7 Trends Impacting Ingram Micro Partners: Marriage of AI, Data Looms Large
Are the distributors and cloud hyperscaler going to be friends in the long term?
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Partners over the course of Ingram Micro One echoed an idea that Ingram executives were saying all week: Artificial intelligence is nothing without the data that powers it.
Ingram chief digital officer Sanjib Sahoo argued that AI has existed since 1957. While the current hype around AI comes in part from consumerized products like ChatGPT, Sahoo pointed to the how the data environment has evolved to better enable AI.
“The industry is ripe and prepared for AI because the data has matured. You can actually extract data from your legacy. You can harmonize data on the fly. You can create massive data sets for you to get intel to have that power of AI, which was not there before,” Sahoo said in a panel last week.
While some partners shared that they are selling solutions like Microsoft Copilot, many of them shared that they are engaging clients in projects around how they are gathering and partioning data.
“It is important to prepare the data so that it can be properly leveraged and not exposed inappropriately to people. Data is really the lifeblood of AI,” said Dave Poggi, who serves as CEO of Software InsITe, a partner firm that consults on and integrates application solutions.
Poggi and other partners said they expect AI projects to continue past 2023, as the data continues to mature.
And that focus fits well for Software InsITe, which Poggi said is working to more closely align align with the business objectives of its clients.
“Our focus is on trying to move closer and closer to the strategy of the company — the strategy for their applications and their processes. That’s going to drive what they need from a network and hardware and licensing perspective,” Poggi told Channel Futures. “And it also drives what do we need to integrate and bring together? What solutions are out there? How do we help integrate those? How do they analyze and track their business? What are the KPIs and the benchmarks they use to make sure they’re achieving the results they need?”
Poggi noted that company conversations about AI transcend the IT department.
“Absolutely every one of our clients at the executive – if not the board – level are saying, ‘What are we doing around AI? ’ In the spring it might have been IT that was starting to think about it. By this fall it’s already reached the board level. If they didn’t have it then, they have it now. It feels like it’s going to drive the bus for quite a while.”
And that top-down approach is the right one, Poggi said.
“A lot of times we look at IT technologies, and they come in and they infiltrate, and things change at a lower level,” he said. “It’s clear with AI that it’s not going to work if it’s just a IT initiative. You’ve got to have the people on board understanding, and the change management has to be a part of what you do. Everybody wants to disrupt their market, but you might disrupt your company.”
For that reason, Software InsITe has made AI-related training and education a point of emphasis across its entire team, rather than just having one person become the expert.
Sahoo in a keynote envisioned a complimentary relationship between humans and AI as AI continues to proliferate. The mindset that AI is going to replace humans en masse comes from assuming that AI is first and foremost about automating processes, he said.
Instead, Sahoo said partners should focus on using AI to enhance customer and employee experience, rather than moving straight to automation.
“You have to use AI and generative AI in your business and on your business. One little thing at a time. Don’t go for big, fancy problems. Go for little problems. Focus on experience and automation will follow,” he said. “We all think AI is just automation, automation, automation. Use AI as a token for experience.”
Ingram’s Xvantage platform was the star of the show at Ingram Micro One, with the distributor demoing the new mobile app for the digital hub.
One of the ideas behind Xvantage – in addition to putting hardware, cloud and software portfolios on the same platforms – is automating more processes for partners.
Eola Technology Partners CEO Kevin Fraser said in a keynote interview that the Xvantage platform has freed up his people to on steps in the transaction process that historically took days. That timeline has decreased to minutes, Fraser said.
“Xvantage has removed that friction from the process. It has also added philosophy to the process,” he said.
David Frankland, managing partner of Cloud Managed Networks, said he wished he had addressed “those transactional pieces” earlier in the history of his company.
“Incorporating all the tools that are available to us as soon as we can and with the processes that we have. It’s important to help the whole company culture and mindset of employees, and it translates all the way down into your customers,” he said on a panel.
At the same time, some partners shared that they are working out their strategies for how they and their employees will use digital platforms like Xvantage. Although Xvantage can turn phone calls about quotes and orders into the click of the button, some teams have built inertia around an established process. And some of them say they need to have more strategic conversations before they build out their policies on the their digital platforms.
Security value-added reseller GuidePoint Security is eyeing such a conversation.
GuidePoint director of strategic alliances Kevin Caughman said he sees “embracing more of a B2B relationship” with Ingram as an important priority going forward.
“We have a dedicated team — an alias — that we send transactions through. You can scale up with bodies, but I think the B2B approach would be the way to go,” Caughman told Channel Futures. “We’ve had some preliminary conversations about how we could integrate our systems, get invoicing and things like that through a B2B method, but we haven’t really done that yet. To me, that’s really the next phase of our relationship: automating the actual transaction part of our relationship.”
Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay made a point of answering a question many have people have been putting to him: Are cloud hyperscalers and their marketplaces friend or foe to the distributors?
While Bay said the answer may depend, it also is ultimately “yes.”
On paper, AWS is absolutely a partner of Ingram’s. The cloud provider exhibited at Ingram Micro One, and AWS appeared on the keynote stage with Ingram executives to share how the parties are working hand in hand.
“Go back to the not-so-long ago: cloud. There were people standing on stages like this saying, ‘Go fire all your salespeople and hire only business people, because everybody’s being disintermediated; because the cloud providers are going to take everybody direct,'” Bay recounted in an on-stage Q&A. “OK, there was a sense of that, but really at the end of the day, it was about how we make sure that you’re adding value. I would say the hyperscalers are very big partners of ours and they continue to grow the opportunity.”
Bay drew a distinction between transactions, which he said cloud marketplaces do well, and “interactions,” which he said Ingram and its customers do well. He noted that the average solution Ingram delivers contains an average of six products and services.
“[Hyperscalers] have a very efficient marketplace and how to transact subscription-based technologies. But that’s not your value. Your value is much more than that transaction. You create the seamless solutions and services and again, wrapping your IP around that. That’s what your customers expect from you,” Bay told the partner audience.
It’s not news to say the broadline distributors have expanded beyond traditional hardware offerings in recent years, and a brief sampling of the partner attendees at Ingram Micro One confirmed that.
Take, for instance, Poggi’s Software InsITe, an application-focused partner that is sister companies with an MSP and IT reseller. Historically, the sister company would primarily have engaged with Ingram, while InsITe had less in common.
“Ingram isn’t just about hardware anymore. And it’s not just software SKUs; it’s solutions, and that’s our focus,” Poggi said.
Poggi said he had chatted with mobile computing provider Zebra Technologies on the show floor. While Zebra provides hardware, Poggi’s company enables such equipment with its application services and consultation around the cloud environment.
“You can’t afford to just do a component. You maybe have to go beyond your comfort zone and scale up, or maybe partner up to get to a point where you can really meet your clients’ needs,” Poggi said.
GuidePoint Security counts hundreds of independent software vendors in its portfolio. In addition to household name vendors, many of GuidePoint’s suppliers fit into more niche categories.
Many of the latter are aligning embracing distribution more, Caughman told Channel Futures.
“They need somebody that can help them with all the other things that maybe GuidePoint doesn’t need. I think as more and more of these cyber companies start growing up, they’re going to leverage distribution,” he said.
Channel Futures wrote last month about sales cycle delays technology advisor partners were reporting. A combination of macroeconomic concerns and new questions about AI solutions caused a slowdown in purchasing in the first and second quarters of 2023 for many customers.
And that problem is not specific to the technology advisor/agent space, it seems. Multiple VARs and MSPs said they saw friction in the first half of the year.
“There was this large pull-through/pull-forward in spend for 2021 and 2022. And we certainly felt a little bit of a step back in Q1 and Q2 of 2023,” said Ryan Overtoom, who leads Sikich‘s cloud and managed services.
Poggi said many customers hit pause on their IT purchasing decisions at the beginning of the year. He pointed specifically to concerns about inflation.
However, Poggi, Overtoom and other partners agreed that they are seeing a pickup in activity as the sales cycle returns to normal.
“You can have a pause, but IT is the lifeblood of a lot of their activities already, so they can’t really just go ahead and shut down the pumps,” Poggi said. “It doesn’t work. They can try to pause and we don’t blame him. I think we’d be growing as an industry even faster if there was some stability in the market.”
Channel Futures wrote last month about sales cycle delays technology advisor partners were reporting. A combination of macroeconomic concerns and new questions about AI solutions caused a slowdown in purchasing in the first and second quarters of 2023 for many customers.
And that problem is not specific to the technology advisor/agent space, it seems. Multiple VARs and MSPs said they saw friction in the first half of the year.
“There was this large pull-through/pull-forward in spend for 2021 and 2022. And we certainly felt a little bit of a step back in Q1 and Q2 of 2023,” said Ryan Overtoom, who leads Sikich‘s cloud and managed services.
Poggi said many customers hit pause on their IT purchasing decisions at the beginning of the year. He pointed specifically to concerns about inflation.
However, Poggi, Overtoom and other partners agreed that they are seeing a pickup in activity as the sales cycle returns to normal.
“You can have a pause, but IT is the lifeblood of a lot of their activities already, so they can’t really just go ahead and shut down the pumps,” Poggi said. “It doesn’t work. They can try to pause and we don’t blame him. I think we’d be growing as an industry even faster if there was some stability in the market.”
Ingram Micro partners say artificial intelligence (AI) is driving customer conversations and projects in 2023. Moreover, those AI conversations are invariably leading into the topic of data.
The distribution giant hosted its Ingram Micro One event in Nashville last week, drawing a crowd of suppliers and channel partners. That meeting of the minds helped paint a picture of the challenges and opportunities that that channel partners face.
The opportunity that dominated conversations was generative AI, which McKinsey estimates will turn into a multitrillion market by 2032. Popular large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are helping drive intrigue in the enterprise IT world.
However, a key message came loud and clear out of Ingram Micro One that improved data is helping create this market.
IBM’s Madison Gooch
“Remember the story that everybody told about 15 years ago, where you went into every client and people were like, ‘Data is your competitive advantage. You need more data. You need to get your data estate in motion.’ Well, we have reached it, folks,” said Madison Gooch, director of Watson applications and solutions at IBM. “We’re at the frontier. Data is going to be people’s competitive advantage.”
Partners shared how they’re engaging with customers to prepare their data for artificial intelligence. They also shared their insights on automating their processes and the lengthening of the sales cycle. In addition, Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay fielded the question of whether or not the distributors and cloud hyperscalers are getting along with one another.
In the slideshow above, view observations from Ingram Micro partners who attended the recent event about technology, sales and distribution.
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