisco Webex cloud collaboration technology.
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