Ingram installs country CEOs as part of European rejig

Distie wants each country to become more autonomous

Ingram Micro has created new chief executive roles in each of its country-level European businesses in a bid to give more power to its local units.

Former UK managing director Brent McCarty (pictured) has stepped up to become the in-country chief executive and each of the other countries in which Ingram operates across Europe have also had a new top dog appointed.

Before the new regime came into place last month, Ingram's country- or regional-level businesses had four top leaders across four business units: technology solutions, supply chain, mobility and cloud. But now, the newly appointed CEOs will come in above the quartet.

McCarty told CRN the idea is to give each country more control over its business.

"We have tried to drive more autonomy and agility at the country level so that one person oversees all business units," he said.

"The idea behind Putting all business units under one leader is so we can execute quickly for our vendors and our customers while at the same time making sure we maximise the use of our people based on the level of maturity of the various different countries we serve.

"In some countries we have a very large mobility business and in other countries, we have a smaller mobility business, as an example. We want to make decisions on how to best resource those businesses based on where they are. That's the idea behind giving the country the autonomy to do so. It's rather than a prescriptive model in some cases."

At a corporate level, Ingram has announced its plans to take cost-cutting measures.

This, coupled with the new country-level CEO moves, has seen some senior staff let go. Adam Sweeney, director of European marketing and vendor management; Marios Ktisti, senior manager for mobility services in Europe; and Fergal Donovan, vice president of global vendor relations, have left the firm, McCarty confirmed.

Ingram does not break out financial results or growth figures on a country basis, but McCarty said the UK is enjoying strong demand in certain areas.

"We've seen some good, strong demand around PCs, actually," he said. "We're a little bit against the grain. We're seeing some nice growth in the SMB space and there's still some opportunity around the server and storage part of the market. We're seeing our cloud business do very, very well."