Marketing Message

Ingram Micro’s Marketing Message To Partners: Embrace Your Brand BY CJ FAIRFIELD SHOWCASING EXPERTISE

Prior to the pandemic, the majority of Ingram Micro’s marketing efforts were focused on the tools and technologies a partner can offer. Since then, however, the distributor has found these eff orts—and the message being portrayed—have been fl ipped on their head. Today it’s all about the customer experience and the importance of a partner’s brand behind the business.

“What we’re seeing is our partners embracing their brand and what they represent and who they are as a company,” said Jennifer Anaya, senior vice president of global marketing at Ingram Micro. “You can replicate a lot of things in terms of skills or systems or tools that you use. But you really can’t replicate who you have on your team that has the expertise and the relationships and the knowledge that they bring.”

In addition, before the pandemic partners almost solely relied on in-person events to get in front of their distributor, vendors and even end customers, said Dennis Crupi, vice president of marketing at Ingram Micro.

“When the pandemic took all that away we all had to learn how to keep those points of connectivity alive and frequent through virtual experiences,” he said.

Ingram Micro, meanwhile, did some internal research and found that on average it provided at least six diff erent products that make up a partner’s solution.

“Historically our partners were pretty focused on a smaller group of vendors. If Ingram on average is delivering six different products as part of a solution, that means those partners are having to have relationships with a lot of diff erent manufacturers,” Anaya said. “Ingram is that consolidating point aggregating all that together.”

Partners today also are marketing the solution and not the vendors whose products make up that solution, she said.

“What those partners are providing is the expertise on how that solution works,” Anaya said.

“The outcome of what that solution should be doing for the business that it’s being implemented into is an entirely diff erent go-to-market approach and message than our partners have historically had,” she said.

Partners are also adopting a customer experience model to wrap around their go-to-market eff orts when marketing their technologies. Partners that are able to defi ne their stack and their process to focus more attention on ensuring a great customer experience are the ones seeing success, according to Crupi.

Because many solution providers are technologists, they “get really wrapped around tools,” Anaya added. That message has changed to get away from the understanding of the tools to focus more on the content.

“The tools are important because you need standardized tools connected so that you can understand what your customers are connecting with, whether it’s your website or social media handles,” she said. “That’s going to start to improve that customer experience and allow you to have that 180-degree view of how you’re marketing and what that does to back into how you’re selling and how you’re delivering.”

She added that partners want to engage and now use those tools to be smarter.

“We partner with a couple of outside companies and use their marketing automation platform to develop content that the partners can easily, at the click of a button, rebrand into their own brand, look and feel,” Crupi said.

James Rocker, CEO of Bohemia, N.Y.-based MSP Nerds That Care, likes that Ingram Micro’s marketing services address partners of all types.

“Everybody needs something sort of diff erent so they provide a wide variety of services,” he said. “They’ve partnered with industry leaders and people who they found would be a really good fi t for the partner community. That’s what I found to be most advantageous for my business.”

He said it’s also helpful to listen and learn about what others are doing to help their own business “walk the walk.”

“You’re not making that leap of faith by yourself,” he said. “You’re talking to others who have done that process before so you can really learn from all of the aspects that they have.” 

BY C.J. FAIRFIELD

Jennifer Anaya

SVP, Global Marketing

Dennis Crupi

VP, Marketing

EDUCATED DECISIONS Finding The Best Fit: The Emerging Business Group Forges Ties Between Partners And New-To-The-Channel Vendors

BY JOSEPH F. KOVAR

When vendors take their fi rst steps into distribution, one place they turn to is the Emerging Business Group, part of the Advanced Solutions Division at Ingram Micro.

The Emerging Business Group is itself an emerging part of Ingram Micro, having been formed about two years ago on the foundation of two separate businesses that were heavily focused on new and emerging vendors and technologies, including Promark, a value-added distributor it acquired in 2012.

Donald Scott, director of the Emerging Business Group, said his focus is mainly on vendors of cybersecurity, data center, automation and digital transformation technologies. The group has a team of about 60 who work with other Ingram Micro employees who provide technical and marketing support.

Despite the group’s name it is not focused on emerging vendors. Instead, Scott said, it is focused on established vendors that are new to distribution or to the channel, or those that are looking for additional support to reach partners.

“We provide them with dedicated management, a main person that owns the relationship with the vendors, along with fi eld business development resources, inside folks that do the same types of roles, fi eld marketing and inside transactional support as well,” he said. “So we’re built essentially to provide the best possible experience for new vendors coming into distribution or Ingram Micro specifi cally and provide them with best practices to help them engage effi ciently with our sales teams and navigate to the best partner fi ts.”

For channel partners, the Emerging Business Group brings a number of benefi ts, said James Range, president, CEO and owner of White Rock Security, a Dallas-based security-focused solution provider.

Range said he knows that these vendors, including a few security companies he partners with such as Adlumin, Bitdefender and Arctic Wolf Networks, have likely already been successful in the market but are either new to the channel or new to distribution.

“With Ingram Micro [Emerging Business Group], these companies are brought to the forefront,” he said. “[The group] has only about 20 to 30 products, rather than thousands from Ingram Micro as a whole.”

Ingram Micro has the resources to bring these companies to channel partners and does the vetting they need before signing on with them, Range said.

“Ingram Micro off ers additional training on them, along with sales engineers who provide additional support at the drop of a hat to make working with them more seamless,” he said.

Andy Whiteside, founder and CEO of XenTegra, a Huntersville, N.C.-based digital workspace and virtual desktop infrastructure solution provider, said his company likes working with the Emerging Business Group because it facilitates connections with vendors that might otherwise get lost in a distributor’s large line card.

“These are technologies we want to market, sell, enable and do services with,” Whiteside said. “Ingram Micro’s [Emerging Business Group] helps us scale with these companies without our having to fi gure out where to start transacting. It’s a part of the Ingram Micro portfolio that allows us to get started quickly.”

The Emerging Business Group helps vendors provide the necessary enablement to partners and connects them with solution providers they otherwise would not have found, Whiteside said.

Working with the Emerging Business Group is a two-way street, he said. “Ingram Micro is bringing vendors [that are new to them] to us,” he said. “It’s highly likely they’re ready to transact. Or, if we ask for something not on their line card, they often bring [it] to us quickly.”

The Emerging Business Group serves a very important purpose for vendors looking to build their channel base, Scott said.

Generally speaking, smaller and newer vendors don’t have the funds to invest in an expensive support model through distribution, compared with large tier-one vendors that generally invest quite a bit through their distribution partners for things like business development or market development, sales overlays, transactional support and so on, a lot of which is vendor-funded, he said.

“Smaller vendors, especially those that are still venturefunded or pre-IPO, are a little bit more cognizant of their burn rates and less inclined to invest in those types of resources, especially when they’re not sure about how to work through distribution,” he said. “So the fact that Ingram Micro invests in these resources and pays for those resources once we’re successful in selling the vendor solutions is valuable to them. It helps them free up capital to focus on other things like product development.”

The Emerging Business Group generally brings from three to six new vendors to its channel partners every quarter, Scott said. Cloud data management company Rubrik, for instance, has technically been part of the Emerging Business Group for about four years and is the largest vendor still working with the organization, he said.

Yubico, which develops hardware authentication security keys, is working with the group to make Ingram Micro its fi rst

Finding The Best Fit: The Emerging Business Group Forges Ties Between

Donald Scott

Director, Emerging Business Group

go-to-market move through a large distributor, he said.

Those vendors are typically supported by the program for about four years, although they may stay longer, Scott said.

“Provided that we both feel good about the direction that our partnership is going, we’ll maintain support for that vendor somewhere in the neighborhood of four years,” he said. [Rubrik has] evolved quite a bit, and they’re going through a lot of changes. ... We’ve already had conversations about what’s the next step in terms of positioning them within one of our other vendor business units, whether it’s our data center practice, security group, or another.”

Solution providers that reach out to the Emerging Business Group will fi nd that Ingram Micro has made it easy to start relationships with vendors new to the channel and likely don’t have a lot of money to spend on building the channel, Scott said.

“Generally speaking, a lot of them might have a channel organization of fi ve or six people,” he said. “So what we’re doing to help the vendor is also helping the partner in terms of acting almost like a sales force multiplier.”

Ingram Micro provides field support and sales support, including getting its own people certifi ed with the vendor, to be able to sit down with partners and talk intelligently about the vendor’s technology and how to engage the technical resources from the distributor or the vendor as well as learn what it takes to be authorized or certifi ed, Scott said.

“[Solution providers] have a single team in Ingram Micro that can bring you into diff erent small vendors to help you understand what it takes to be successful and help make an educated decision on whether it’s the right fi t for your business,” he said. “Our team doesn’t just bring a vendor in and then run out and talk to all our partners at once about the vendor. We sit down and talk about where the technology plays from an end user’s viewpoint.”

This includes looking at specifi c vertical focuses, how the technology fi ts with certain market segments, such as SMB, and which partners are focused on that market segment or vertical, Scott said.

“So we’re going to help the vendor understand where they fi t from a partner standpoint,” he said. “And then we’re going to go to those partners that we see through our data as being the best fit for the vendor. So we’re hopefully shortening the recruitment cycle for both sides. The vendors are going to spend less time talking to folks that aren’t a fi t, and the partners can be assured that we’ve looked at their businesses and determined that this technology fi ts their strategy.”

Scott said he encourages partners to check in with the Emerging Business Group often because it is continually engaging with partners to learn what gaps they see in their off erings, what kinds of technologies they are interested in and what vendors they may have heard of that Ingram Micro has yet to carry.

“That type of feedback is extremely vital to us,” he said. “A partner telling me, ‘This vendor is really doing great things in the channel’ is candidly the best kind of feedback I can get. I’d rather hear that from a channel partner than I would from somebody at Gartner or IDC or Forrester.” 

Who’s In The Emerging Business Group?

These are some of the vendors developing their channel business via Ingram Micro’s Emerging Business Group: • Adlumin, a Washington, D.C.-based managed detection and response technology developer founded in 2016 • AppViewX, a Seattle-based developer of automation and orchestration technology for network infrastructure and public key infrastructure, founded in 2017 when it was spun out of Payoda • Arctic Wolf Networks, an Eden Prairie, Minn.based managed detection and response technology developer founded in 2012 • Bitdefender, a Bucharest, Romania-based cybersecurity company founded in 2001 • NetAlly, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based developer of networking testing and Wi-Fi analysis technology founded in 1993 and spun out of Netscout as an independent company in 2019 • Rubrik, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based cloud data management and data security technology developer founded in 2014

• Skyhigh Security, a San Jose, Calif.-based developer of cybersecurity technology, formerly known as McAfee

Enterprise • Yubico, a Stockholm, Sweden-based developer of hardware authentication security keys founded in 2007

SECURITY IS TOP OF MIND Ingram Micro’s Asset Disposition Services Help Partners Take Out The Recycling

BY CJ FAIRFIELD

Todd Zegers

Global VP, IT Asset Disposition, Reverse Logistics As data security is of the utmost importance to any partner, Ingram Micro wants to make sure that data is secure when an electronic device is at the end of its life cycle.

“The number of devices in today’s world that capture and store data is like never before, and that’s not going to slow down anytime soon,” said Todd Zegers, global vice president of IT asset disposition and reverse logistics at Ingram Micro. “Using a reputable partner to do this type of work where we’re going to scrub everything, we’re going to capture everything and we’re going to erase everything and certify or physically destroy it, it’s probably more important than ever before.”

With its IT asset disposition offering, Ingram Micro off ers cradle-to-grave services for its partners and their end customers to make sure no data gets leaked when their devices are recycled.

And Ingram Micro is starting to see more and more partners come to the distributor because they don’t have the operations to perform such services in-house.

“They don’t have trucks, they don’t have the processing equipment, they don’t have the capability to do refurbishing and remanufacturing and reselling those devices,” Zegers said. “We’re really plugging in nicely as an endto-end distributor for these partners who don’t have the capabilities.”

But fi rst, it starts with security.

“That’s actually fi rst and foremost,” he said. “Making sure when a client is disposing of equipment, whether the data is erased or shredded on-site by one of our shredding machines, that’s really important. But [so is]capturing serial numbers of data-bearing devices on-site.”

This is key so that when materials arrive back at the warehouse they’re rescanned and verifi ed to make sure nothing was lost or stolen during transit.

Another benefi t is the remarketing value. Zegers said 65 percent of what is brought in is refurbished and resold to secondary markets. A portion of those proceeds go back to the customer to off set fees for the services. The third benefi t is e-cycling.

“We have to track [items] all the way back into the manufacturing stream,” he said. “We could tell a customer at any point in time where the plastic from their materials went.”

Ingram Micro has a large footprint when it comes to IT asset disposition. If a customer is in a country where Ingram Micro doesn’t have a presence, it will set up best-in-class partners for that customer, he said.

Adam Kaye, senior program manager of asset recovery at Somerset, N.J.-based solution provider SHI International, said the appeal of Ingram Micro and its asset disposition services is its global presence.

“It’s being able to off er our customers a one-stop shop, whether they have a location in California, New Jersey, Australia or Japan,” he said.

Ingram Micro’s remarketing network is also benefi cial to SHI as is the number of diff erent sales channels it uses to maximize the reselling of the equipment, according to Kaye.

Using the services has an economic impact on partners as well. For SHI, it’s a unique service that it can off er to customers.

“It’s as simple as any hardware customer of SHI’s,” he said. “It gives us an easy follow-up question of, ‘What are you replacing? What are you doing with the old stuff ?’ So it’s only a positive program fi nancially.”

Jason Taylor, president of Cleveland-based MSP MCPc, said the company is also harnessing a holistic life-cycle management approach to recycling IT assets from cradle to grave.

“We wanted to be able to do the recycling ourselves. Ingram, specifi cally Todd [Zegers], was very open-minded to us creating a franchise-like relationship with them where it’s MCPc-based employees but we’re using Ingram’s software platform and process,” he said. “When it’s a local customer [their electronics] go to an MCPc facility and we do everything cradle to grave.” 

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MEETING THE CHALLENGE ‘Get To Yes:’ Creative Financing For A Cloud And Managed Services World

BY JOSEPH F. KOVAR

Anthony Mackle

SVP, CFO, U.S., Latin America

Melanie DelValle

Director, Customer Finance As business IT requirements have shifted over time from straight hardware sales at fi xed credit terms to SaaS and managed services, Ingram Micro has moved to provide partners with the fi nancial tools to address the change.

Anthony Mackle, Ingram Micro’s senior vice president and CFO for the U.S. and Latin America, said it has been diffi cult for many partners to shift from 30-day or 60-day terms to charging monthly service fees. And this has created an opportunity for the distributor to explore ways to fi nance partners’ business instead of just transactions.

“We provide that cash fl ow to not only fuel your growth but also quite frankly get you through to the break-even point,” Mackle said. “And what we found out was on either a 36-month annuity or SaaS, month 23 was your breakeven point. That’s where your cash fl ow starts covering the investment out of your pocket because you have to hire the head count and buy the software and hardware yourself.”

The move toward managed services and the cloud has required new fi nancing tools for partners, Mackle said.

“That evolved from just fi nancing contracts and the cash fl ow cycle to also funding partner acquisitions of other partners. … We started to step in to support their acquisition strategies,” he said.

That’s the kind of support solution providers said they have seen from Ingram Micro.

Scott Lennon, president of Total Communications, a Hartford, Conn.-based solution provider that in December Lennon acquired from its former owner, Frontier Communications, said support from Ingram Micro was essential to his ability to take the company independent.

“Ingram Micro knows our run rate, they know us, and they understand the challenges of a small business,” Lennon said. “So they came up with programs to help ensure we succeed.”

That included providing a term loan to help Lennon acquire the company as well as a good line of credit to help the business grow.

“Ingram Micro gave us the runway and the term loan,” he said. “We’re also looking to leverage Ingram Micro for future acquisitions.”

John Santoru, president, CEO and new owner of Albuquerque, N.M.-based Holmans USA, said he acquired the U.S. Department of Energy-focused solution provider this past April with creative fi nancing from Ingram Micro.

The distributor also helped with strategic inventory, a key requirement with certain government customers, Santoru said.

“Ingram Micro fi nanced not only what we owed them, but the backlog as well. … Ingram Micro understands my customer base and knows that federal customers place large orders from $500,000 to $3 million,” he said. “We can really sweat the payables. But Ingram has always worked well with that.”

Ingram Micro has a strategy called “Get To Yes,” Mackle said.

“With ‘Get To Yes,’ it doesn’t matter whether you’re using traditional credit, traditional financing or financing the partner,” he said. “It is how we can help you fi nance your business, the deal and fuel growth.”

The strategy means Ingram Micro can’t just publish a booklet laying out fi nancial options, Mackle said.

“The reality is, as soon as I hear something diff erent, I’m going to create something else,” he said. “And in a lot of cases, our fi nancing is literally tailored to what our partners are trying to do and where they’re trying to get to.”

This is completely diff erent thinking from how a bank provides fi nancing, said Melanie DelValle, Ingram Micro’s director of customer fi nance.

“Think of somebody buying heavy equipment and a bulldozer costs $1 million,” she said. “Banks understand that type of fi nancing because they understand the collateral. What Ingram understands is the MSP business and the channel. We leverage that understanding to create unique fi nancing off erings based on the structure of that business.”

Looking ahead, Ingram Micro’s fi nancial services will be increasingly tied to the new Ingram Micro Xvantage platform, Delvalle said. Xvantage is a new digital experience platform launched in September that aims to improve how the distributor works with partners, including making it easier to fi nance partner interactions.

“[We’re looking at] how do we leverage our Xvantage platform to be able to combine customers’ ongoing software subscriptions—including cloud with a device payment—in one single monthly payment,” she said.

David Sewell, CEO of Sewell Tech, a Dallas-based MSP, has seen “Get To Yes” in action.

“We’ve never had a customer not get approved,” Sewell said. “Working with Ingram Micro on leasing means bigger deals. I don’t have to do credit approvals. I let the Ingram Micro fi nancial people pull credit and do the approvals. It’s nice to have that option when a client is looking to buy a lot. This makes it easier to close deals.”

Channel fi nancing is a unique specialization that must be able to handle on-premises and off -premises infrastructure and services, Mackle said.

“You have to hire the head count to support those services, you have to buy what’s needed, and you’re billing out over time,” he said. “You’re billing monthly. So you’re getting monthly payments, but it’s out of your pocket. How do you grow that faster? You need cash fl ow.” 

DEI, ESG Are Central To Ingram Micro’s Culture: ‘Our Success Is All About People’ BY CJ FAIRFIELD

Ingram Micro is nothing without its people, said Scott Sherman. And that means the distributor is laser-focused on environmental, social and governance and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

It’s not one versus the other, said Sherman, executive vice president and chief human resources offi cer at Ingram Micro. DEI and ESG are part of the company’s culture. They are what makes the company what it is.

“It’s ESG with DEI,” he said. “It’s ESG and it’s DEI.”

“We’ve been doing DEI for years,” he said. “Talent is one of our six tenets of success. Being diverse, equitable and inclusive has been a key element of that tenet since before we articulated that tenet. It’s always been a part of who we are.”

DEI is a part of the ESG framework because it’s the people who make Ingram Micro successful, Sherman said.

“We don’t own buildings. We don’t own much technology. What we have are great people who work through processes that focus on customers at the middle,” he said. “Our success is all about people.”

Sherman hopes that bleeds over to its partner community as well.

He encourages partners to think about their own DEI and ESG initiatives and pick where they want to start to make a diff erence. He said it’s important to engage communities both internally and externally and deliver on those initiatives.

“If we get this right, then our work will be energizing and we’ll be able to share it,” he said. “We’ll be able to wash, rinse and repeat in what we’re doing. If we are energizing in any and all of these eff orts, then we’re going to make our community a better place by doing the right things the right way. We think that a more diverse associate community will engage more eff ectively with our vendor and reseller communities to develop more creative solutions and business opportunities.”

Ingram Micro is also putting its money where its mouth is and making key investments in its people. Just recently it promoted company veteran Susan O’Sullivan to vice president of DEI, a new position.

“DEI has always been in the fabric of Ingram, and we’ve always had these basic principles,” O’Sullivan told CRN in an interview earlier this year. “I think we realized that now more than ever we need to make this a serious commitment. We have to take action. We have to show sustainable and ongoing action, and I think we [need] to have someone own it.”

O’Sullivan’s role includes looking at DEI and communities and how Ingram Micro can better serve employees and solution providers. The company also appoints team members from around the world as DEI ambassadors and facilitators.

“What we’re doing with those folks is we’re deploying what we call a ‘Together at Ingram Micro’ curriculum,” said Sherman. “It’s our global DEI curriculum. We developed that to be a very global DEI curriculum. Many organizations are focusing on DEI from a very U.S.-centric point of view, and we’re trying not to do that.”

The company also is harnessing its employee resource groups but is not controlling them from the center. The ERGs have the fl exibility to grow however they want and “support each other, fi nd excellence, build excellence, and now we’re helping them defi ne what the frameworks for growth should be.”

And those groups help Ingram Micro remain intellectually and emotionally connected to their teams, Sherman said. There also is a directive to reach out to local colleges, universities and vocational schools to forge ties with a younger and more diverse talent pool.

Meanwhile, Ingram Micro keeps its ear to the ground through anonymous internal “pulse” surveys. The distributor’s DEI favorable score was 87 percent, a number Sherman said has increased year over year.

“Ninety-two percent of us believe we treat each other with dignity and respect,” he said. “Ninety percent of us say we can be ourselves at work and be accepted. And then about 80 percent of us say that all of us have the opportunity to advance in the organization. We know that that’s a perception we have to continue to evolve.”

The survey also found that in the fi rst half of 2022, 74 percent of Ingram Micro’s executive roles were fi lled with internal candidates. Thirteen percent of the company’s associates, on a global level, were either promoted or had developmental job experience in the fi rst half of 2022.

“It really is that career opportunity here,” he said. “That makes us better, smarter, faster, more equitable and more inclusive. We’re really working to make sure that we’re bringing in more diverse talent, and then we’re incubating that talent to grow with us for the future.” 

Scott Sherman

EVP, Chief Human Resources Offi cer

Susan O’Sullivan

VP, DEI

MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR ARENA Game On: Ingram Micro Helps Partners Break Into Untapped Market

BY JOSEPH F. KOVAR

Craig Birmingham

VP, GM, Business and Consumer Solutions

Nicholas Anthony Nanez

Sr. Vendor Business Manager, Business and Consumer Solutions Through its Business and Consumer Division, Ingram Micro sees a big opportunity for solution providers to tap into its gaming portfolio to help people work, live and play better, said Craig Birmingham, the distributor’s vice president and general manager for business and consumer solutions.

Birmingham told CRN his division off ers products and services that cut across all three areas, including technology to work remotely, deliver managed print services, enable in-class or remote education, and develop gaming and eSports environments.

“If you get them all working the same way, they’re all intertwined,” he said. “When COVID hit, home became the center of education, entertainment and work. We all became IT specialists and centers of video production.”

That change helped drive Ingram Micro to invest in the gaming market, including building a six-station gaming arena in its Buff alo, N.Y., offi ce, Birmingham said.

“It was really us being able to show our partners, ‘Hey, yeah, gaming’s cool. One, how do you sell it? Two, where do you sell it? And three, why is it important?’ It’s not just your kids playing on Xbox,” he said.

Opportunities in the gaming market are appearing from some pretty big investors and even the government, said James Rocker, CEO of Nerds That Care, a Bohemia, N.Y.based MSP and gaming solution provider that is currently pursuing two gaming deals and leveraging Ingram Micro to support its eff orts.

“We’re seeing eSports now at the same level we saw fantasy sports teams 10 years ago,” Rocker said. “There are people in Asia and Europe being paid a good amount of money to be eSports professionals. And just like any athlete, they need the best equipment. So this is an opportunity for us to build the infrastructure and gaming stations to support them.”

Ingram Micro has the products but needs MSPs like Nerds That Care to build the solutions gamers want, Rocker said.

“Gamers want a custom experience and are not looking for the out-of-the-box experience,” he said. This will encourage more MSPs like us to get involved.”

Gaming is gaining importance in the channel as partners find opportunities in verticals they already serve, said Nicholas Anthony Nanez, Ingram Micro’s senior vendor business manager for business and consumer solutions.

“Gaming is important because it’s really started to become popular outside of the home environment,” Nanez said. “And we’re seeing some of this popularity in the verticals that our partners are already selling into: education, hospitality and some commercial entertainment spaces.”

Because Ingram Micro provides partners the IT infrastructure technology behind these buildouts, the distributor is front and center when partners fi nd a budget for creating an eSports lab, Nanez said.

“That’s why we felt that it was important for us to create this program, not only just to say, ‘Hey, here are the products that we off er,’ but also walk them through what an end-to-end solution for these buildouts looks like,” he said.

Gaming is a small part of Ingram Micro’s Business and Consumer Division, but it draws on technology and services from across the entire division, from PCs and monitors to pro-AV off erings, making it a wide channel play, Birmingham said.

“We have resellers that are selling into the education space,” he said. “And there are full-ride scholarships now in gaming. And so you’ve got universities that are building out eSports labs as part of the curriculum, and they’re in competitions. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry right now.”

Solution providers looking to explore the business can get training and certifications, Nanez said. They could try for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math)-accredited certifi cations, or take courses with a varsity eSports foundation or the National Esports Association, which partners with Ingram Micro, to certify solution providers to become eSports trainers, coaches or program providers.

While there are some solution providers focused on building eSports programs, others often simply stumble across opportunities, Nanez said.

“They may be out doing installs in a library at a university, and the IT director and the athletic director get together because a budget’s [been] created for an eSports program,” he said. “And that’s when Ingram gets brought into the conversation because our IT solution provider doesn’t really know exactly what goes into creating a program and infrastructure.”

Ingram Micro’s new gaming center is similar to what one might see at an internet cafe or a university, Nanez said.

The six-station gaming center includes gaming PCs, a content creation streaming station, a full-blown racing rig with a 49-inch LG monitor, gaming lighting and wall graphics. The distributor can also help partners with customized wall graphics and game and school logos on the headrests on the chairs, he said.

The gaming lab is open by appointment only, Nanez said.

“Associates, vendor partners, reseller partners, even end users can come in as long as they’re with a reseller or a vendor to take a tour and see what we can help them with,” he said.

“I can’t wait to see what Ingram Micro [has built] in its gaming center,” Rocker said. “I look forward to bringing potential customers in to see some of the things being built out and maybe painting a picture of things customers hadn’t thought about.” 

EBG and Arctic Wolf helped a partner secure a near six-figure deal within just two weeks of beginning the sales cycle thanks to our strategy of consistent and collaborative engagement. This partner was then able to quickly identify more clients they can engage jointly with the Arctic Wolf and the Ingram Micro EBG team, driving a six-figure pipeline.

A service provider had a client that bought a large facility with significant networking issues. EBG and NetAlly helped the partner identify issues with the wired network and develop a plan to deploy a wireless 6E network. It worked and gave the service provider confidence to take on this type of opportunity in the future without outsourcing.

Protecting remote workers’ access to cloud applications, public cloud environments and private access networks is crucial to businesses’ operations everywhere. The EBG team is proud to partner with Skyhigh Security and help service providers deliver a higher level of security to their clients while navigating the challenges of today’s multi-cloud workplace.

Bitdefender has been an EBG partner for over five years, with significant year-over-year growth among our partners. This partnership gives channel partners competitive margins and the ability to build their own cybersecurity practices with Bitdefender, delivering a foundation of intuitive, flexible and scalable solutions ready to meet customer demand.

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