A reorganization of relationships with its customers and suppliers, based on a new digital tool. This is the last move of Ingram Micro, which he officially presented a few days ago Xvantage on the Italian market, the portal to which all partners in the peninsula are already required to register in order to continue working with the distributor.
Which as he recalled Hakim Mazili, Sales Core Director B2B & B2C of Ingram Micro Italia, has been able to put on the plate for over 40 years a remarkable capacity in terms of logistics and distribution on a global scale, with over 1.5 billion goods handled a year, a turnover of more than 54 billion dollars, more than 170,000 customers and 1500 vendors.
“We live in a complex market, our job is to anticipate market trends and tendencies. Over the years we have added numerous pieces to increase and enrich our portfolio. Now with this new digital platform we want to eliminate complexity at an operational level, avoiding the typical manual skills of corporate bureaucracy and the related inefficiencies, so as to allow our customers to obtain maximum efficiency in their daily business“.
Not just e-commerce
As added by GGiorgio Rovatti, director of vendor management at Ingram Micro: “Xvantage does nothing but take all the bureaucracy in force in managing customer relationships (quotations, projects, contracts, etc.), which is often regulated with chain mails, making the experience and communication simpler. Once completed, Xvantage will be a platform that will allow for direct correlation between three different types of players: i.e. distributor, vendor and customer. Xvantage is designed to have no gray areas, with clear information and no misunderstandings whatsoever. But, above all, it is not just a classic e-commerce site as before. Rather, it is a platform that allows you to create complex solutions, made for example of data centers, services, security. And there are currently no other distributor sites that allow you to do this. Of course, it is always possible to purchase individual products and solutions. Furthermore, the platform, thanks to artificial intelligence solutions, offers the possibility of having personalized insights and suggestions, which are very useful in particular for small-medium range customers”.
What can you ask ChatGPT? Download the 2023 guide: advice for use, examples and opinions
Strengths for vendors and partners
Xvantage will soon feature the ability to reserve slots to speak with Trend Micro technicians and engineers, as well as have full visibility of all upcoming renewals.
Another strong point of XVantage is the availability of offers constantly updated in real time via the cloud. Furthermore, as soon as the vendor-dedicated part is completed – by the end of the year – customers will also have the possibility to request a special offer or quotation directly from the vendors. On the contrary, Ingram Micro’s ambition is that when fully operational, every quotation requested by the customer will have an answer in 30 seconds, thanks to the rapidity of the connections guaranteed by the platform. This second part of Xvantage (to which a version of the platform for internal personnel will be added), should allow Ingram Micro to more easily approach small-sized vendors, also reducing the complexity associated with relations with the distributor for them. But even large vendors will be able to benefit from the full development of the platform, intercepting that segment of small resellers with whom they would otherwise find it difficult to get in touch.
In fact, the channel remains the horizon of Xvantage and Ingram Micro: “The registration process is completed within 24/48 hours, but it would be almost instantaneous if we didn’t take the time to carry out the necessary checks. In fact, we are committed to opening our portal only to ICT resellers”, concludes Rovatti.