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Spierkel, Ingram Venture ForthDATE: 25-OCT-2007 Ingram Micro CEO Greg Spierkel joined Ziff Davis Enterprise Editorial Director Mike Vizard at VentureTech Invitational for a recent Changing Channels podcast. A transcript of that interview follows.
Mike Vizard: The first thing I thought I'd ask you since we're here at your event is, you know, there's still a lot of choices among the distributors. I can go to any one of your competitors, low and high — and I won't bother going through the list out of respect for your event — but why Ingram? What today in your mind differentiates Ingram and why should the solution provider partner with Ingram over the multitude of sources that they have out there? Greg Spierkel: Well, there's just a huge number of things in my mind that I think are positive about why Ingram. [A recent survey says] a broad base of resellers that's saying, "Look, there're six categories out of 15 that Ingram was best in class." So, right there there's a voice of the customer base that's talking about things that we're doing well. That all said, the things that we keep pushing right now and I think we're having some real success with, is we continue to be really innovative. We continue to be taking risks and doing things before others will. I think we find opportunities, either in products, or solutions or technologies before others do. And, you know, I can go through a list of examples, but what we've done in managed services recently is just on the cusp of something pretty interesting for the industry. It's helping a segment of resellers, not all of them, but you know, at some point, that gets bigger and that becomes a great service offering, and there's a whole suite of capabilities that we built around that. We're going after interesting things like teaming up with Google to be the first to offer Google services in the channel. And we're doing this on a global level. We've just signed up with Best Buy. We're first to sort of help the channel again to be successful, to find new leads and opportunities. There were other choices out there. Both those companies, guess what — Ingram Micro. In terms of size, innovation and ability to take risks are, you know, front and foremost in my mind. So from a community that has choices, I think we provide more services and more options and a greater team to work with day in and day out. So I think that's one of the main reasons why we keep staying ahead of the curve in size. That doesn't mean everybody else goes away. You know, there's still going to be choice out there. Vizard: You mentioned managed services and it feels like we're at some point — I don't know whether you want to call it an evolution or a revolution; it depends on your point of view I guess — but a lot of people talk about solution providers in the age of managed services aren't going to be reselling products per se because they're going to become almost a type of buyer where they take the paper, they own the product and they manage it. Is that going to fundamentally change the relationship between distributors, resellers and their end customers, or how do you see that kind of playing out? Spierkel: If you've followed the channel over the last few years pretty closely and if we talked 10 years ago, we would have said you, the reseller, don't have to touch the product. You really shouldn't; there's no value-add in that. Yet there was skepticism, some concern and some angst in the reseller body at-large that basically said, "No, no, no. You may get access to my customer base." So fast forward from a period of maybe 30 to 40 percent of our resellers at that point 10 years ago who were managing that touch the product today, you know, less than 5 percent of our customer base touches the product anymore. So it used to be 70 percent and now it's less than 5 percent. So that's analogous to saying, "Look, Ingram has got a real good core competency capability. They're a trusted partner." I would take the same view on managed services, not that we're going to take over all the backroom offices for everybody. I think it's an evolutionary thing just like the statement I made before. You've got a situation where clearly we feel that there're some services and tools that we can provide and leverage our scale for to make the reseller be more effective with his customer base. Many of those resellers and systems integrators frankly don't have the financial wherewithal to put these tools together. They can go out and get pieces of them, but Ingram Micro, again, is taking care of the supply chain for them and providing them a number of capabilities that make them look bigger as a trusted partner to their customer base. I see this as another helping step and evolution in our relationship with our customer base. And again, a certain portion is going to use it and a certain portion is going to continue to develop its own tools. I think as we get better at it, I think there's a better chance that we'll have a greater degree of penetration and I think we've been pretty happy thus far with everything we've done in the first full year of doing this. We announced this last year at VTN in the fall, so this is just a one-year anniversary essentially of our move down what I call a managed-service domain. But there're a lot of other services we've been providing beyond managed services. Next Page: Virtual solution providers.
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| Looking to grow IT's role in business? Looking to equip IT with the tools to make a difference? The time has come to for solution providers to increase the importance of IT. Opinion: Margins will drop quickly on managed services, and VARs need to stay two steps ahead to keep up. |
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