Whether it’s evolving the Xvantage platform, helping partners with talent or offering more professional services, Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay said that the distributor’s partners are in the center of it all.

And it’s still all about relationships.

“The complexity of how technology services are delivered is still going to remain,” Bay told CRN in an exclusive interview. “I think it’s actually going to continue to be more complex, and we’ve got to have people to be able to move forward with that. We’ll continue to build out, as we call them, engines that will drive value for partners. But we’re going to have our partners right in the middle of everything we do.”

One way it’s helping is through its newly-launched Staff Assist Program where partners can hire Ingram Micro employees at offshore locations and make them a part of an MSP’s team.

Partners will be paying 30 to 50 percent less, conservatively, than that of hiring talent in the U.S. for cloud, NOC, server administration, network administration and cybersecurity.

They also have the flexibility to hire as many or as few as they want as the service can be scaled down to serve the SMB market or scaled up to enterprise levels. The hiring cycle typically takes about 30 to 60 days.

“Being a global company and having the reach, we have the visibility into where the talent lies and then working with our partners to help them understand the needs they have and where we can fill those gaps,” Kirk Robinson EVP and president of North America for Irvine, Calif.-based distributor Ingram Micro, told CRN. “You may think some of the larger partners out there have all the needs and all the engineers but nobody has everything. We’re always looking at where do we fit in, regardless of the size of the company. Where’s the talent needed and how can we provide that on their behalf?”

CRN sat down with Bay to discuss the Staff Assist Program, the Xvantage platform and why partners are in the middle of it all.