Ingram Micro is meeting partners demand for a frictionless unified procurement platform with the launch of Xvantage
Ingram Micro is promising channel partners in the UK an easier, unified customer experience with the recent launch of the machine learning-powered Xvantage platform.
Or as CEO Paul Bay said: “We’re going to consumerise distribution, remove a bunch of friction and accelerate value for our customers and our vendor partners. The net of it is we really want to make it easier to do business with us.”
Instead of the disjointed procurement path of old, with partners having to buy different components from different systems, Xvantage offers the convenience of a unified ‘single pane of glass’ that allows partners to look at everything – hardware, software, cloud, subscriptions, services – through one platform, create quotes and orders combining multiple technologies and view tracking information in real-time.
This simpler path to purchase is backed by high levels of automation, real- time 24 x 7 insights and personalisation familiar to users of Netflix and other consumer platforms, such as proactive product recommendations based on past purchases and trending products.
The combination of Xvantage’s advanced capabilities and clear, intuitive interface is designed to reduce the amount of time partners spend tracking deliveries, managing subscriptions and carrying out other routine processes – some early adopters report time savings of as much as 50% – while also making it easier for partners to build solutions that, in Ingram Micro’s experience, typically bring together six complementary products and services.
Optimised for solutions
For Ingram Micro Executive Vice President and Global Chief Digital Officer Sanjib Sahoo, who has driven the development of Xvantage since joining the distributor 18 months ago, the ease with which technologies can be combined through the platform is a major benefit at a time when Ingram Micro, channel partners and end users are prioritising solutions.
“Everyone is looking at solutions. So the question for us is how can we make solutions selling much easier through a dashboard? How can we make meaningful solutions that are powered by data and machine learning and give them to our channel partners in a more seamless way?
“Today, bringing together hardware, cloud, services is a very asymmetric process; it’s very disjointed. You buy cloud a certain way; you buy services
a different way; you buy hardware a different way. For example, you can track hardware, but can you track cloud? It is a different experience, with provisioning and subscription management. How do you conjoin all these experiences through one platform to make it easy and intuitive for channel partners?”
Having a single pane of glass is helpful. So too are automation, AI and machine learning, which free up time for Ingram Micro and partners to have those more strategic, consultative discussions that underpin solutions selling.
Matthew Sanderson, SVP & Chief Executive UK, Ireland & EMEA Professional Services, adds that the aim of Xvantage is not to reduce interactions with partners but to change them from the mundane to something more meaningful.
“From our perspective, it allows our sales associates to be more productive. We’re asking them to sell more services, to wrap services around this and that – and the resellers are asking for that as well. It’s just a question of having the time to be able to do that. If we take away all the friction of doing business, they will have that time.”
Phased introduction
Xvantage is being introduced in phases over the next few months but by the end of Q2 it will be the sole way for partners to interface with Ingram Micro online.
For now, Xvantage is limited to hardware, including quoting, billing, subscriptions and renewals. There are also links to Ingram Micro’s Cloud Marketplace, which will become redundant when cloud solutions and services are fully integrated into the platform in the next few weeks.
Xvantage was launched in North America last September and is now active in 12 countries including the UK where it is already being used by 730 channel partners. All partners (active and dormant) are expected to move to it before Ingram Micro retires its old systems in Q2.
In addition to Xvantage for Partners and Xvantage for Associates, which Ingram Micro uses internally, it will soon be introducing Xvantage for Vendors, creating a complete eco-system that will enable partners, vendors and the distributor’s own employees to interact with one another through the platform.
This is not a website
At the UK launch of Xvantage, Sahoo repeatedly stressed that this was not another e-commerce website, but something entirely different, describing it variously as ‘an AI-driven digital twin’ and ‘an intelligent self-learning experience ecosystem’.
Created using building blocks from Cloud Blue, Ingram Micro’s independent marketplace platform for everything-as-a- service solutions including the company’s own Cloud Marketplace, Xvantage seamlessly connects different elements in the ecosystem through a real-time data mesh that extracts data from disparate systems and applies machine learning and intelligence to it.
Platform benefits include:
- Seamless interconnectivity: Channel partners can interact with Ingram Micro employees seamlessly. A reseller can submit a question that an Ingram Micro employee can view in the Associate Platform and respond to instantly. Likewise, a vendor partner uploading an SKU or other information can interact with Ingram Micro or a channel partner directly through the platform.
- Push recommendations: Intelligence and machine learning enable Xvantage to push recommendations to partners in real-time as they are using the system and at the moment of purchase. On one level, this is a convenient way for users to be made aware of other products and solutions in Ingram Micro’s vast offering. On another, it helps users add value. For example, when a reseller looks at a product in Xvantage, the system can proactively recommend a warranty, making it quick and easy for the reseller to bundle that with the hardware.
- Personalisation: Another aspect of the platform’s intelligence is personalisation of the interface for individual resellers based on their areas of specialism or expertise, creating a more streamlined, relevant experience. Xvantage’s algorithms will continuously learn about a reseller’s preferences based on previous purchases, just as Netflix does, and from answers to questions generated by the system. Users can customise Xvantage in other ways, too, for example by changing the layout of widgets or choosing the sorts of recommendation they want to see at the time of purchase, such as warranty-only or warranty and financing options.
- Insights: Real-time, 24/7 insights embedded within the platform and accessed via a dashboard give partners an in-depth view of business activities with their customers and with Ingram Micro. These insights help partners run their businesses better and make more intelligent decisions, while also simplifying tasks like the management of subscription renewals at scale with just a few clicks.
-
Content: In addition to insights and recommendations generated by the platform itself, Ingram Micro is uploading a cornucopia of content and information for channel partners to access. For Jennifer Anaya, Senior Vice President, Global Marketing, this is another of Xvantage’s key points of difference. “Traditional distribution websites just deal with the transactional side of things,” she said. “What we are providing is a way for salespeople to get real-time information on what’s happening with their customers, or for engineers to find information on what’s happening with certifications or on training that they could be eligible for or potentially new technologies about which they want to find out more. It’s going to reach across into our channel partners in a much more intuitive way than just the transactional side of the business. The other thing that’s embedded in there is credit information. We also have financial solutions that we’re suggesting and offering to our partners to consider, depending on the solutions they’re looking at.”
This is a journey
In his presentation, Sahoo made the point that Xvantage is just the start of journey – a journey that has no end.
Because the platform is self-learning, it is continuously refining and enhancing its recommendations and insights. At the same time, Ingram Micro development teams are constantly adding new features and functionality.
“When we started, we were bringing in new capabilities every two weeks. Now, we do it every week. We are constantly adding and enriching Xvantage’s capabilities,” he said.
“Over time we will look at how we can make interactions even more meaningful, for example with real-time dynamic insights. Today, we have static insights that don’t change in real-time. An example on Netflix would be 56% people liked this movie. Now, imagine I am watching a movie and the platform says 24 people are watching this movie right now and 12 people are liking it. That is dynamic insight, and over time we will bring that in, but it is a journey.”
Sabine Howest, Senior Vice President, Global Digital Operations, adds that
in the future there will also be more scope for partners to integrate their own solutions into the platform and to access a community of experts.“We do see an advantage, particularly around services, of using this as an ecosystem for partners as well. Because they can’t do everything themselves, they’re not able to be a specialist in every single field, we can bring together a community so that they can help each other. They’re asking for the ability to add their own services and they’re asking with whom can I partner in order to fulfil my end user’s total solution. Xvantage should become an ecosystem for them as well.”
ingram x4c_01
Be First to Comment