Holly Niedzielski, director of event marketing and partner communities at Ingram Micro
AURORA, COLORADO — With apologies to the late great Leonard Cohen, the Trust X Alliance solution provider community has long since taken Manhattan. Now it’s looking to take Berlin.
With a successful expansion into the United Kingdom (where the group has more than 40 members today) under its belt, the Ingram Micro-sponsored reseller group has just introduced its first members in Germany. The three-company German chapter launched at the start of this year and made its first appearance at Ingram Micro ONE here this week.
“We’re starting small, just like we did in the U.K., said Holly Niedzielski, director of event marketing and partner communities at Ingram Micro. “We want to get real advocates into the program, so they can help their frenemies get together and join the group.”
While the community took several years after the introduction of its first U.K. chapter to look to further new shores, the community seems to have an appetite for further expansion in short order. Niedzielski said, “she could see” going forward with chapters of the group in regions throughout EMEA soon.
Jeffrey Jansen, senior consultant and vendor relationship officer at Edmonton-based PC Corp., and a member of the Trust X Alliance Council said the community has formed at expansion committee to get more formalized in where, and how, the community pops up next.
“Based on our success in the U.K., we think we’re getting better at this,” Jansen said. “We believe we have something really special, and we have a template for it. Now we have to scale.”
Jeffrey Jansen, senior consultant and vendor relationship officer at Edmonton-based PC Corp.
Jansen described that scale potentially including other markets in Europe, the Caribbean, and South America. And it’s a priority given the increasingly globalized market in which solution providers compete. One of the biggest tangible values of communities like Trust X has long been the ability to expand a solution provider’s reach beyond familiar territory. Soon, though, those connections may be as much intercontinental as they are transborder today.
“We feel we’re at a point where we need to expand this out. We have to start thinking globally,” Jansen said.
Niedzielski is no stranger to calls for the reseller community to expand beyond its heritage in North America and the U.K. She says she gets queries from various countries where Ingram does business, from the company’s team internally, from resellers and vendors alike.
She said the community “always wants quick” when it comes to expansion, but that it needs to make sure it’s doing so in a way where it meets the community’s vision for who its members are and their core values. There’s no specific number in mind for the expansion of the German group, for example. Instead, the desire is to find the right partners to fit into the group.
“If that means another handful of members by the end of the year, that would be a success for us,” she said.
