Ingram Micro has launched the first production edition of Xvantage, a self-serve “digital experience” designed to give resellers and vendors centralized online access to everything they need to do business with the distributor itself and each other.
The system is available now in the U.S. and Germany, and will arrive in 10 additional countries including Canada before the end of the year, with global rollout to follow early in 2023. Ingram announced those plans during its LATAM ONE event for Latin American partners, which takes place this week in Orlando.
First unveiled in May during the distributor’s Cloud Summit in Miami, Xvantage aims to replace multiple legacy tools with a single interface that partners can employ to prepare quotes, place orders, track shipments, apply for credit, handle invoices, and more.
Single sign-on integration with Ingram’s cloud marketplace enables users to manage SaaS and IaaS subscriptions through the console as well. Automated business intelligence functionality highlights cross-sell and upsell opportunities, while built-in machine learning technology continually personalizes the site to match each user’s needs and habits.
“It learns constantly from what you are doing and customizes an experience,” says Sanjib Sahoo, executive vice president and chief digital officer at Ingram. The result, he adds, is a “digital twin” of the distributor’s real-world offerings modeled after intuitive business-to-consumer websites.
“Xvantage is more of a spirit and a strategy, not just an IT tool,” he explains. “It’s a new way for how partners can interact with us.”
Xvantage will eventually offer Ingram’s resellers, employees, and vendor partners a common digital foundation for collaboration and communication. Initial functionality for the first two of those communities is available now. The first vendor-focused features are scheduled to ship early next year.
Ingram plans to release updates to Xvantage roughly every two weeks. On the roadmap for coming months are enhanced backend integration that will help partners build hardware and cloud subscriptions into unified solutions, as well as more sophisticated, AI-based business analytics functionality that will highlight sales opportunities involving customer-specific combinations of products and services.
“It’ll be much more of a proactive conversation than it is today,” said Ingram CEO Paul Bay during a conversation with ChannelPro at the Cloud Summit earlier this year. “We can create bundles and we can create insights and go have a much more intelligent conversation with the channel partners, and ultimately out to the end user, about how we can help them build a more profitable and productive business.”
The 1.0 edition of Xvantage introduced today, which took some 15 months to develop, is part of a larger partner satisfaction drive underway at Ingram since 2019.
Other digital components of that multi-faceted initiative include the Flexible Subscription Engine, an automated portal unveiled last November that provides “quote to cash” resources for building and managing as-a-service solutions mixing cloud resources with on-premises hardware.
