Mark Snider opens up on what life is like under Chinese ownership
Volume vs. value
The industry's top four enterprise distributors - Ingram, Avnet, Arrow and Tech Data - effectively became three when Tech Data announced its intention to buy the value-rich Technology Solutions segment of Avnet in September of last year.
Soon after the deal closed in February, Tech Data's European boss Patrick Zammit told Channelnomics Europe that the deal would give Tech Data a "comparable" scale to Ingram, but could also differentiate itself in more specialist and specific skills.
Snider said that Ingram are not looking at Tech Data's merger as an opportunity to gain market share during the lengthy integration period that lies before its rival.
"I wouldn't count on that," he said. "For us, we have got to be proactive on our own. When we devise our strategies we start with our customers and our vendors and having competitors in the middle of that might just make it confusing for us."
Instead, Snider said that Ingram has also made efforts to become a balanced and well-rounded player, and having a clear distinction between volume and value business has been central to Ingram's success.
"The value we bring is, whatever the solution is, as broad as it is, we can offer that to our customers - I think that is what the winning model is. When the lines between volume and value start blurring, that's when you start losing. We have a volume lead and a value lead and it is not that one is more important than the other… you need both so you can go to your customers confidently and give them what they're looking for."
"This model of having the full spectrum is one we are investing in heavily. You don't see us backing away from any particular segment… it is more about balance. The differentiator for us is on this SMB reseller side. If you look through our focus areas, a real strength of ours is on that SMB market overall."
Cloud goes sky-high
The EMEA boss named HP, HPE, Dell EMC, Microsoft and Cisco as the vendors that pull in the most revenues for Ingram. The distribution titan has been busy expanding its cloud marketplace across the continent, which is now available across 20 EMEA countries, in five different currencies and six languages.
"I would say from a general trend, the cloud business, and software which are growing together, that is one of the fastest areas of the business from a revenue growth stream perspective," said Snider.
"That is why, as we have expanded, and we have made it accessible, there is more than a million and a half licensed users on it now."
He added: "Then on the other side there's a development component of it because we are almost more like a software manufacturer now. The Odin platform is our proprietary platform that we have to keep expanding and improving, so for that we need programmers and a different kind of employee than we had before."
Pan-EMEA conversations
The firm underwent a major global restructure in 2015 which saw Ingram shut down its European HQ in Brussels, and appoint in-country chief executives to manage its four business units: technology solutions; supply chain; mobility; and cloud.
Snider said he has no plans to change its country chief executive structure, but instead plans to get chief executives sharing knowledge on an EMEA - not a European - level.
"We have switched our structure to be more of an EMEA structure. Before I came on board the reporting relationships were with different areas. For us, our real focus is to get synergies between these teams. We've got really good chief executives from a country standpoint and I want to get them to be sharing best practices. My job as the new leader is to increase communication across our teams. We want to be aggressive in the market, and continue to grow the value portfolio and the value business and be important to vendors, but also be indispensable to customers," he said.
