The expanded deal will see PTC’s full portfolio made available to Ingram partners, up from the half to which they had access before. Ingram is also supporting the new relationship through multiple initiatives designed to simplify the technology for partners.
Mrinalini Lakshminarayanan, Global Executive Director, Emerging Technologies at Ingram Micro
Global distributor Ingram Micro has signed a deal with Boston-headquartered PTC, which makes a wide variety of CAD, PLM, IoT, and Augmented Reality solutions. The deal expands an existing relationship with PTC, significantly expands Ingram’s portfolio, will bring new reseller partners in from PTC, and should significantly expand Ingram’s IoT portfolio in North America.
“I spent some amount of time in manufacturing and have a deep understanding of that environment, said Mrinalini Lakshminarayanan, Global Executive Director, Emerging Technologies at Ingram Micro, who runs the global IoT solutions team, and sets the strategy for IoT. “Industry 4.0 is growing significantly. PTC has a full portfolio of products in that space – CAD, PLM and augmented reality. They provide a complete set of solutions for manufacturing.”
Ingram has a previous relationship with PTC, but this significantly expands that relationship
“We did have half of their portfolio available for us to resell,” Lakshminarayanan said. “Now we can resell the whole portfolio, and we can also now service existing partners with this expanded relationship.”
Lakshminarayanan said that this market had really picked up steam for Ingram since the advent of COVID.
“What we call extended reality, and which others call virtual reality and other terms, has been a big part of growth in our portfolio,” Lakshminarayanan said. “Because of COVID, there was a huge adoption into the space. ISVs developed a lot of applications that can be used by extended reality, especially around manufacturing support, and training. This has made it a huge growth horizontal – growing in many verticals, like smart cities and healthcare. The initial growth of IoT in these areas was in operations teams, but IoT is now growing in IT as well.” The result has been double digit growth in the space for Ingram over the last year.
Lakshminarayanan stressed that Ingram has also been active in expanding its own facilities to deal with increased demand in this area, of which the PTC expansion is just one aspect.
At the beginning of the year, we extended our portfolio between one and two devices on anything in the space,” she said. “We want to be sure that we can extend across whole reality areas.” They also expanded vertical applications and services as well as their extended reality portfolio.
Ingram Micro has also been more aggressive in encouraging partners to visit their IoT Centre of Excellence in Irvine CA, which they opened up in April 2020. The Centre showcases end to end solutions in multiple verticals, and provides workshops and training to build IoT and expanded reality practices. It also helps them build unique solutions for specific opportunities, and to obtain certification of solutions on IoT platforms in order to reduce time to market.
“In the Center of Excellence, we have experience zones where partners can come leverage this technology,” Lakshminarayanan said. “Some of this capability is already virtual and we are building more of it, so that partners can choose what they want in how they experience this.
“We have developed vertical expertise in this space and continue to do so, in order to reduce the barrier to entry to partners,” she added. “We also now have a full training group, working with reseller partners at all levels. We want to reduce the complexity for our resellers by leveraging our own solution labs through our Accelerator Program. That is being leveraged by many of our partners now. We are doing end to end solution packages because they make life easier for partners. Our goal is to demystify complex technology for our partners through our acceleration programs and end to end solutions.”
Lakshminarayanan was very bullish about the expectations Ingram Micro has from the expanded partnership.
“We expect to see significant growth in this space,” she said. “We are working on vertical space solutions, and we see a lot of marriage these with the PTC products we are selling into that space. PTC has not worked with distribution in North America before, and they are also now bringing their own partners into Ingram.”
Ingram Micro Canada is equally positive about the prospects for the expanded relationship in this market.
“Ingram Micro plays the critical role of an IoT solutions and services aggregator for the channel, and has seen increased adoption of IoT in Canada specifically year-over-year,” said Savio Lee, Business Leader, DX and Emerging Technologies, at Ingram Micro Canada. “Our new North America alliance with PTC is a natural fit within Ingram Micro’s successful and growing IoT portfolio.”
