TD SYNNEX’s Digital Bridge is Ready for Crossing
The distributor’s strategic effort to “meet partners where they’re at” has begun arriving in the form of a backend infrastructure integration with Microsoft Teams.
As I’ve recently lamented, platforms have become so important in tech today that defining the word precisely is growing difficult. Companies like Syncro and NinjaOne use it one way. Companies like Ingram Micro use it another.
TD SYNNEX doesn’t much care how you define platform, I’d say, based on a conversation this week with Nate Herz (pictured), the distributor’s SVP of business operations for North America. But like arch-rival Ingram, it cares a lot about using software to forge deeper partner relationships by making resellers, solution providers, and others more efficient.
“We have a very unique opportunity in North America with the systems architecture that we have to help to deliver cohesive experiences across what I would categorize as our traditional business,” Herz says, along with new businesses like cloud computing and smaller ones like managed print. “We’re really focused there. Where can we deliver commercial excellence, operational excellence, and enable our partners to transform using technology?”
Herz’s boss Reyna Thompson, TD SYNNEX’s North American president, has a simpler way of referring to that focus—“getting things done”—and included it among her three core themes for the year ahead during a keynote presentation last November. In pursuit of that goal, Herz, who’s arguably the tip of Thompson’s getting things done spear, is building integrations between the distributor’s backend infrastructure and the applications its partners live in all day through initiatives like Digital Bridge, which we’ve written about before.
Except that it was still mostly on the drawing board back then and began showing up in real life this week in the form of a new plugin that lets partners research products and find TD SYNNEX contacts from directly inside Microsoft Teams. Order tracking and freight estimation will arrive as well soon.
“One of the missions of Digital Bridge is to meet partners where they’re at,” Herz says, which is Teams for a lot of partners a lot of the time. “What we saw is that the easiest way to meet partners where they’re working is to start there.”
There are additional integrations in the works too with PSA systems from ConnectWise and Kaseya, ServiceNow, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, and more.
The whole thing is an interesting inversion of Ingram’s strategy, which is more aimed at attracting partners to a new, AI-powered and automated system called Xvantage than feeding data to third-party applications. The ultimate objective is pretty much the same, though.
“My hope is that it drives loyalty and drives an increase in market share to TD SYNNEX,” Herz says.
One last note about Digital Bridge
I made a point in an earlier post of emphasizing how TD SYNNEX considers partner communities and partner ecosystems closely related. Herz, for his part, made a point of underscoring the same idea when discussing how partners are contributing to Digital Bridge, and how much they appreciate the opportunity.
“They’re very excited about how we’re involving our partner community, and how we’re getting feedback, how we’re communicating with them, and taking that feedback and building it into our roadmap,” he said.