It hasn't been an easy year for many Australian IT firms. Many are dealing with complex cyber security and technology challenges, tough competition and trading conditions, and changing customer expectations about return on investment.
For help, a large number of these firms lean on their IT distributors. These partnerships are in the spotlight as IT firms look to their distributors for more than just product supply and technical support.
We spoke to Ingram Mico Vice President and Country Chief Executive for ANZ, Tim Ament, about how the distributor is responding.
Few companies are as intertwined with the Australian IT sales channel as Ingram Micro, which counts more than 7,000 active resellers and more than 240 technology vendors as partners. Hundreds of these partners attended the 2023 Ingram Experience event in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, where Ament commented on the challenges facing IT firms.
“The way that technology's being consumed is changing in terms of consumption models. You have hybrid IT environments and coming out of Covid, companies expect now almost instant ROI on the technologies they purchase because work from home delivered that immediate ROI,” Ament noted.
“Companies have to deal with all that complexity. No company can do it alone.”
“Broad but specialised”
In recent years, Ingram Micro Australia has been building a case for IT firms to lean on it more heavily.
In 2022, it brought its cloud and traditional businesses together. It's also bulked up its workforce.
“We've added over 100 new people into the business. These are customer facing resources – customer or vendor. It's a $10 million investment and it creates specialisation,” Ament said.
“The positive feedback was that we were broad, but we needed to also be specialised. So now we have four divisions across cloud, cybersecurity and business applications, our advanced and specialty solutions, our commercial solutions and our consumer solutions.”
“The needs of the customers are different in each of those areas. So now we have specialised teams that service those unique markets and they can be very consultative in the way they approach those relationships.”
Augmenting and enabling
Ament’s pitch is that Ingram Micro will take partners on a journey. He used the SMB and mid-market as an example.
“Before it was very transactional, but now they have a dedicated support that's helping them go on their journey,” he said.
“When customers become more specialised, then we move them into…we have 180 customers that are in our advanced solutions group, and those customers have become more specialised in advanced solutions.”
“Another customer might be more cloud centric. And we have 400 customers that we segmented that are more MSP/CSP-type customers, and they're leaning in and growing at an accelerated rate.”
“So, this ability for us to be broad but specialised is what's really enabling us with our partners in the market.”
Unsurprisingly, cybersecurity remains a focus.
”There's partners that might be experts in cybersecurity, but they might run into an opportunity where they need us to help them flex to cover a geography,” Ament explained.
“They might want to use us to do the assessments because they want to keep their resources focused on more the deployment services, the billable-type services.”
”We augment capabilities for those companies that are really experts, but then we also help enable. So there's customers that say, ‘Hey, I need to enable and build a cybersecurity practice. I can work with Ingram Micro, they can help me do training certifications.’ Then we can help them with the initial solutions design on opportunities.”
“Then slowly they build their own practice and they can either continue to use our resources, or they can start to build their own capabilities over time as well. So partnerships, I think, are more important than ever.”
Automating transactions
Along the way, Ament wants Ingram Micro to free up partners for more meaningful interactions with customers.
“There's a lot of complexity in this market around doing simple things like quotes and orders and special pricing. In fact, 60 percent of the transactions we do require some type of special pricing or deal registration. There's tonnes of emails – three million emails that go back and forth every year to facilitate that,” he said.
To help with this, Ingram Micro is bringing its Xvantage platform to Australia.
“We've started and we launched Xvantage, what we call our digital twin, to start to help customers deal with all this complexity. Because we all have resources - Ingram Micro, our resellers and our vendors – we all have resources tied up in these manual transactions.”
“We really want to help our partners shift from transactions to more interactions with their customers. 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?’.”
Ament described Xvantage as a big pivot to platform-based automation.
“We're doing that by connecting in via APIs into our vendors’ tools and then being able to present that back out to the customers, and customers can use our platform to be able to see that. But also, if they want to engage into their ERP systems, they can connect with our APIs into their system.”
“We're doing all that through listening to our customers, who've told us that they need the business to be simpler and they need to get more resources out interacting with their customers and not transacting.”
ESG focus
Ament also sees Ingram Micro’s focus on environmental, social and governance issues being relevant to partners.
“This is becoming more and more of an important conversation for many of our customers and vendors and our employees, where they want to know they're part of a company that's focused around those three areas,” Ament said.
Globally, Ingram Micro aims to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
“As an example, we've partnered with Schneider Electric to use their application to be able to get data and insights into our carbon footprint as a company. And then that will set foundational metrics for us to then be able to drive our sustainability objectives around the world,” Ament explained.
In 2023, Ingram Micro became the first Cisco distributor on Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China to win the Cisco Environmental Sustainability Specialisation certification across the region.
“What's really key with that is it's not just our certification, but it's our ability now to take that to market to enable their customers, our collective customers, around their sustainability journey as well,” Ament said.
“You can't replace that human interaction with technology”
Ultimately, Ingram Micro’s strategy rests on the premise that people and personal business relationships still underpin the business of IT.
“You can't replace that human interaction with technology. It starts foundationally with relationships,” Ament said.
“I was at dinner last night with a customer and he was talking about how they service this SMB market and they do it through partnerships, and they really lean on Ingram Micro.”
“And he said, ‘I’m with Ingram because of those relationships and the investments they've made in my business.’”
“That's the way we want to win, because we believe that that's sustainable and sticky when we've made those investments and focus on those relationships.”
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