Ingram Micro Debuts New Unified Xvantage Platform Experience at GCIS
The new platforms through Xvantage provides an all-in-one experience for partners.
Marie Rourke/WhiteFox Marketing
Launched late last year, Ingram Micro Xvantage aimed to offer a shared experience for associates, MSPs, VARs and vendors.
“One of the the challenges of this industry was always to obviously take complexity out, but create that experience and a frictionless path to purchase for different kinds of technology,” said Ingram Micro’s Sanjib Sahoo. “Today, the product and hardware have a different platform, a different way to buy, and cloud has a different way to buy. And so if you are a reseller or a partner, you buy everything technology, but you go to two different experiences, two different platforms, and there are different complexities in that. So that is something that has not been solved in the industry, how we merge this together to create a unified, seamless, blended experience, which includes visibility, searching, single card, agnostic card, managing subscriptions, end-to-end, procuring hardware, everything together to one single experience.”
The three new platforms through Xvantage provide an all-in-one experience for partners, he said.
“For the partners, we have a simplistic, holistic home page that is user friendly, personalized, customized and includes a view of everything, which means you can actually view hardware, software, subscriptions, everything in one platform,” Sahoo said. You can actually search an all-in-one dashboard so it’s an integrated catalog. You can search products, cloud subscriptions, everything in one single search, which is also intelligent AI driven in the platform based on the user.”
Wrapping the new platforms with AI means partners get insights, Sahoo said.
“They get recommendations,” he said. “They have a personalized view customized to what they want to see. All of this comes together into one single platform for the partners that we believe will create a new norm, a new experience for our partners, and take the complexity out. Xvantage was a more AI-driven digital ecosystem and experience platform for our partners. We launched for our vendors. But now as we go through it, we are reinventing and redesigning this whole experience in a new way for our partners.”
Photo courtesy: Marie Rourke/WhiteFox Marketing
At last year’s Ingram Micro Cloud Summit, the No. 1 request from partners was, “treat us as one customer,” Sahoo said.
“Why do we have two different platforms, two different experiences?” he said. “Treat us as one customer; have a single way to actually do this. And obviously we also took a lot of feedback about features and capabilities they wanted to see in the platform on the cloud side. So more and more of that was cloud.”
In addition, a lot of partners who already had Xvantage working on the hardware side wanted Ingram Micro to bring the cloud experience to the same platform, Sahoo said.
“We are moving from transacting in multiple different marketplaces in the world, in the industry, to interacting in one platform,” he said.
Photo courtesy: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock
Victor Baez (pictured), Ingram Micro‘s senior vice president of global cloud sales, said some companies are listening to the customer and the customer is saying, “Hey, there’s too much complexity.”
“Xvantage is now this incredible platform that doesn’t just manage the transaction,” he said. “It really guides you through all the processes and cycles before the transaction, anything as simple as quoting, giving you insights on what you’re quoting, to also aspects after the transaction, such as provisioning for cloud. You can’t just send an invoice over to a customer and not manage the life cycle. So the fact that our customers, our partners, can do that on a single platform is really second to none. Then on top of that, you layer in what only a company like Ingram in the channel can do because we are also an ISV, so there are also integrations right into this platform. There are tons of APIs they can leverage to actually run their business better.”
Ingram Micro is removing friction, driving “a ton of automation,” Baez said.
“But the coolest aspect, in my opinion, is you have three different sets of constituents all looking at the same data set,” he said. “So you have the vendor, the Ciscos of the world, our own associates and our own partners all talking to each other in real time, leveraging the same data set. So instead of the Cisco sales rep having to call us to call the reseller to understand the status of an order, it’s all right there in front of them, in real time.”
Top challenges facing partners include the complexity of doing business and keeping up with changes in technology, Sahoo said.
“There are a lot of challenges that partners have right now,” he said. “Our understanding is partners come here and they look at our innovation hub, where a lot of companies are coming and presenting their innovative solutions. We have keynote speakers who talk specifically about these, about innovation, driving fast solutions to market, how to actually create the culture, how to take complexity out and then bring this all together so that the partners can [learn it].
In addition, some partners at GCIS have doubled their business in the last couple of years with the surge in technology consumption spurred by the pandemic, Baez said.
“So now the question is, how do you keep driving growth in perhaps a slower-growth environment?” he said. “How do you capture the opportunities that are still growing triple digits despite your overall business maybe growing slower because you’re not having that pandemic surge in business. So this is where Ingram is making investments on top of the platform. You can also leverage all the augmentation we provide, all the technical support that we provide and all the services that we offer.”
Photo courtesy: Marie Rourke/WhiteFox Marketing
Sahoo hopes partners will log into Xvantage and use it because “this will make their lives much better.”
“Obviously they will take with them a lot of insights and how to really drive their business better, plan their business, be more profitable, take complexity out of their own business, have the right portfolio mix of where they want to put their big bets, and also understand the right trends of cybersecurity, AI, innovation, and what is happening in the industry so that makes them more knowledgeable,” he said.
Photo courtesy: monticello/Shutterstock
Sahoo hopes partners will log into Xvantage and use it because “this will make their lives much better.”
“Obviously they will take with them a lot of insights and how to really drive their business better, plan their business, be more profitable, take complexity out of their own business, have the right portfolio mix of where they want to put their big bets, and also understand the right trends of cybersecurity, AI, innovation, and what is happening in the industry so that makes them more knowledgeable,” he said.
Photo courtesy: monticello/Shutterstock
The Ingram Micro Global Cloud and Innovation Summit (GCIS) kicked off Tuesday with the unveiling of an all-in-one Xvantage platform for everything Ingram Micro.
The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace is sunsetting. In its place, the Xvantage platform will include a product platform, a cloud platform and an agile intelligence (AI) platform in a single digital experience.
With the Ingram Micro Xvantage platform, the distributor’s associates, customers and vendors can do more, sell more and grow more at scale.
GCIS Theme
The theme of Ingram Micro GCIS is “mindset, speed and solutions.”
Ingram Micro’s Sanjib Sahoo
“To drive more transformation for this industry, we need to figure out the right combination of speed of solutions to market, the right mindset and also focus on the experience,” said Sanjib Sahoo, Ingram Micro’s executive vice president and chief digital officer. “If you look at every single organization, especially with AI and ChatGPT, and technology changing every day, how do we, channel partners and the industry combat that?”
Innovation is Ingram Micro’s theme, but innovation isn’t just bringing “shiny technology” to the market, he said.
“It is primarily about, how do you create a culture of innovation?” Sahoo said. “How do you create the mindset? How do you make sure that you architect solutions, even with data? So digitization today is not just automation; it is experience driven. And this experience needs culture, which is the spirit and the mindset. And then the combination of this experience creates the speed to market. So the channel partners should really focus on experience, focus on solutions, and also not just on how many seats of cloud you need, but understand the gaps and problems of these organizations, and bring a spirit of innovation. That’s the key message that we want to drive home.”
See our slideshow above for more about the Xvantage platform and more from GCIS.
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