Chapter 1: IT Distribution: Challenges and Opportunities

In 2020, Ingram Micro was the world’s largest IT distributor by reach, extending to nearly 90 percent of the world’s population with net sales of $49.1 billion. Following a traditional distribution model, the company offered hardware and software products from 1,500 vendors (including Apple, Cisco, and Dell) to 161,000 customers, primarily value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators (SIs), managed service providers (MSPs), and telecom businesses.

Then there was the issue of antiquated systems and processes. Ingram Micro’s mainframe of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software was 45 years old. The company had separate, unintegrated systems for its cloud, asset disposition, and e-commerce businesses. There was no unified global system for sales data, leaving each regional and local market to design its own processes and store information in a decentralized database. Ingram Micro’s website had thousands of distinct landing pages and few ways of capturing marketing data on a global scale. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Ingram’s employees. “We sold a lot of technology, but we didn’t always use technology very well,” recalled Anaya. “Our systems were antiquated, and the entire industry operates in ways that are people-intensive and disconnected.”

A New Vision

While those challenges were apparent to Sahoo when he joined Ingram Micro in June 2021, his background made him uniquely qualified to tackle them. After growing up in a remote area of India, Sahoo started his career in finance and economics before getting a master’s in technology. In the 2010s, he was CIO and CTO of the online trading platform TradeMONSTER, the first streaming browser-based trading platform, which was later acquired by E-Trade. When he was hired by Ingram Micro as chief digital officer, he was specifically tasked with improving e-commerce, leveraging his experience with TradeMONSTER. But that goal quickly proved too small. Instead, Sahoo began thinking about the operational and business challenges that Ingram Micro faced—and the opportunities they presented. “I did not stay in my job or in that box,” Sahoo recalled. “I looked at the industry and came up with an idea. The world’s largest content company, Facebook, does not own a single piece of content. The largest taxi company, Uber, doesn’t own a single taxi. As a distributor, Ingram Micro doesn’t own anything; we connect the left to the right. Why can’t we be a platform company, too?”

Bay, who was then president of global technology solutions, brought Sahoo a vision for a “single pane glass” interface that would integrate the disparate elements of customer orders, including hardware and software. AI-enabled engines would customize everything from pricing and recommendations to tracking information and business insights. Those engines would be fed by inputs from a newly constructed data lake (i.e., a centralized repository of clean data), which would allow Ingram Micro to unify and leverage its massive amounts of decentralized data for the first time.

The design wasn’t just about software, interfaces, and data management. It would also represent a foundational shift in Ingram Micro’s business, evolving it from a traditional distributor into a platform company. At the same time, Ingram Micro would remain dedicated to its long-held values. “Our mantra has always been to put the customer in the middle of the way we invest, innovate and grow,” said Anaya. 

Bay entrusted Sahoo with the task of creating the strategy and roadmap that would guide Ingram Micro through the transformation. “I did not approach it with the goal of creating a system to solve the business,” Sahoo recalled. “I created it to be the foundation to become a platform business. That's very different. We are disrupting Ingram Micro from within Ingram Micro. If we don’t, somebody else will.”

With approval from Bay and then-CEO Alain Monié, Sahoo prepared a 40-slide deck that laid out his ideas for a meeting of Ingram Micro’s leadership and investors in September of 2021. During the presentation, he set an ambitious timeline: a mere 15 weeks to develop a minimum viable product (MVP). “I really remember that I got a standing ovation,” Sahoo recalled. “It was a defining moment for us. And from that time onwards, they approved the budget for the two-year build, and we started the journey.”