Kirk Robinson (left), Ingram Micro’s EVP and president, North America, and CEO Paul Bay (Photo courtesy of Ingram Micro)
At the Ingram Micro ONE 2023 partner conference, the distributor revealed a new mobile app for its Xvantage platform and a new staff augmentation service.
“Experience” was the dominant theme at this week’s Ingram Micro ONE 2023 partner conference in Nashville—creating a frictionless experience, from vendors to distribution to MSP partners to employees to end customers that fuels growth.
Driving that experience is Xvantage, Ingram Micro’s digital twin and business platform that launched last year. Xvantage was designed to bring a B2C experience to the B2B tech industry, while delivering AI-based personalized insight on trends and opportunities that all stakeholders in the channel ecosystem can capitalize on. Xvantage now offers Ingram Micro’s complete portfolio, including hardware, software, professional services, and advanced solutions, along with real-time configuration-to-order and quote-to-order capabilities.
During a press panel earlier in the day, MSP partners who have been using Xvantage reported greater efficiency and time savings, allowing them more time to focus on customer success and moving the business forward.
“With our people, Xvantage, and with the immense power of our data and business resources, it’s our mission to deliver to you an efficient and personalized experience, to remove friction from your business and help you create more value for your end customers,” Kirk Robinson, Ingram Micro’s EVP and president, North America, told attendees in the opening session.
Since the launch of Xvantage, Ingram Micro has pledged to continually and incrementally make that experience better. At the conference, Sanjib Sahoo, EVP, chief digital officer, and the lead behind Xvantage, previewed the new Xvantage mobile app, which will be available for both Android and iOS by the end of October.
Sahoo said that the mobile app is a continuation of providing the best experience anytime, anywhere, and something partners started requesting at the Ingram Micro Global Cloud and Innovation Summit in May. Now, MSPs can conduct all their transactions without being tied to the desktop. ONE Conference attendees were offered early access to the app.
Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay said “opportunity is the word” over the next 12 months for partners who take advantage of Xvantage’s capabilities. “We are on this journey to become a platform company, moving from transaction to interaction,” he said, noting that well over 100,000 partners globally are already using the platform. “It’s about how do we provide the best experience anytime and anywhere. Pretty simple.”
Bay also addressed the customer lifecycle journey and the industry trend of moving from monthly recurring revenue (MRR) to annual recurring revenue (ARR). “It’s not just around the three-letter acronym buzzword. It’s about how do we have a more predictable business for all of us in the future and making sure we’re driving to free up that time and get that annual recurring revenue into the system so we can focus on how we’re servicing, ultimately, the partner in the long run.”
One new service for partners announced at the conference was Staff Assist, a technical staff augmentation service to help address the hiring challenges and skills gap MSPs are struggling with. “Essentially, it’s an Ingram-badged individual and Ingram device, but they can onboard them into their solution set and their PSA and their platforms and [they] become an extension of their team,” explained Paul Hager, Ingram Micro VP of services.
With the service, MSPs can request a Level 1 or 2 tech or network administrator, and Ingram will vet and field personnel for the MSP to interview and select. Staff Assist is provided as an annual contract, billed monthly on a flat rate per role. “We’ve gotten a lot of interest already on day one and we look forward to having this as another path to help our partners that are struggling with that talent gap so that they can help accelerate their business,” Hager said.
Also new is the ability to connect and book a meeting with both Ingram Micro’s Cybersecurity Center of Excellence and the Data Center & Hybrid Cloud Center of Excellence team members via Xvantage. The two Centers of Excellence provide “a digital way of connecting multiple pieces of the technology journey for our partners,” said Cheryl Rang, sales category leader. Ingram has a “team that’s just writing content, building collateral, working on partner enablement, on what’s happening out there. They may have a talk track around AI, they may have a talk track around hybrid cloud or cost optimization … things that are happening in the industry that a partner may say, ‘I don’t know where to go to find out what that means or why it’s relevant to my business.’” The Centers of Excellence are now where partners can go for that thought leadership.
Finally, wrapping up day two of the conference’s general session, keynote speaker Tiffani Bova, whose latest book The Experience Mindset: Changing The Way You Think About Growth, reinforced the theme of experience. “If your experience that you’re providing with your associates and your people and your teams and your vendor relationships isn’t strong, it doesn’t matter what products you sell,” she told the audience.
While the focus in recent years has been on improving customer experience (CX) to fuel growth, Bova’s latest research as global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce shows that the employee experience (EX) is equally important but has been neglected. “The number one stakeholder for every business pursuing long-term success is not the customer right now. It is the employee,” she said. Why? “The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job,” she stressed.
Improving EX involves addressing people, process, technology, and culture, she explained. As a first step, she recommended focusing on process. “The average enterprise uses thousands of apps. Only 29% are integrated. Who bears the brunt of that? The employees. You would never ask your customer to open a tab to find out about a product, open a tab to order the product, open a tab to put in the credit card information, open a tab to do the shipping information, and then open a tab to track your order.”
Reducing the friction required to do their jobs is one step toward adopting an experience mindset, she said. “Ask your employees, what processes are broken? What processes make no sense? Where is there opportunity for us to reduce their effort to do their job, to improve the experience that they have?”
MSPs that get both CX and EX right going forward will experience faster growth, she concluded.
