Ingram Micro: Business-to-Consumer, Business-to-Business Are Merging

Business-to-customer and business-to-business markets are slowly merging due to the changing nature of the technology, according to Ingram Micro's leading digital executive.

Ingram Micro executive vice president and chief digital officer Sanjib Sahoo raised that to attendees multiple times at the distributor's One Innovation Summit Thursday in suburban Washington, D.C. Sahoo spoke on stage about how the power of AI and how its evolving components are B2B and B2C together, a marriage that managed service providers need to recognize.

Sahoo's presentation piggybacked on the company's unveiling this week of its new Ultra loyalty program as well as its integration of the AWS Marketplace with its Xvantage platform.

Channel Futures got a chance to sit down with Sahoo to talk about B2B and B2C as well as how to approach AI as a whole.

CF: How do you think B2B and B2C are blending together in the channel?

Sanjib Sahoo: B2C and B2B are merging because the same people, especially the millennials, who are used to B2C, are also driving B2B forward. Some of these changes relate to how business deals are done. For example, B2C sales are where speed is important since you can't wait to price an item. Personalization is also very important, especially as consumers use systems like Netflix for their own personal custom feeds. There's also how informed you are regarding software. You can track your fees, you can track your food. You can track all these things that are real and the speed is very different from B2B's long cycles, complexities and billing issues.

Related:Ingram Micro Integrates Xvantage with AWS Marketplace

CF: What do these changes mean for partners?

SS: The technology has evolved a lot in our industry, but have the processes changed? You have new capabilities with AI technology in every cloud, but we still generally took time for billing, special pricing and coding. It takes days, and those complexities have to be changed. ... We want to create a B2C experience in the industry in such a way that partners can get the efficiencies by bringing in those technology capabilities into our industry so they can grow and focus on growing their business, what they're good at, and so they don't have to work on fixing billing issues or pricing issues.

CF: What is Ingram Micro doing to prepare for the blending of B2B and B2C?

SS: You start with experience. You have your partner journey, your vendor journey, your employee journey. You break it down to the touch points in the journey. We actually have built our own data mesh based on all 40 years of data, and the data has both a transactional, operational store, and also an AI ingestion factory. These two work in tandem to feed the processes that drive the journeys.

Related:Ingram Micro One: Distributor Unveils Ultra Loyalty Program

So we first look at collecting data and governance of data with compliance and ethics to make sure those are accurate, and then really use that data to figure out a way how we can feed the business process engines to create that journey. We started with the front for the customer experience. Now we look at the front, middle and back of the business process.

CF: How does Ingram Micro's recent announcements around its new loyalty program and AWS integration fit into this blending?

SS: The loyalty program is understanding that we need to create stickiness, because we are building an ecosystem. The more partners can leverage the platform, the more they can benefit, and we can benefit together. We are going through a journey of understanding, "How are the partners in the platform? Are they leveraging it fully? What is a platform versus non platform? Why are they still calling?" Looking at that data creates a genesis of a loyalty program. Similarly, with hyperscalers, we initially realized, "we buy hardware and cloud differently," so we brought in hardware and cloud in the same platform. Let us figure that out with an ecosystem integration. It's difficult for partners to go separately to a hyperscaler marketplace, then come to a platform, and then buy hardware. So we provided a a consolidated buying journey to solve complex solutions together. All of this is part of our understanding that journey and looking at the data and figuring it out problems as we go.

CF: What has been a consistent theme you've run into while talking with Ingram Micro partners?

SS: We hear a lot of noise about AI. Everybody's trying to create an AI strategy, right? My advice is you don't need to have an AI strategy or do a business strategy and try to fit AI to fit that business strategy. That's sometimes a mistake. What can happen is, you lose focus. You're trying too hard to actually make AI work, and you do not create value. You lose focus on your business. So you have to merge them together, whereas AI is in your operational DNA.

AI is a combination of cloud, platform, security, everything together. The new technology landscape that helps you solve problems has to be operational in such a way that the technology helping you solve problems grows the top line or bottom line. It's not about just running behind shiny technology, but the value creation to make it more real. It's very important.

Everybody [says],"Oh my God, what's going to happen with AI?" My point is that you don't want to know everything about AI. Learn what AI can do at a high level. Learn what problems you have, and then partner, [address] small problems and solve them.