Ingram Micro is rolling out a new phase of its Ingram Micro Xvantage platform. The first phase was rolled out starting in September 2022 and is designed to be a single platform that unifies the buying and support experience for channel partners. The new phase extends the platform to Ingram Micro’s vendor partners, enabling their entire catalogs to be ingested by the Xvantage.
Ingram Micro calls Xvantage “our digital twin.”
The term digital twin has a lot of meanings out there in the tech marketplace right now. Generally it’s a digital representation of something that exists in the physical world. Often it’s a simulation that incorporates artificial intelligence providing people with insights into the physical world that it represents.
What Does Ingram Micro Mean By Digital Twin?
“Everything that you could do with Ingram Micro today, you could do with Xvantage digitally,” Sanjib Sahoo told ChannelE2E. Sahoo is executive vice president and global chief digital officer at Ingram Micro. “It is a platform enabled by machine learning, and it’s an ecosystem for our channel partners – our customers, our associates, and other vendors.”
Sahoo explained that Xvantage is built on a real time data mesh (which is basically a new kind of decentralized infrastructure for data management that makes data more accessible and available to business users). The terms digital twin and data mesh are both very hot in enterprise data management, analytics, and AI circles right now.
What Xvantage Offers Ingram Micro Vendor Partners
New vendors entering the Ingram Micro ecosystem can “self-onboard,” by following steps provided by the system.
Xvantage can ingest vendor catalogs using machine learning and other artificial intelligence to process these catalogs and map taxonomy to industry standard taxonomy. Sahoo said this process is almost instantaneous.
The quick upload of catalogs lets customers immediately be able to search for skus and transact with vendor partners.
Xvantage also provides that “single pane of glass” for vendor partners – a dashboard that lets vendor partners see all their activity including key performance indicators (KPIs).
When is Xvantage Available for Vendors
Ingram Micro has been piloting this platform with several vendors and will roll the platform out to vendors on May 1 in the United States. Then it will roll out the platform to Canada and Germany. From there Ingram Micro will expand the platform across all geographies by the end of this year.
Key takeaways about Ingram Micro Xvantage for the IT vendor community:
- A full dashboard of real-time visibility into their Ingram Micro business
- Personalized interaction for their account teams with dedicated resources and experts, including Ingram Micro’s certified engineers, demand planning and marketing teams.
- Channel visibility to learn from and action data insights, including performance and velocity for real-time business planning.
- Document Hub (catalog ingestion pipeline) where data is uploaded from any format or taxonomy and automatically formatted, categorized, and translated into an industry standard SKU format that customers can immediately search, quote and order from.
- More prescriptive and targeted marketing efforts enabled including timely campaigns and promotions.
