Ingram Micro GCIS 2023: Xvantage Adds Unified Product Catalog Across Hardware, Software

‘We are truly shifting away from a marketplace to becoming a platform,’ Sanjib Sahoo, Ingram Micro’s chief digital officer, tells CRN in an interview.

Sanjib Sahoo

Ingram Micro will sunset its Cloud Marketplace and move those capabilities to its Xvantage platform, a step forward in making Xvantage the digital twin of Ingram Micro’s services, the IT distributor unveiled during its Global Cloud & Innovation Summit event.

The Irvine, Calif.-based distributor also announced a host of updates to the Xvantage platform, including a new homepage, an improved path to purchase and a unified product catalog across hardware, software cloud and subscriptions.

“We are truly shifting away from a marketplace to becoming a platform,” Sanjib Sahoo, Ingram Micro’s chief digital officer and executive vice president, told CRN in an interview. “It’s not just transactions, where you can transact, look at prices, catalog. What we want to give to our partners is the entire experience.”

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Xvantage Updates At Ingram Micro GCIS

Victor Baez, Ingram Micro’s senior vice president of global cloud sales, told CRN in an interview that Xvantage seeks to address “marketplace sprawl” for solution providers.

“If you look at it now, there’s half a million listings in some of these marketplaces – nobody knows why they’re there, what they do, what they don’t do,” Baez said. “So our job on Xvantage is going to be to kind of curate that, bring that as an Xvantage offer, or sometimes create our own, list it on the hyperscale marketplace, but bring the transaction back to Xvantage. So that’s the opportunity that Xvantage opens up for us.”

Xvantage promises to allow the sales teams of solution providers, vendors and Ingram itself will all interact with the same data set in real time, he said.

Xvantage will be the platform for provisioning licenses and it will communicate with vendor platforms such as Microsoft’s new commerce experience (NCE). Users can also upgrade, downgrade, cancel and perform the same tasks as with Cloud Marketplace, he said.

“This is a true platform that we’re going to market with,” Baez said. “It’s the way to interact with Ingram. But it’s also the way we’re going to behave as an ecosystem.”

Over the next few weeks, Ingram Micro will onboard more customers to give them access to the new capabilities, Sahoo said.

The distributor has been onboarding vendors for Xvantage, which launched in September. Ingram Micro has about 40 vendors in pilot with the platform, with more being added, Sahoo said. Xvantage can integrate with future vendor marketplaces as well.

The advantage for vendors is performance visibility, understanding supply and demand, building marketing plans and more, he said. Vendor marketing materials on Xvantage are also searchable, and users can get individualized vendor content through the platform.

“We are solving some of the most complex problems, I would say, in any industry,” he said.

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

Rocker 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.”

The new homepage for Xvantage has widgets and personalization capabilities to allow solution-provider-customers to view quotes, orders, renewals, subscriptions, business insights, recommendations, marketing tools and other resources, according to Ingram Micro.

The unified product catalog allows solution provider-customers to search from one dashboard for offerings across hardware, software, cloud and subscriptions.

An improved path to purchase on Xvantage promises to give users contextual recommendations, vendor mandatory validations and end-customer information.

The updated Xvantage promises instantaneous status and tracking with real-time updates during fulfillment and provisioning.

Xvantage also has automated subscription management and options for co-terming, partial upgrades and auto-renewals, according to the distributor. A one-touch experience to get solution providers from quote to order promises the ability to manage complex multi-line business flows.

And Xvantage is powered by artificial intelligence to deliver market trends, end customer behavior and other information for solution providers, according to the vendor.