At Ingram Micro ONE 2024, taking place this week in Washington, D.C., Ingram Micro announced the launch of both Ingram Micro Ultra, their reimagined loyalty program, and several upcoming integrations between hyperscaler marketplaces and the Xvantage platform.
Ingram Micro Ultra Launch
Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay announced the launch of Ingram Micro Ultra during his keynote presentation. Ultra is a reimagined loyalty program for Ingram Micro partners, building on the foundational elements of the exclusively cloud-based program of the same name launched a few years prior.
“Ingram Micro Ultra is a broader loyalty program for all Ingram Micro, not just the cloud, and it’s for all the partners,” says Sanjib Sahoo (pictured right), EVP and chief digital officer at Ingram Micro. “The idea is that this is a loyalty program where we reward partners based on loyalty, and the higher level you are, the more benefits you will get. It’s more like an airline frequent flyer program. And the idea for the platform is to bring everything to one platform, one ecosystem. It’s building digital points and loyalty.”
As far as new benefits MSP partners can expect to see from the Ultra program, Sahoo says, “MSPs can leverage the platform to learn more about their business. Some MSPs do not realize that they have so much data in the platform, which is also cleaned, massaged, and AI-driven to help them grow their business better. We encourage them to come to the platform more through the program, which means that everybody as MSPs can look at, for example, which products are working and which are not. They can look at new ways to optimize the market. They can look at efficiency, which can free up time and money for them to grow their business. It’s all intertwined together in the platform.”
Ultra’s Goals, Benefits, and Tiers
Of Ultra’s goal, Bay (pictured right) says, “We want to incentivize you and give you more ways to grow your business, because we want you to partner more deeply with us. This is early stages, as we’re launching this right now, but you’re going to get things that like personalized business intelligence data. You’re going to get targeted insights and trends, things like buying behavior and analysis. So think of this as not just a rewards program, but a true loyalty rewards program that we’re focused on. Instead of having six different incentive programs from six different vendors like our partners had previously, we’re creating one place, on a global instance, to be able to come in and help manage all of those different incentives. We want to help you define how you can do more with us in the future and free up your time.”
Ultra is a three-tiered loyalty program, offering the following benefits:
- Real-time business trends, allowing partners to gain visibility into market trends
- Buying behavior analysis and premium insights, giving MSPs advanced analysis of purchasing patterns and operational data
- Informed decision making, thanks to real-time, critical data
The three tiers are Essential, Advanced, and Elite. Partners are sorted into tiers based on their performance, engagement level, and loyalty. Elite status will be awarded to members of Ingram Micro’s SMB Alliance and Trust X Alliance. Ultra is available now in the U.S. and set to expand worldwide in 2025.
The Xvantage Advantage
Xvantage is Ingram Micro’s AI-powered platform, designed to drastically reduce the amount of time MSPs spend ordering and renewing products for their clients. During ONE’s opening keynote, Sahoo discussed the ever-growing market for hyperscaler markets, which allow MSPs to buy and sell cloud products and services at scale.
To capitalize on this booming industry and offer their partners the most seamless marketplace experience possible, Xvantage will be integrating with several hyperscaler marketplaces, starting with AWS. AWS’s marketplace is already fully integrated with Xvantage and can be shopped now.
As for Ingram Micro’s goal with this integration, Sahoo says, “The first thing is to take friction out of the buyer journey. [We wanted our partners to] have a consolidated buying journey so that [they] can build complex solutions end-to-end, keeping the end user commit levels—that means we are really building a one-stop shop for the platform. Before, if you went to the hyperscaler markets, you were buying in isolation from one of them. You could either buy AWS or GCP or Azure, but here you can get access to all of them. But also, we have our insights, data recommendations, hardware, everything in that same platform with seamless integration. We are bringing everything into an ecosystem. That’s the whole advantage that our partners will get.”
As for what integrations are next, company executives say they will come “in the months ahead.”
Learn more about Xvantage from our coverage of Ingram Micro 2023.
Upcoming Growth Tracks
Ingram Micro also announced the upcoming introduction of new growth tracks within their platform. The first growth track, Xvantage Enable, will focus on educating, training, and informing partners about AI. The goal is to help accelerate AI adoption among channel partners and their customers by educating them about the opportunities and challenges related to AI. Xvantage Enable is set to launch in Q4 2024, with additional growth tracks to come in 2025.
“We are excited to introduce Ingram Micro Ultra and debut our growth tracks as part of the continued daily innovation and value found within Xvantage,” says Jennifer Anaya, senior vice president, Global Marketing at Ingram Micro. “Launching Ingram Micro Ultra marks another milestone in our journey to become aggressively digital while remaining amazingly human.”
Looking forward, Ingram Micro will continue optimizing and expanding their platform, with the goal of making sure their partners have the tools they need to reach their full potential. On their roadmap looking forward is studying the data on adoption, tweaking the platform to better help their partners, and gradually expanding to other countries.
Photos taken by Ingram Micro.
