Ingram Micro is increasing its mobility services play across the A/NZ region as it seeks to engage with resellers, telcos and vendors.
Since acquiring Brightpoint Distribution for $US840 million in 2012, Ingram has been keen to ramp up its mobility services play on a global scale and in A/NZ.
In April, Ingram Micro Australia brought Peter Kendall on board as the A/NZ executive managing director of mobility. He has extensive experience within the mobile telecommunications industry, previously working for Vodafone Global Enterprise, Brightpoint and Vodafone New Zealand.
Rick Gawdat was hired in July as the general manager, supply chain services for mobility. He also previously worked for Vodafone Global Enterprise, Brightpoint, Nokia and Microsoft.
Both Kendall and Gawdat are concentrating on building up a strong mobility services business within the A/NZ region.
“We bought Brightpoint to get a mobility portfolio and it also had a very strong services business,” Kendall said. “At a base level, there’s still a bit of lack of understanding that Ingram Micro has probably the best mobility services business.”
Kendall will focus on growing the handset device distribution business, stepping into other areas of the market such as wearable devices and the connected home, as well as building a bigger services portfolio.
Gawdat said on a global scale, Ingram wants to head towards driving a wedge in the services game as well as leveraging other strong areas of Ingram’s business across enterprise, small business and Cloud.
“Different parts of our business have different strengths. What we’re trying to do is become the enablers and aggregators internally to join all the dots together of the different capabilities and skills sets that Ingram has broadly,” Gawdat said.
“Brightpoint in the US, is a massive services business. It’s bigger than our distribution business in Australia and it’s a successful and mature functioning engine. We’re picking up some ideas from those guys, which may be on a small scale, but we have to start somewhere.”
In the US, Brightpoint maintains relationships with telcos such as Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T. It also works with wearable tech vendor, Fitbit.
In Australia, it maintains relationships with Vodafone, Telstra and Optus as well as Spark in New Zealand.
“We’re well connected with the different carriers here and we’re driving initiatives with those guys,” Gawdat said.
From a vendor’s perspective, Gawdat said they want more than just moving a box from one point to another.
“They’re talking to us about eCommerce opportunities and we've got a very robust eCommerce capability in the US, with more than 40 eCommerce solutions for partners,” he said. “We’re leveraging those learning's and capabilities and offering something similar to our vendor partners here as a new channel and route to market as a bolt on to existing channels.”
Gawdat said it was currently working with its enterprise business to seek out opportunities for resellers in the mobility services sector.
“We've got a broad IT and reseller channel and they’re experts at looking after the enterprise market and talking about their ICT infrastructure. But they don’t necessarily have the right skills sets in mobility - that defaults back to the carrier,” he said. “We’re starting to talk to resellers that traditional wouldn't have been thinking about a mobility play, and saying well here’s another piece of the pie for you.
“Some resellers are hungry for a smarter mobility play and will need help if they don’t already have the resources to do it,” he said. “We've already started with one partner here and we’re already getting some good results particularly in the mid-market space. We’re also talking to two or three vendors and some carriers that don’t have much of a thrusting commercial business and want us to help them out.
“It’s a three-way play between our traditional resellers, carriers and vendors.”
