During his recent visit to Mumbai, CRN India caught up with the architect of ‘Xvantage’ platform where India born Sanjib Sahoo, EVP and Global Chief Digital Officer, Ingram Micro Inc explained the journey of a digital immigrant company to become a digital native company. Ingram Micro went through different phases from a traditional phase to a bridge phase, powered by Data
The US based Sanjib Sahoo, EVP and Global Chief Digital Officer, Ingram Micro along with N S Bindra, SVP & Chief Country Executive, Ingram Micro India launched the much awaited digital experience platform ‘Xvantage’ for its partners in Mumbai. Xvantage is powered by a global real-time data mesh containing decades of operating and transactional data and is enhanced by AI and machine learning. Ingram Micro’s cloud marketplace is also integrated into Xvantage, allowing cloud solutions to be easily incorporated into solutions containing technology hardware, software and professional services.
According to Sahoo, Xvantage is not a website or an e-commerce platform. It is a completely machine learning and AI based self-learning digital ecosystem. “We have completely transformed our traditional way of business model with a different experience for our partners, vendors and associates,” he informed.
Comparing ‘Xvantage’ with the new age platform based businesses like Zomato, Amazon and Uber. Ingram is looking to give similar app based digital experience into the ICT distribution. Another big change, a $54 billion company helping partners to make their businesses better by taking the complexity out and removing the mundane tasks, ability to easily construct solutions and help their end customers to drive more outcomes and become a true partner.
“We are on a journey to transform our business to become a platform company. We are becoming an experience driven organization where we are bringing in best of engineers, from Amazon, Facebook, and Google so that we can move the engineering culture to do every weekly new features and modern technology at the same time and create a DG Ops group, which has the operational spirit, knows the business, and put both of them together to start this journey”, he added.
When CRN asked how the digital transformation journey of a global distributor looks different compared to other sectors. He said, “We support several different brands. It is very complicated and because we operate across the globe, everybody, every country has different systems. There are different complications, so we have to make sure we address all of the complexity. Risk management takes a big role because generally in large organizations, you don’t take a lot of risks, but instead of focusing on that 40% chance of failure, you have to focus on that 60% chance of success.”
Ingram Micro has been powering the world’s technology brands. Currently, it has more than 160000 partners and about 1500 vendor partners, The platform went live in the U.S. and Germany. Now in India, it has been rolled out to it partners across India. Furthermore, it has planned to launch it in about 10 countries by the end of the year. The platform will be rolled out worldwide by early to mid-2023. As the industry moves towards selling more solutions than tech, this platform will help partners to be more cognitive and creative and help them to create and capture value for their customers.
Lastly, Sahoo advises partners to focus on the customer and focus on selling solutions and not technology, business will come. We want our partners to be outcome based, solution based, because the consumption models are changing, other service models are changing.
Giving the local perspective of Xvantage to its partners, N S Bindra, SVP & Chief Country Executive at Ingram Micro India Limited added, “Our partners today are looking at how they can engage deeper with their customers. A partner who was into sales of system integration business so far, obviously never focused on selling laptops or selling cloud, but today what they’re looking at is how they can engage more with the customers, with an objective of solving customers problems and shifting the focus from technology selling to outcome-based discussions.”
