How the pandemic has changed the culture of distribution

Bill Brandel, country chief executive for Ingram Micro Canada

Bill Brandel, country chief executive for Ingram Micro Canada joins the ChannelBuzz.ca Podcast to discuss how the distributor has changed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Like many businesses, distribution was stretched like never before while simultaneously facing unprecedented and at the time unknown challenges as the pandemic took hold this spring. Distributors had to figure out how to protect their people and ensure business continuity, which in their case, included making sure that much-needed laptops, monitors, and other devices could get out to solution providers, and ultimately to their customers as they also looked to ensure business continuity.

We discuss:

Ingram’s reaction to the early days of the pandemic, moving to work-from-home for those who could, and moving to safeguard those who needed to be in the distribution centre;
the key role distributors played in the mad pace of solution providers helping their own clients to move to a work-from-home stand in those early days;
how the company’s culture allowed it to make the changes it needed to make, and how technology helped keep that culture intact through those changes in ways that might not have been possible even a year ago;
why solution providers are looking for more security, more cloud, and flexible financing options from their distributors; and
why Ingram Canada chief financial executive is “going to be a force of change” in the channel.

All this and much more in this edition of the ChannelBuzz.ca Podcast.