Looking to simplify the customer experience for its partners, Ingram Micro announced that its Xvantage platform, first rolled out last year, will serve as a single unified platform for everything – hardware, software, and cloud transactions, as well as a business intelligence/AI dashboard offering business and market insights.
Previously, Ingram Micro partners had to do their cloud transactions and their technology solution transactions separately.
Ingram Micro executives delivered the news at the inaugural Ingram Micro Global Cloud & Innovation Summit, an event that brought together 2,200 resellers, managed service providers, other technology service providers and IT vendors from around the world.
What Partners Told CEO Paul Bay
“There was one common theme I heard in every conversation that I had (with partners),” said Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay in his keynote address, recounting the conversations he had during his first year in the top job. “Treat me like one customer…95% of our Ingram Cloud customers are also buying technology, other technologies, services from Ingram Micro.”
But those customers were showing up in two different instances in Ingram Micro’s business units.
Xvantage is now unifying that customer experience as the only platform partners/customers will need. With that in mind, Ingram Micro will also be sunsetting its Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace.
Ingram Micro Chief Digital Officer Sanjib Sahoo offered a demo of the unified Xvantage platform during the event, showing that a partner could add hardware, software and cloud services to a single shopping cart.
But Sahoo’s message was as much about adopting the right mindset and approach to digital transformation as it was about the technological capabilities of the Xvantage platform.
“Digital transformation is not about technology,” Sahoo said. “The heart of any successful digital transformation is not technology. The heart is human, mindset, spirit.”
What Capabilities are in Xvantage?
According to Ingram Micro, the new Xvantage platform now offers all of the following:
- An intuitive homepage experience that serves as a dynamic command center, with easy-to-use widgets and personalization capabilities, enabling partners with a comprehensive view of quotes, orders, renewals, subscriptions, business insights, recommendations and a variety of marketing tools to drive growth and success.
- A unified product catalog with hardware, software, cloud and subscriptions all discoverable in a comprehensive, contextual search experience.
- A new and improved path to purchase seamlessly guiding customers from product discovery to cart to checkout, offering a frictionless and convenient shopping experience, replete with contextual recommendations, vendor mandatory validations and end customer information.
- A zero touch ordering experience with instantaneous status and tracking, empowering customers with real-time updates and detailed insights, providing transparency throughout the fulfillment and provisioning journey.
- A fully automated subscription management experience providing convenience and control, and offering partners easier management of recurring subscriptions, and a variety of flexible customization options from co-terming to partial upgrades to auto-renewals and more.
- AI-driven insights to empower vendors and partners with data-driven analytics, surfacing market trends, end customer behaviors, and actionable intelligence.
- One-touch quote to price to configure to order capabilities enabling customers to manage complex multi-line quote to order business flows.
Xvantage Background
While the unified platform was introduced at the Ingram Micro Global Cloud & Innovation Summit this week, the platform itself has been under development for longer than that. In the first quarter this year the U.S., Canada, and Germany were the first countries to transition to Xvantage. Ingram Micro reports that additional countries including India, Spain, and the UK are in the process of upgrading to the platform.
As of early May 2023, Ingram Micro Xvantage is now available to selected vendors doing business with Ingram Micro in Canada, Germany, and the United States. More information on that here.
What Partners Like about Xvantage
At a press conference organized by Ingram Micro, three partners talked about their experiences with the Xvantage platform so far, and all were pleased at how much time their teams had saved in putting together quotes and deals with the new platform.
Sahoo said Ingram Micro is in the process of studying the time savings internally, but the distribution giant does not yet have any quantitative metrics on time savings to share publicly.
Nonetheless, partners were happy with the improvements.
Bill Blum, president and owner of managed service provider, Alpine Business Systems, said that his staff called the platform “a serious game changer. This is an Amazon-like experience.”
Similarly, Joanna Muzzatti, CEO of Microsoft partner Commerx, said that her team reported that it takes less than half a day to do the things that used to take them a week.
The Xvantage Roadmap?
The unified platform was the big announcement, but Ingram Micro executives hinted at future developments. Jennifer Anaya, chief marketing officer, said that the company is creating a community engine on Xvantage to help partners work together and go to market together.
