Ingram Micro 2011 Annual Report Download - page 14

•Competitive Differentiation through a Customer-Centric Approach. We are committed to enhancing
customer loyalty by working to continually strengthen our value proposition. Through our understanding
and fulfillment of the needs of our reseller and supplier partners, we provide our customers with the
supply chain tools they require to increase the efficiency of their operations, enabling them to reduce
inventory levels, improve customer delivery, and enhance profitability. We provide business information
to our customers, suppliers, and end-users by leveraging our information systems. We give resellers, and
in some cases their customers, real-time access to our product inventory data. By providing improved
visibility to participants in the supply chain, we allow inventory levels throughout the channel to more
closely reflect end-user demand. This information flow enables high quality execution and our ability to
provide favorable order fill rates to our customers around the world while optimizing our investment in
working capital. Through our data analytics capabilities we are able to leverage our extensive database of
end-user shipping and purchasing records to provide valuable data for our vendors and resellers in North
America. Our vendors can utilize this information to help them achieve a higher return on their marketing
campaigns through more effective targeting and messaging, while resellers benefit from tailored sales
leads. Our business analytics tools in EMEA evaluate customer and vendor data to drive internal
efficiencies and feed vendor-focused programs. Our tools provide the data and analytics to enable us to
deliver more value-added services to our customers and vendors, offering them a targeted approach to
market coverage and providing specialized technology development and solutions.
In the U.S. and Canada, we host channel communities which collectively cover a total of more than 3,000
customers. Leading our community portfolio is the exclusive VentureTech Network (“VTN”), our
premier group of solution providers. For over a decade, we believe that VTN has set the channel standard
in peer collaboration and development. New, exclusive, fee-based programs have been added to VTN
community offerings, which we believe will drive additional growth and differentiation for this base of
resellers. In addition, our SMB Alliance community provides networking opportunities, tools and support
for a broader base of our emerging small and midmarket resellers. We host communities to address the
needs of resellers focused on the government and education sector (Public Sector Elite) and system
builders (System ArchiTECHs). Collectively, we align the partners in our communities with the
relationships, resources, and programs to enhance their growth strategies.
Our commitment to a customer-centric focus has been widely recognized throughout the IT industry, as
evidenced by a number of awards received by Ingram Micro over the past year. In 2011, our European
operation earned three regional Distributor of the Year awards at a premier channel event: winners were
Southern Europe, DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Hungary), and UK & Ireland. Among the
many awards our regional and country operations have received from vendor partners are Red Hat’s
“North American Distributor of the Year,” Microsoft’s “Distributor of the Year” for our Canadian
operation and its “2011 Authorized Distributor Partner of the Year” for our Indian operation, and
VMware’s “Global” and “Americas Distributor of the Year” awards. Our U.S. operation also received top
distributor awards from Juniper Networks, QLogic, Trend Micro and Fortinet.
Customers
We conduct business with most of the leading resellers of IT products and services around the world. Our
broad customer base is divided into segments which include VARs, corporate resellers, retailers, systems
integrators, direct marketers, Internet-based resellers, independent dealers, reseller purchasing associations,
managed service providers, cloud providers and PC assemblers. Many of our reseller customers are heavily
dependent on distribution partners with the necessary systems, capital, inventory availability, and distribution
facilities in place to provide fulfillment and other services. We also provide supply chain management services to
a variety of customers, including retailers, Internet resellers, and vendors. Within our mobility business, we
provide activation services for mobility product vendors, and sell mobility products to wireless sub-dealers and
independent software vendors. We try to reduce our exposure to the impact of business fluctuations by
maintaining a balance in the customer segments we serve. We attempt to periodically rebalance our customer
mix in keeping with profitability goals.
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