Ingram Launches Two Divisions To Support Midmarket Solutions

The distributor's Advanced Technology division is focused on security, networking and unified communications solutions and will be led by Ken Bast, vice president and general manager. The Advanced Computing division, led by Scott Zahl, vice president and general manager, will focus on infrastructure solutions including software, storage and virtualization.

Both divisions have access to Ingram Micro's existing credit, customer service, marketing, tech support and more resources.

The Santa Ana, Calif.-based company created the divisions to offer VARs more specialized and dedicated expertise in those areas, according to Keith Bradley, Ingram's president of North America.

"With two new divisions, we're going to better align with the marketplace," Bradley said. "We've identified the midmarket and enterprise data center space, we call it the midmarket, [and] we want to expand there."

The new divisions appear similar to Tech Data's Advanced Infrastructure Solutions business, and are indicative of a trend in which traditional broadline distributors are moving upstream and competing more against traditional enterprise distributors like Arrow Electronics Enterprise Computing Solutions and Avnet's Technology Solutions Group.

"Everything that broadline distribution does is of value. But you're right in that as technology moves upstream, by aligning the advanced divisions, we're looking more at the midmarket space," Bradley said.

Ingram Micro purposely avoided the "enterprise" tag for its new divisions because it wants to focus more solely on that sub-1000-seat space, Bradley said.

"The technology is moving downstream into the midmarket. We feel we own those SMB relationships with resellers. While it may look externally like we're competing more with Arrow and Avnet, my hypothesis is that they don't compete in that [midmarket] segment," he said.

Ingram Micro plans to focus a specific list of customers inside the new divisions, but he won't detail how many nor how much business they combine to provide.

"It's not an immaterial number moving into the division. We feel this is a good evolution for Ingram Micro," Bradley said. "We have more empowerment lower in the organization. We have sales, vendor management, marketing, in one business unit. We have a GM empowered to make decisions and customers that live inside the division.

"Hopefully," Bradley added, "it will make us more nimble in the marketplace."Expanding the vendor line card that supports Advanced Technologies and Advanced Computing won't be a big priority because Ingram Micro has such a robust portfolio now, said Bradley and Paul Bay, executive vice president, Ingram Micro North America. "If you're asking if we're going to get into the Unix space today the answer is now. We're going to prove ourselves inside the midmarket segment and there are no significant gaps in our line card," Bradley said. In addition, Ingram Micro announced new investments in its traditional business, including the creation of dedicated teams to help VARs navigate the myriad of IT vendors' order management processes, especially those that can be quite complex. The idea is to simplify the entire quote-to-order entry process for more complex orders and track all orders from a select number of vendors, said Bay. "We've set up a process to allow us to manage orders no matter what area of the business they come in for. We've made it seamless to navigate with very complex vendors," he said.