Ingram Micro’s ‘User-Friendly’ Xvantage Onboards Vendors

‘It’s really getting more visibility into supply and demand. Vendors can look at the fulfill orders and look at what is happening to their order performance. It’s really providing real time visibility into not only Ingram Micro’s business, what they do with us…but more importantly, the whole channel visibility. So we have actionable data insights, performance and velocity for their business planning,’ says Sanjib Sahoo, executive vice president and chief digital officer at Ingram Micro.

IT distributor Ingram Micro is now onboarding its vendor partners to its Xvantage platform, offering a single pane of glass experience to communicate and do business with its MSP partners.

“It’s really getting more visibility into supply and demand,” Sanjib Sahoo, executive vice president and chief digital officer at Irvine, Calif.-based Ingram Micro, told CRN. “Vendors can look at the fulfill orders and look at what is happening to their order performance. It’s really providing real-time visibility into not only Ingram Micro’s business, what they do with us…but more importantly, the whole channel visibility. So we have actionable data insights, performance and velocity for their business planning.”

The Xvantage platform was launched in September 2022 and provides a personalized experience with data insight tailored to each and every one of Ingram Micro’s partners. Through automation intelligence and machine learning, Xvantage offers real-time transactional benefits such as up-to-the-minute order status, tracking, renewals, subscription billing and real-time customer service capabilities.

[Related: Gaining The Xvantage: Ingram Micro Brings Big Data To Partners]

Dubbed Ingram’s “digital twin,” the platform is available to select vendors in the U.S., Canada and Germany.

“We never had a vendor platform that customers [and] vendors could come and interact with us,” Sahoo said. “It’s a single pane of glass for the vendor partners to interact with Ingram Micro like we did for our channel partners.”

Xvantage offers vendors a full dashboard of real-time visibility into their Ingram Micro business, personalized interactions for their account teams with Ingram’s certified engineers, demand planning and marketing teams and an industry-first document hub where data is uploaded from any format or taxonomy and automatically formatted, categorized and translated into a SKU.

Vendors can also self-upload and manage their catalogs, provide key performance and insight markers and manage go to market campaigns. New vendors can also self-onboard with more capabilities added each week.

Sahoo said the more easily Ingram can integrate with its more than 1,500 vendors, the better bundling and solutions it can provide.

“It’s easier for us to connect the vendors with MSPs through our platform, that is the whole idea behind this,” he added.

Since its launch, many capabilities have been added such as recommendations, personalized insights and real-time configuration ordering. Vendors and partners can also communicate through the platform with a chat feature, with more real-time communication capabilities coming in the future.

In the six months since premiering, 100 percent of Ingram’s MSP partners are on Xvantage, which is live in 14 countries. In fact, “dormant” MSPs have “come back” and are now being very interactive on the platform, Sahoo said.

More announcements will be made at Ingram’s Global Cloud and Innovation Summit in Las Vegas later this month.

James Rocker, founder and CEO of Bohemia, N.Y.-based MSP Nerds That Care, said the platform is “so user-friendly that it’s just exciting when you first log in.”

From a navigational and organizational standpoint, Xvantage is keeping his MSP organized, “and so much more efficient than we’ve ever been before.”

He said having all of the vendors on Xvantage is now making it easy to order everything in one place.

“Before, we were having to go through five different windows and screens to put everything together that we needed,” he said. “Now it’s all in one spot. It has already streamlined our efficiency since we were onboarded, so it’s been fantastic.”