Ingram Micro has launched an AI-powered, self-learning Xvantage platform in the UK.
CEO Paul Bay said the distribution giant launched Xvantage in the US and Germany in September. The move will “consumerise distribution” and make Ingram easier for resellers to interact with the company.
Ingram Micro global chief digital officer Sanjib Sahoo said Xvantage is “not a website or webshop”.
“The difference is that this is a platform. This is an intelligent, self-learning ecosystem,” he said.
Xvantage will provide a single pain of glass for resellers to purchase hardware, cloud services and software from Ingram.
But the platform’s ability to deliver a personalised experienced to reseller customers – including making product recommendations – will make dealing with the distributor akin to using consumer streaming platform Netflix, Sahoo said.
“If I go on Netflix, my homescreen and [Ingram UK MD] Matt [Sanderson’s] homescreen are different. That’s the customised experience. Imagine bringing that experience to distribution,” he said.
“It’s not an e-commerce platform. It’s a complete, automated ecosystem that is connected through a real-time data mesh that takes into account all the data we have over years and years of doing business. This will make every interaction meaningful and delightful for our customers.”
Ingram invested $550m to build cloud marketplace CloudBlue, and Xvantage uses that investment as its foundation, Sahoo said. The distributor has brought in “a lot of new talent” from the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon to build a more engineering-led mindset, he added.
