Walters to leave Ingram Micro in sales restructure

In a shock announcement to the Australian channel, veteran John Walters has announced that he will leave Ingram Micro, effective January 31 next year. 

Walters, head of commercial sales and solutions, has worked at Ingram Micro and its earlier incarnation, Tech Pacific, for over seven and a half years.

Walters forged strong relationships between the distie and its resellers and vendors through his charismatic personality and through events such as a company-sponsored trip down Papua New Guinea's Kokoda Trail.

Walters said he had effectively "planned himself out of a job" after being appointed the architect of a restructure of the country's largest distributor with Jay Miley, CEO of Ingram Micro Australia.

Walters told CRN that after introducing Miley to the Australian business 12 months ago, the two had sat down to work out how to reposition the sales force. While Ingram has done well in the volume side of the business with mass merchants and consumer electronics, the distie needed to compete more effectively with niche distributors.

"There's a lot of more niche disties who are really well positioned in their niche," said Walters, discussing competitors that cover technology as varied as security to networking to servers.

"The challenge at Ingram is that we're across all that plus mass merchants and consumer electronics. It's really hard to compete against those niche disties unless you build niche focused go-to-market strategies within Ingram."

The first step was working on the area which Walters ran. The distributor needed a "separate alignment" where one arm focused on volume and the other on value.

"Something new had to be done for our sales force," said Walters. The solutions group Walters had set up two years ago was successful, he said, but needed tighter integration internally.

"The more we went along... Jay said this to me six months ago - 'you're planning yourself out of a role'."

The joke turned serious as it became obvious that there wasn't a suitable role with someone of Walters' experience.

"I see this as a really positive restructure and I'm pretty much one of the only casualties, if you want to put it like that," laughed Walters. "I'm leaving with extremely proud memories."

Walters listed his greatest achievements as the establishment of the solutions group at Ingram Micro and running an Australia-wide program at Tech Pacific in 2003 to 2004. The program "re-harnessed SMB resellers in regional Australia".

"The feedback we got was fantastic," he said. "The results we got were fantastic."

Walters said he was interested in working in the channel with either a vendor or a reseller. He added he had agreed with Miley on "some pretty tight parameters" that prevented him working with Ingram's competitors in the immediate future.

Walters also said it wouldn't feel like the right thing to do.

"To go from Ingram to a competitor - I honestly don't know whether I could do that and hold my head high," he said.