Ingram Micro CEO on the importance of specialized skill sets in the channel

Paul Bay, Hope McGarry and Diego Utge speak to CRN Australia during a visit to Sydney.

Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay believes the distributor’s partners need to have specialized skill sets to be successful in today’s current market.

He said to enable endpoint solutions, advanced specialties and cloud, Bay highlighted the importance of enhancing and augmenting both their customer and vendor skill sets.

Speaking to CRN Australia, Bay explained their average product deployment has five different products and services, so the complete solution is important.

“In today's world, because of the complexity of how technology is deployed at that end business, there's different ways to deploy a solution. Is it on prem? Is it off prem? Wrapping that all together,” he explained.

“Many instances, on a global basis, our customers need to have their specialized skill sets, and if they're deploying that entire business, generalists are no longer really what we're seeing.”

Bay noted that the distie is seeing more people having specialized skill sets.

“They can lean on Ingram Micro both of our customers and our vendors to augment that business outcome that's out there,” he said.

“We've heard from them that it's important to add additional certifications, add additional competencies, add additional feet on the street, whether it's around certain technologies, whether it's around vertical markets, whether it's around other end business opportunities.”

Diego Utge, EVP and group president of Asia Pacific at Ingram Micro said partners and customers need to have the specialization and knowledge of the technologies and they help on their vendors route to market.

“That's where concept of certifications, channel enablement, recruiting for specific technologies that comes into play,” he explained.

“It's a very fragmented business where specialization – aside from what we do very well, which is supporting credit facilities, logistics – makes distribution attractive to the ecosystem.

“As Bay mentioned, five products in average per invoice. You truly see there that aggregation is our forte, and that's how we continue going to market and enable more technology vendors as well as channels,” he added.

Ingram Micro Australia’s managing director, Hope McGarry explained the strengths the distributor has to offer their customers in terms of skill sets.

“What we're doing is just aligning our skill set and our capability to where we see the opportunity for our customers. That's a really important piece that distribution can do,” she explained.

McGarry said Ingram Micro sits at an interesting intersection of the market.

“We work across so many vendors, and we're working with so many customers and partners each and every day,” she explained.

“We get very unique insight into where the partners are getting momentum, so which technology stacks and which solution sets are driving the market and are in hyper growth.”

Because of that, McGarry noted the distie is able to identify those opportunities and work with the partners.

“We can invest ahead of the curve, make sure we've got the right expertise and skill set to help get ahead of it and to augment our partner capabilities as well,” she said.

McGarry used the example of cyber security, which she said is growing rapidly.

“I was on the road a few weeks ago presenting and we know that the cyber resiliency piece is absolutely critical,” she said.

“Our partners are being asked to do more in that space. It's at the board level, conversation Cyber Risk and Insurance that we're seeing.

“We know that we need to have capability internally to be able to support our partners, whether it's augmenting capability or white labelling for them.”

Xvantage adoption down under

Ingram Micro launched Xvantage in April 2024, with just over a year into this journey, McGarry said they have more than 5,500 partners in their ecosystem onboarded.

“That's a substantial number of partners that are leveraging the platform each and every day,” she said.

The partners and customers are using the platform to “do more, sell more, grow more, to free their teams up, to be able to focus on higher value work, and for them to be out talking to their end users and driving value”.

McGarry said they’re “proud” that they’ve got that many customers already on board.

"It talks to the fact that, typically, in Australia and New Zealand, we are early adopters,” she explained.

“That's a good thing. Over 3 million searches on the platform today, which is also impressive, and over 150,000 orders have been placed.

"Given that we only launched in April of last year, the trajectory is strong. Then anecdotally or qualitatively, the feedback from the partner ecosystem has been exceptionally positive.”

Views on the APAC market

Travelling around the APAC region for a couple of weeks, Bay said Australia is one of the disties “top countries” and that excites him.

"What we're doing and what McGarry and team are doing around how we can help enable that and be a true business partner to our customers as they're out solving for business challenges and user challenges and those outcomes that are out there,” he said.

"We can do that at scale, both from a local level, a regional level and a global level.”

From his point of view, he sees a lot of movement within the APAC region.

“The overall opportunity and the diversity that happens in this region, from a melting pot of from a global perspective.

“There's a lot that goes on in this region, so it's the forward thinking and the opportunity to continue to grow,” he explained.

Bay said there is a reason why APAC is 27 percent of the company’s revenue.

“We made those investments. One of the differentiations we talk about is investing ahead of the curve, and that was what we did around Asia Pacific, specifically, and more importantly, of what we've done around Australia,” he added.

McGarry explained to CRN Australia that her team gets her excited and gets her out of bed every day.

“I have an amazing team, and I think leading people is such a privilege,” she said.

“Leading my team and supporting our customers to be successful and our vendors is really the motivation. We truly are here to support our customers and our vendor success and that's really all the motivation that myself and the team need.”

Seeing all the wins keeps McGarry and her team motivated.

“When we see our vendors growing, we see our partners winning, and we've played a role in that, it's exceptionally rewarding to see that,” she explained.

“We live, breathe, eat and sleep it, the challenges and the wins. We celebrate a lot of that with our customers when we see them have success. That's the thing that motivates me the most. It's intrinsic motivation.”

Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to the Ingram Micro ransomware attack.