Multiyear financing models and digitalization becoming significant for partners

Ingram Micro helps business partners to operate more efficiently and successfully in the markets they serve. The company has a vast global infrastructure and it focuses on cloud, mobility, technology lifecycle, supply chain and technology solutions. Ingram Micro boosts the value of its position at the intersection of thousands of vendors, resellers and retailer partners by customizing and delivering highly targeted applications for industry verticals, business to business customers and commercial needs. In a chat with VARINDIA, Navneet Singh Bindra, Vice President and Country Chief Executive, Ingram Micro India tries throwing light on all these aspects-

The technology distribution landscape to support hybrid work

On the current technology distribution landscape, Navneet Singh Bindra Bindra says, “Hybrid work environment calls for a distributed, always on secure IT framework. It has multiple implications for technology distribution – client devices must be made available to distributed workforce, they should be able to securely draw upon the enterprise resources located centrally; work teams should be able to collaborate seamlessly from anywhere anytime over the open network, and many such tactical considerations. A truly hybrid work environment means that more people than ever before may be working from places with constrained infrastructure, and technology distribution has played crucial role in making hybrid work happen in true sense. As we move onwards, technology distribution has to play an equally important role in enabling longer term workplace strategies by providing sustainable, flexible and scalable end to end solutions which can be deployed quickly and easily.”  

The opportunities as the game-changer

According to Bindra, “We are starting to see an economic bounce back and hence an uptake in digital investments across multiple sectors, including agriculture. Strengthening of regulatory framework, global investments in digital infrastructure and a vibrant start up ecosystem are the added tailwinds. From IT perspective, growth is all around us, and opportunities are in abundance. Multiple game changing forces are at play here – changing customer behaviour in favour of digital experiential buying, focus of enterprises on IT enabled human innovation to create market differentiation, automation getting woven into the very fabric of organizations, and strong govt focus on next level of digital infrastructure. As a solutions aggregator and broad-range technology provider, we endeavour to engage in all drivers which are creating an IT driven landscape, enabling meaningful outcome driven solutions.”

The massive technological adoption

The large-scale technological adoption across sectors has changed the partner business model, apart from creating new business & engagement models. The entire channel ecosystem is moving towards an outcome based consultative engagement with customers, enabled by technical and financial solutions. “This means that partners are focussing more than ever on chosen customer segments with segment specific solutions, striving to make it easier for customers to own, deploy, run and scale the solutions depending on their business requirements. Partners are also engaging deeper with their customers to fulfil requirements across technologies, which mean they need to rely more on ecosystem to support them on skills they don’t possess. The true partnership model is becoming much more relevant now. Also, multiyear financing models and digitalization of their own processes is becoming significantly more important for partners now. Partners are also facing increasing demands of talent acquisition and retention, and they must contend with the issue of succession planning as more and more of customer requirements demand multiyear engagements,” explains Bindra.

Aiding partner transformation

Ingram Micro offers solutions needed to help customers embark on or accelerate their transformation journey. We are helping our customers modernize their infrastructure so they can scale on demand and respond quickly to business needs.

Bindra says, “Our existing investments in growth drivers have helped our partners derive more value out of us and hence better serve their customers. Professional services help partners delve deeper into their existing customer base and cater to customer needs for those technologies as well where they themselves do not have relevant skills, ensuring that they continue to remain partner of choice for their customers for all IT needs. Online engagement model has ensured uninterrupted supply of products and services to customers in the most trying of all pandemic situations. Automation has delivered quicker turnarounds to our partners and consistent service levels across varying demand levels.”

To Conclude

Bindra is hopeful about the value those investments have delivered to their partners, moving forward they plan to invest more heavily in similar areas to deliver superlative experience to their partners. In his concluding words he says, “The technology shift has led to a surge of new SaaS companies; organizations are looking for innovative methods to stand out and successfully transition from Software-as-a-Service to Value-as-a-Service. Delivering VaaS effectively requires a new kind of relationship between vendors and customers. It's more of a partnership in which both parties are empowered to support and hold one other accountable for accomplishing measurable outcomes that both parties have agreed on. The distribution ecosystem needs to invest in new age technologies and platforms to engage in and monitor customer experience under the new VaaS paradigm.”