01732 759725 30 COVER STORY Ingram Micro encourages resellers to explore new technology areas at its first ever Festival of Technology • New LED Division • New UCC Vendors • New Channel Financing Solutions • New Marketing Subscription Service point out that they don’t have to be a specialist, because Ingram Micro is. “We have expansive knowledge and capabilities in these areas, including technical pre-sales expertise, a service capability and the technical knowledge in all four areas to be able to take some of that pressure away from our partners.” In this context, the Festival of Technology also gave Ingram Micro the opportunity to introduce Ingram Micro IoT, which helps resellers get started in IoT for logistics, retail, industry, smart cities and agriculture by providing a marketplace of pre-vetted solutions supported by services including solution design, implementation and training. Pandya adds that feedback on the day and in surveys since suggests that the combination of an engaging seminar programme and vendor exhibition was highly successful in meeting Speciality Solutions’ main objective. “A big positive for us at this event was that a lot of POS and data capture people started to talk to us about video security, because a huge amount of what they do is On October 18, Ingram Micro broke with its tradition of holding niche specialist events and launched its first Festival of Technology at the Fairmont Windsor Park Hotel. The event gave Ingram Micro Speciality Solutions the opportunity to showcase its four technology divisions – data capture, point of sale (POS), audiovisual & physical security, and unified communications – plus associated services like Ingram Micro Financial Solutions and Comms-care in an environment that could accommodate a large number of attendees while still providing opportunities for personal, faceto-face interaction. Raj Pandya, Commercial Director of Speciality Solutions, Ingram Micro UK & Ireland, told Technology Reseller that this balance was necessary to meet the needs of its invited audience of specialist partners and more generalist IT resellers. “Five or six years ago, Speciality Solutions was formed from an amalgamation of four very different business units, all very bespoke in what they do and all requiring significant technical ability. What we quickly worked out was that the end user is utilising all four of those technologies, but they’re buying them from four different sources – the AV is being bought from an AV integrator, the point of sale (POS) is being bought through a POS integrator and so on. “We wanted to get resellers, integrators and service providers from different technology areas together in one location to promote all of our technologies, to let them know that they could be missing out on opportunities in other areas just because they feel they don’t have the necessary specialism and, above all, to Ingram Micro Raj Pandya, Commercial Director of Speciality Solutions, Ingram Micro UK & Ireland
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=