AI Automates Integrations at Ingram Micro
An AI-powered addition to the distributor’s Xvantage platform is designed to complete a process that has historically taken weeks in minutes instead.
HP isn’t just asking end users, per my reporting elsewhere this week, to deploy AI-based solutions. It’s doing so itself, a practice Dave McQuarrie, the company’s chief commercial officer, calls “drinking our own champagne” rather than “eating our own dog food.”
Ingram Micro, an HP distribution partner and Amplify exhibitor, is similarly devoted to metaphorical cork popping. “We sell the most amazing technology,” observes Sanjib Sahoo (pictured right), who per earlier reporting became president of Ingram’s Global Platform Group two months ago. “Should we not use the most amazing technology to give a better experience?”
The specific experience Ingram officially began enhancing three days ago has inspired more than a few vendors and solution providers to reach for something harder than champagne in the past. “In my opinion, one of the biggest blockers in B2B is integration,” Sahoo says. “Nobody has resources. It takes money. The formats are not the same.”
Linking ERP, CRM, and other business applications to a distributor’s backend systems (as TD SYNNEX too has recently noted) has historically taken months or even years as a result. According to Sahoo, however, the Integrations Hub Ingram added to its next-gen Xvantage platform this week more or less eliminates that process.
“Say you have a Salesforce or other account,” he explains. “You can put in your username, password, or plugin and within seconds or a minute it’ll automatically connect with Xvantage.”
The process relies on a patented AI framework trained on more than a year’s worth of integration data, Sahoo adds. “Partners can come in as they are and we can meet them where they are,” he says. “They don’t have to change anything on their side.” Vendors can use the Hub to simplify Xvantage integrations as well, Sahoo notes, if not to a few minutes than at least to a few weeks.
Per an earlier post, Ingram is using the time freed up by tools like the Integrations Hub to have better conversations about more strategic topics. “Our sales team can talk to partners about their problems, how they can grow their business, what their pain points are, what solutions are there, what emerging technology they can work on,” Sahoo says.
Next up on the Xvantage roadmap and in development now is business intelligence functionality that will draw on the platform’s rich store of order, pricing, and inventory records to help Ingram and its partners make smarter supply and demand decisions.
Sahoo calls that “using data to create an experience.” And aren’t experiences what everyone, including yours truly, ultimately craves?
Want to hear more from Sahoo?
He’ll be joining us on the podcast I co-host in two weeks. No time like the present, though, to become a subscriber.
