Ingram Micro Xvantage: Transforming Technology Distribution

Ingram Micro is the business behind the world’s brands with the ability to reach nearly 90 percent of the world’s population. Their diverse solutions portfolio spans thousands of technology hardware and services options, as well as XaaS solutions. During an interaction with Vidushi, Navdeep Narula, Executive Director, Mobility & DigiOps, Ingram Micro India focused on the development and key features of Ingram Micro Xvantage, a self-learning digital platform that enhances user experience, operational efficiency, and personalized solutions for customers, vendors, and associates in the technology distribution industry.

What was the primary motivation behind the development of Ingram Micro Xvantage, and how does it differentiate it from existing platforms in the industry?

The technology distribution industry has come of age in the last couple of years, and the new digital era of doing business demands a refined approach towards digitalization. Thankfully, we were ahead of time in envisioning the idea of Ingram Micro Xvantage that can enable us to transform from being a traditional distributor to a Digital Platform Business. It’s a self-learning digital experiential ecosystem that creates a unified experience for customers, suppliers, employees, and partners.

Xvantage provides a multi-sided marketplace model for hardware, software, cloud, subscriptions, and services. It also creates Ingram Micro-specific bundles to enable XaaS subscription models to capture new revenue growth. Xvantage also enables our partners with insights-based go-to-market leveraging customer segmentation and deep learning. Our platform leverages the power of AI/ML to drive dynamic pricing, personalization, and recommendations. It creates a cloud-native platform strategy to optimize business flexibility and enhance the ability to pivot to new models. Moreover, Xvantage applies automation to create new operational efficiencies and capture more data using autonomous engines.

Some of the key features that differentiate Xvantage from existing platforms in the industry are:

• Hyper-personalized B2B Experience
  Every user – business owner, C-level, sales, technical, finance, purchasing – can personalize the widgets they see when they log into Xvantage. Personalization allows users to create a unique view that displays the specific data that is most important to them.
• Real-time Custom Pricing
  Xvantage stores millions of SKUs, unique margin profiles, and rebate agreements. Digital engines powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) receive data from multiple sources to create a product catalogue or quote in seconds.
• Instant Quotes and Orders
  The standard for generating complex quotes in the IT distribution industry is between eight and 72 hours. Xvantage can create similar quotes in 20 seconds to four minutes. This gives resellers and vendors a competitive advantage because they can close high-value deals much faster.
• One-Stop Solution Shop
  Xvantage allows resellers to create solutions that include Cloud subscriptions with hardware, software, and services in a single quote and automatically generate an order. This capability makes it easier for any reseller to offer high-value solutions to their end customers.
• Insights that Drive Demand
  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) provide insights and recommendations for related products for each opportunity entered in Xvantage. Insights based on customer preferences drive upsells and cross-sell opportunities that result in larger deal sizes.

Can you elaborate on how the platform’s intelligent and self-learning features enhance the user experience for your customers, vendor partners, and associates?

For Customers

• Learn everything tech via a rich content experience that delivers industry insights, technology trends, and comprehensive solution offerings.
• Partner better with easy access to personalized deals and insight on business trends.
• Build solutions using insightful suggestions and customized product bundling recommendations
• Manage business in one place on a customizable home page with access to current quotes, orders, renewals, and credit capacity or financing options
• Buy products with the ability to create, search and view all Ingram Micro quotes, a simplified checkout experience, and real-time order tracking and delivery ETAs

For Vendors

• Serve as the ultimate command center for all vendors.
• Build an intelligent and scalable approach.
• Drive rich and measurable outcomes—Effective, Efficient, & Exciting!
• Personalize experiences and custom fit around each vendor.

For Associates

• Provide a fully collaborative environment between ourselves and our partners.
• Take advantage of 45 years of operating experience and abundant data across various ERPs and other local, regional, and global data sources.
• Serve resellers, as well as solutions and service providers equally.
• Provide a more intuitive experience to support customers with growth opportunities and more ways to grow their profitability.

Xvantage offers a “single pane of glass” for managing products, services, and solutions. How does this approach improve operational efficiency for your partners?

Ingram Micro Xvantage™ is a fully digital and intelligent, self-learning global experience platform – much like those we use every day to hire a car, order groceries, or find a place to stay. This platform is being used by our customers, our vendor partners, and by our associates – each having their own unique view – to connect, collaborate, learn, and manage our entire business of products, services, software and cloud, and business solutions in one “single pane of glass.”

Xvantage will also serve as a naming convention for the self-learning digital engines include Subscriptions, Insights, Support (Customer Service), Quotations, Pricing and Tracking (Order Status & Tracking), and End- User functionality for storefronts, which we will call Performance. In other words, we are digitizing most of our processes to support our customers and vendors.

Business benefits include:

• Optimizing business flexibility through a cloud-native platform strategy
• Ability to easily pivot to new business models
• Creating new operational efficiencies
• Capturing more data using autonomous engines
• Enabling faster returns on investment

The platform’s intelligent and customized user interface, combined with our world-class personal touch, elevates and differentiates Xvantage’ s learning, partnering, and buying experience for everyone engaged. It allows Ingram Micro to transform from a legacy distribution to infinite digital business models and monetization.

Could you provide some examples of how Xvantage’s personalized user interface can help businesses make more informed decisions through industry insights and technology trends?

Our vision for our customers includes them being equipped to learn “everything tech” via a rich content experience that will deliver industry insights, technology trends and comprehensive solution offerings. We foresee better partnerships with them through easy access to personalized deals and insight into business trends. Our vision also includes building solutions by utilizing insightful suggestions and customized product bundling recommendations.

Xvantage’s Insights and Recommendations feature allows you to harness Ingram Micro’s data on customer experiences, vendor insights, and supply and demand signals to provide tailored recommendations, and growth opportunities, reveal blind spots, and expand the breadth and depth of your portfolio for incremental sales, and more. Reduce time and resources needed to gather and identify the correct data that includes your customers’ buying patterns, and technology and cloud trends unique to your business. Partners can take advantage of powerful insights fully integrated throughout the platform to make better purchasing decisions, find more products that customers will benefit from, and expand their portfolio with insights that support, inform, and accurately predict the next best move.

How does Xvantage facilitate better partnerships through access to personalized deals and business insights? Can you share any success stories?

It’s not a surprise that personalized deals and actionable business insights can be of great help to any of our partners. They can make smarter decisions with valuable insights immediately displayed on the dashboard when they log into Xvantage. Moreover, they can also make educated and strategic business decisions with the power of data, enabling them to pivot, expand and stay ahead of the curve for their customers.
We have had a large customers giving us feedback that thanks to the insights and recommendations on our platform – they have been able to identify opportunities for their business model and also some gaps that they are working to fill in order to maximise on their businesses.

What specific tools or features within Xvantage support the creation of customized product bundles and solutions for business-specific needs?

Ingram Micro Xvantage Configure to Order (CTO) is designed to save time. Prepare vendor-built and vendor-approved quotes within minutes, simplify the delivery process for custom orders, and effortlessly monitor order statuses with just a single click. This latest feature streamlines day-to-day operations by eliminating manual processes. The automation enables our partners to seamlessly convert configuration quotes into actual orders. They can discover selected deals and quotes from trusted vendors, and instantly send it to their customers. We understand that the customer experience matters—now our partners can provide customized solutions, at any volume!

Some of the key benefits include:

• Streamline transactions: Accelerated quote and order process Streamline transactions with automation, making the quoting and ordering process pain-free.
• Confidence in solutions: Build complex configurations aligned with the specs of the end customers and approved by the vendor, eliminating concerns about quality and compatibility.
• Efficient information access: Easily access and reduce time on tracking down information with serial numbers, contract details, shipments, and more.
• Eliminate manual processes: Say goodbye to manual processes and inefficiencies by leveraging the power of Configure to Order.

How does the platform’s customizable home page simplify the management of business operations, such as quotes, orders, renewals, and credit options?

Ingram Micro Xvantage is laden with a host of distinguishing features, functionalities and capabilities that can help our partners sell more, do more, and grow more! They can streamline business operations, reduce time to market, and quickly adapt to market changes with these Xvantage features.

Homepage

Customize the real-time home page dashboard to your business requirements. View key performance indicators of important business activities and operational process status. Select widgets from providing alerts to actionable AI-driven insights to get your job done faster.

Quote and configuration to order

• Offer a set of products that meet your customer’s specific needs.
• Collaborate with our team and vendors to create complex or special quotes on-demand, then convert them into orders automatically with a click of a button.
• Reduce SLA times to minutes. View all your quotes with discounts and special pricing automatically applied (where applicable).
• Operate more efficiently, save time and resources, apply proactive deal pricing, ensure compliance, and get immediate order confirmation.

Unified invoicing and payments

• Use the power of automation to seamlessly track and report on operational and financial data in one place and save time.
• Modern, automated control of license, subscription, billing and payment management.
• View hardware and cloud invoices and credit line allocations from a single screen so you can focus more on developing your solutions and improving customer experience and relationships.
• Quickly search for any invoice using the sort and filter options or based on data fields, such as invoice dates, due date, invoice number, reseller PO number, status or invoice type.

Subscription management

Partners can leverage this feature as per their business requirements to improve day-to-day operations, optimize accounting efforts, prevent licenses from expiring, and predict and track revenue. They can leverage co-terming, calendar billing alignment, and partial upgrades to make budgeting, billing, procurement cycles, and the entire subscription license renewal process much more efficient.

Orders & renewal tracking

This feature allows our partners to get real-time order status updates and quickly set a correct SLA. They can view previous purchases, existing order statuses, renewal statuses, and order tracking information all in one place. Moreover, this helps them secure their customer relationships using a self-service account, license, and contract management with auto-generated renewals and notifications to avoid gaps in service.

With the rise of digital transformation, how does Ingram Micro ensure that Xvantage remains at the forefront of technological advancements, continuously meeting the evolving needs of your partners?

Though the pace of technological advancements is at its peak in the digital era, we are taking every necessary action to make Xvantage truly futuristic. One of the core missions behind the idea of Xvantage has been to help businesses get ready for the digital era, and we all know that the digital era will be very dynamic and unpredictable in nature. Some of the key focus areas that will enable us to stay at the forefront and tackle the evolving needs of customers are:

• Consolidation of marketplaces into dominant B2B platforms
• Algorithmic & AI-driven digital commerce
• Customer & data-driven supply chains
• More finite customer segmentation
• Full-lifecycle engagement

We have already been quick to comprehend these trends and act upon it timely. We believe that our focus on these aspects will enable us to restrengthen our position as the industry leader.