Ingram Micro has paved the way for the future of Distribution in the IT Channel with the launch of the first AI driven machine learning ecosystem for Channel Partners which they hope is going to change the nature of Distribution from transactions to interactions.
What is Xvantage
“Xvantage is not an ecommerce website, it’s not even a procurement portal. It is much more than this.” Those are the words of Sanjib Sahoo, Executive Vice President and Global Chief Digital Officer at Ingram Micro, who has been the driving force behind the development of Xvantage. “This is an intelligent self-learning experience ecosystem, not a website or a web shop – it’s a completely orchestrated ecosystem that is connected through a real time data mesh that takes into account all the data that we have collected throughout years and years of doing business, to drive intelligence to make every interaction meaningful and delightful for our channel partners”.
That’s a lot to take in, but Sanjib is not wrong. Logging in for the first time, you get the feeling that this is not your usual distributor website.
This is much more powerful, highly customisable, easy to use, fully integrated, resource driven with complete business and industry intelligence at your fingertips. As Ingram Micro put it, “This platform is a single pane of glass for everything.” Everything a Channel Partner needs from one point of contact.
This is something you may expect since it is built on the CloudBlue platform, the same platform that drives the award-winning Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace.
To explain some of the most powerful features, we need to look at other platforms that we use on a day-to-day basis.
The Netflix familiarity and customisation.
Using an example that Sanjib gives, we are all familiar with platforms such as Netflix and use them every day. However, his Netflix homepage looks different to mine because he watches different movies to me, which means he’ll have a different homepage, and we can access what we each want much more efficiently.
This is the joy of personalisation. The customised experience. I have narrowed down my experience to what I want to watch. I then get recommendations based on that customised experience.
Why can’t you bring that Netflix experience to distribution? As Sanjib puts it, “you might be a Channel Partner who only sells cybersecurity or a Channel Partner looking at data centre products. You can customise that user experience so that you only focus on what you want to see or use.”
This is something that Xvantage users notice straight away, and something different business user groups will appreciate. The site comes with a lot of customisable widgets, built for different business views.
If you are in customer services, for example, you might only want the order tracking widget on your home page, whereas sales teams might want open quotes or recommended products. You might want the latest news, services or solutions depending on what you sell. You change Xvantage for your individual needs within your business.
Recommendations
Taking the Netflix analogy further, you also get recommendations based on what you view or search for. So too does the algorithm within Xvantage learn what it can recommend to you based on your choices and purchases.
Sanjib goes on to say, “the recommendations partners will see are based on how they are using the platform, interacting with it. The idea for all Channel Partners is to save time and focus on building their business.”
On top of these intelligent recommendations, because Xvantage is an ecosystem, is an “Intelligent, machine learning and AI driven, self-learning infrastructure,” it is an extremely powerful business intelligence tool that provides recommendations, insights and advice based on Ingram Micro’s years of experience.
Ingram Micro has built a worldwide reach of 90% of the world’s population as a global organisation, to provide unique and tailored insight personalised to resellers. Therefore, resellers can use these global insights to help the local Channel Partner. As Sanjib says, “it’s not just a PowerPoint presentation, it’s real time insights embedded in the platform.”
Frictionless journey and connectivity
One of the fundamental aspects of Xvantage is that it’s seamlessly connected to all the Ingram Micro sites via a data mesh. As Sanjib says, “our experience for our Channel Partners, our Associates, our Vendors, are all interconnected. We are moving from a friction-full journey in distribution to actually having a frictionless journey where it’s seamless and meaningful.”
What does this mean in practice? Sanjib tells us, Ingram Micro is moving from a process of a simple transaction to a meaningful interaction. Xvantage has been launched to Channel Partners this March, but it is already being used internally by Ingram Micro’s Associates and will be launched to the Vendors in Q2, all of which will be tied together to a seamless ecosystem.
As Sanjib explains, “Our Channel Partners can interact with our Associates seamlessly and digitally. For example, if a Channel Partner is entering a quote on the platform, we can view it in our Associate platform and then we can be seamlessly interacting with them, saying do you need any help. Making that meaningful interaction with the Channel Partner – not a transaction.”
“Secondly for our Vendor Partners. If they are uploading a SKU or product information, they can interact with our Associates and our Channel Partners directly through this platform. So, this is the connection we are building, this entire ecosystem which is interconnected,” channel partners connected to associates and vendors.
Take out the complexity and make it more intuitive.
Xvantage has been created to mimic the way we use other platforms at home. You don’t need to learn to use Netflix, Google or eBay, they are intuitive. That is how Xvantage has been created.
“You don’t need any training,” said Sahoo. “It is simple to use, and everything can be done on the one platform. The more you use it, the more the platform learns because it is self-learning, so it provides better recommendations.
“It can provide the insights better, which insights are useful for our Channel Partner so that they can take the focus out of mundane tasks and can actually go and serve their customers better.”
So why did Ingram Micro launch Xvantage?
Channel Partners are moving away from only selling products and more towards selling solutions. Every solution sold has an average of 6 products. Ingram Micro wants to make it easier to move from only selling products to selling capabilities and solutions. The company plans to do this by making solution selling more intuitive and easier to navigate.
Bringing together all the platforms – hardware, cloud, services and subscriptions- all under one platform. However, these are different propositions and have different requirements. You can track hardware, but you can’t track cloud services. Cloud services need provisioning but what about other services?
Each of these have different needs and requirements. That’s what makes the ecosystem so powerful that Channel Partners can get these products and services onto one platform to make it easy for them to sell a complete solution.
Added to this is the value creation and value addition of offering everything under one platform. I sell a product, but as a Channel Partner I want to add a finance offering on top of it. I might want to add professional services. And because of the automation of the platform, these “value adds” are recommended to the Channel Partner at the point of purchase allowing for total solution selling.
As Sanjib tells us, “Let’s say you want to sell a hardware product and you want to add a warranty to the order. The warranty is right there, personalised at the moment of purchase, when our Channel Partner is looking at it.”
“It’s also about who is buying technology today. The CIOs and CTOs are not the only ones buying technology anymore. Because technology has changed so much that every department is buying technology. Each business user is buying technology.
Ingram Micro has to make the technology buying process easy and simple. Especially when technology is changing so quickly, and we have so many new vendors coming on every day. How do we make it easy and simple, through analysis and the content, for our Channel Partners to buy technology easier.”
What the Channel Partners have to say
As with any new platform, seeing is believing. With 43% of Ingram Micro’s trading customers now having transitioned to Xvantage in the UK, with the aim to have 100% of customers transitioning to Xvantage by the end of April, it seems that the customers like what they are seeing.
As Marc Lester, CEO at WWCS says, “The new platform is faster and more stable. I would suggest it reduces ordering times by around 30%”
In addition, its more intuitive… more people internally have adopted it now in comparison to the previous platform.”
From an ease-of-use point of view, it is more efficient to source product and more importantly any “add-ons” for the product, such as warranties.
It only took 10 minutes’ worth of training. It’s quite intuitive and the home page/dashboard allows me to a get the information about client deliveries more efficiently.
Khalil Hussain, Business Manager at Printerbase agrees, “As a pilot customer using Xvantage, I found that its efficiency was much better than the old portal and much more user friendly. Visibility of stock location, quantity and images of the SKUs are much better than any of our other distribution partner portals.”
It has made it much easier for my staff in operations, customer service and sales to get access to the information they need much quicker. This includes visibility of our order statuses, logging and tracking returns, seeing what our current credit status is at, tracking information on a visual map of the UK; all with a one click process so access to these important features is just one click away.
Regarding the switch over and set-up we didn’t have to do a thing! We were switched over to the new portal overnight and because it is so intuitive and user-friendly no training was needed at all. It is like using your new mobile phone once you get it out of the box, no training is needed!
The response from the staff at Printerbase has been nothing but good comments.
I would recommend it as a tool for any department as it is intuitive and customisable to whatever information you need to hand. The homepage is customisable to the dashboards and views that you need. As a sales tool it has all the information needed to help the salesperson sell with all extra value addons displayed clearly to be able to upsell and cross-sell any product. The information and user interface is easy to use and interact with.
Ingram Micro Xvantage is saving us time and helping us streamline the way we do our work,” says Anna Wesley, International Partner Alliance Manager – Distribution at SHI. “The data is served up in an easy to consume way, and provides impactful operational excellence holistically for all locations”.
The Future of Xvantage
This is just the beginning for Ingram Micro. This is a journey that will evolve further and has already evolved since the initial launch in September in America. Soon the Cloud Marketplace will be fully integrated and then services and other offerings will be integrated into the platform. Q2 should see the Vendor platform going live, so soon they will be frictionless across services, subscriptions, cloud and hardware.
And there are more integrations and features planned. As Sanjib says, “when we started we were bringing in new capabilities every 2 weeks, now there have been new features every week”.
Sanjib concludes “the main objective of Xvantage is to help our Channel Partners, almost like having a global company behind them, even in the UK, to help them get the same tools, insights and platform to make them powerful, so that they can serve their customers better.
“This is an ecosystem that we are building and a journey to really improve a new way of experience in this industry, bringing in the same experience I talked about in our personal lives, into distribution, to make it easy to take complexity out, create a frictionless experience and then improve the way they serve their customers. That entire ecosystem is powered by our data mesh AI and machine learning, seamless connectivity – that is the Xvantage ecosystem.”