Mark Sutor on Trust X Alliance in the AI age: The original distributor as platform

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Today, a conversation about the evolution of partner communities in the AI age, and a look at how peer networks that predate the current platform buzzword may have been the original take on the “distributor as platform” idea. Mark Sutor is president of Access Group, a longtime solution provider in the Canadian channel, and he serves as Canadian co-president on the Trust X Alliance Global Advisory Board. He recently came back from the Trust X Alliance Global Leadership Summit in Texas and joined me to talk about what landed, where the community is headed, and how the Canadian channel fits into a rapidly expanding global peer network.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Mark Sutor.

Robert Dutt: Mark, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Mark Sutor: Glad to be here. The summit was a unique experience — unlike anything I’ve seen in the IT channel before. I’m taking back several action items for Access Group and the Canadian community.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned a session with Level Up that stood out. Can you elaborate?

Mark Sutor: The Level Up presenter, Patrick, laid out a clear structure for leadership skills. It resonated with what we already do, but gave us a concrete, actionable framework.

Robert Dutt: What makes this summit different from other channel events?

Mark Sutor: It isn’t an IT-focused summit; it’s a leadership summit for partners, vendors, and Ingram Micro staff. The content is dedicated to personal and professional development, not sales or product demos. Although the material has an IT flavor, the lessons are applicable across industries.

Robert Dutt: At the summit, legendary analyst Ray Wang talked about expertise being commoditized by AI. How does that translate for a Canadian partner?

Mark Sutor: Ray’s insight reinforced that experience, market understanding, and geography are the real differentiators. Those elements set us apart from purely AI-driven solutions.

Robert Dutt: What were the big takeaways for you from the conference at large?

Mark Sutor: Several points stood out. First, industry direction: we need to think long-term about AI’s impact on service delivery and customer interaction. Second, AI evolution: AI will move from substituting tasks to fundamentally reshaping processes — much like Uber redefined transportation. And third, leadership discipline: AI is becoming a strategic discipline, not just a technology trend.

Robert Dutt: How is applied AI being positioned within the Trust X Alliance community?

Mark Sutor: As a member of the Global Advisory Council, I saw that partners are at varied stages — some delivering AI solutions, others exploring internal use cases. We developed a playbook to help members integrate AI internally first, then translate those use cases into client solutions.

Robert Dutt: Can you give me the nickel tour on the new TXA AI Agent coming to the Expand platform?

Mark Sutor: The AI Agent streamlines partner discovery. Instead of manually searching for a partner with specific skills — for example, installing a Cisco router in Saskatchewan — you can ask the agent in natural language and receive accurate results instantly. It also surfaces vendor solutions across the ecosystem. The tool pulls data from public sources like websites and LinkedIn, as well as internal information, making the community more searchable and collaborative.

Robert Dutt: It sounds like the difference between a classic keyword search and a modern, conversational search experience that can even surface new ideas.

Mark Sutor: That is absolutely correct. Of course, the challenge is that we all need to make sure we provide the information it needs, but the AI tool is also very good at consuming publicly available information from our websites and LinkedIn. It’s not just looking inwardly. It’s super cool. You use it and you say, “Wow, this is really neat.” You can see where it potentially goes in terms of hooks into the other things that Ingram Micro is doing with AI and agentic tech as that rolls out.

Robert Dutt: Trust X Alliance is expanding aggressively — new markets including India, the TXA Access program, and a target of 1,000 member companies by 2027. For the Canadian community, does global scale add value?

Mark Sutor: It does impact us, for sure. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about the global events — the camaraderie with other markets. On the environmental stewardship front, for instance, the folks in the UK have been doing amazing things for a few years, and Canada has grown close and participated in some of those ventures. It’s a great way to get a leg up on things happening in other parts of the world. Historically, people liked to go to the U.S. events for a preview of what’s to come, and that is still valid. But I’ve learned many things from the DACH region, the UK, and the Netherlands. I can’t wait to see what comes out of these new markets.

Robert Dutt: How do you feel about Canada’s role, given we’ve been there since before the Trust X name existed, dating back to VTN? We’ve always had a reputation for punching above our weight.

Mark Sutor: That has definitely continued. Canada has always had a voice a little bit louder than our size. Per capita, we have a very strong membership in Canada — we’re sitting just shy of 100 members now, which by population is much larger than a lot of other geographies. We’re going to continue to have a loud voice because of the dedication of the Canadian members. We always say, “You get out what you put in,” and the Canadian members put in their hearts and souls.

Robert Dutt: One of the things I’ve been thinking about, especially as distribution has increasingly redefined itself as a platform, is that in many ways the communities were the first take of “distributor as platform” — not a transactional entity, but a network to create business value, connections, shared intelligence, and leverage. Now we’ve got the technology side with Xvantage. So you’ve got the human community and the digital platform. How does one reinforce the other?

Mark Sutor: It’s a great question, and I’m not sure that anybody really knows one hundred percent. Obviously, Sanjib Sahoo spends all of his waking hours thinking about this aspect of distribution. I can tell you that the Xvantage journey has really been quite helpful. Canada is a little bit farther along in that journey than some other geographies. Every day when I log into Xvantage, there are some things there called insights. I learn things for free about my business and about my customers just by logging in. AI has surfaced various insights about things happening in my own company that perhaps I wouldn’t have even known. It’s remarkable that today, in certain areas, the point of trust for me is actually the data coming out of Xvantage and not necessarily my own system. Because Ingram Micro has done such a good job of collecting appropriate data that really can give those insights.

I think you’re right — there’s a lot of parallels. When I show up to a Trust X event, I gain insights from other members, from vendors, from Ingram Micro itself. The platform is really helping extend that. Not only does it help extend that through insights, but it’s really enabling the employees at Ingram Micro to take a much more proactive approach to understanding our business. I’m having those conversations more and more often where we’re no longer talking about what’s the price and where is it, and much more about how do we build business, how do we grow, how can we market together, how can we go together into various accounts and be stronger together. These are the conversations we’re having. On the back end, it’s Xvantage that has enabled those cycles to be freed up and for Ingram’s people to show up in a different way. I can tell you that in Canada, they do show up differently today than in the past.

Robert Dutt: How so?

Mark Sutor: I was preparing for a discussion with Ingram not that long ago, and this was front of mind — how Ingram had showed up differently. While I was preparing, I got a phone call from one of the reps at Ingram saying, “Hey, I just wanted to see if we could get something in the calendar to talk about how we can grow your Azure business together.” I thought, “Well, there you go. That’s exactly it playing out in real time.” These things didn’t necessarily used to happen with the intensity or the frequency in the past. Now these cycles have been freed up, where Xvantage is taking care of a lot of the mundane day-to-day stuff in the back end, and now we can have real conversations about building value for our customers.

Robert Dutt: As you talk to your peers, both within Trust X and outside of it across the Canadian channel, do you feel that this idea of the new role of distribution is widely understood, widely taken advantage of, widely optimized? Or is it still a competitive differentiator for those who went in early?

Mark Sutor: This is the problem we struggle with. Is it known? Yes. Is it well known? I would say not as well as it should be. I know a lot of members don’t take advantage of the various insights and things that I had mentioned earlier. Getting that word out is one of the objectives of the Trust X Alliance moving forward, both inside the community as well as to the broader Ingram family. Ingram is showing up differently, but I don’t think that the progress they have made is that well known. There’s still a little bit of thought that, well, they have a great website, which is true, but it’s way more than that today. It’s a platform that can do many, many things for your business.

It’s extraordinary what Ingram has done in the past couple of years. There are new features being added to the Xvantage platform weekly, biweekly at this point, and it’s a fast-moving process. Part of the challenge, whenever you’re improving a platform so quickly, is to make sure that people stay current with those changes. It’s a huge advantage. It’s a great thing because it’s moving at the speed of the industry, but at the same time, it’s hard for everyone to keep up to date with those various changes. And just to be clear, they do a fantastic job of revealing those new features. They pop up on your dashboard as they’re being revealed. There are various trainings and other things that go on, but life is busy, right? So it’s hard to keep that front and center, but this is a very good problem to have. In the Trust X Alliance, we’re happy to support those efforts and to make sure that the word gets out in an appropriate way. Part of that is to do things like we’re doing today, to make sure that we continue to talk about the successes that we’re having as members and make sure that the community at large, as well as the Ingram family at large, sees those wins.

Robert Dutt: Ingram’s overall AI strategy cadence has been the crawl, walk, run idea. Do you see the channel as an aggregate still in crawl, or are we moving towards walk?

Mark Sutor: Everyone is still at a very different place in their journey. But I think what’s shifted — I heard someone use this term in one of our affinity meetings the other day — is that things have moved towards expectation. We’re now expecting that AI is going to be doing great things for us. It’s no longer a curiosity, necessarily. And that’s really the shift that I see happening today. But it doesn’t change the fact that everyone’s at a very different position. And in some cases, rightly so. By various industry segment, I think by the nature of those segments, it makes sense to be either ahead or even behind the curve sometimes. But as a community, we’re very focused on elevating everyone’s experience to the point that makes sense for their business, and focusing on that internal use case for AI has been what makes a lot of sense for members.

Robert Dutt: If a Canadian MSP or solution provider isn’t in Trust X Alliance today, what are they actually missing that they can’t get from a vendor program or a buying group?

Mark Sutor: Well, we’re growing. I think that’s one of the biggest ones. Part of our approach to the marketplace is to grow faster together. And by sharing best practices, by working on things like our AI strategy, by leveraging vendor programs, and so on, we’ve been able to grow faster than the marketplace. And that’s, I think, the continued expectation of the organization is to continue to grow.

Robert Dutt: Last one for me. What’s the one thing you’d want Canadian partners to know about where Trust X Alliance is headed over the next twelve months?

Mark Sutor: Definitely watch us. I think that we’re doing a lot of really good things in the industry. The Trust X Alliance is really being positioned as the place to go for expertise, the place to go for knowledge, the place to go if you want a good job done as an end client. So the brand is really being built out in a lot of very interesting ways. It’s no longer necessarily just a brand in the IT community, but it’s gaining a lot of traction out there as the brand for IT. So we do extraordinary work together as a community, and I think we’re going to continue to do that. And yeah, I can’t wait to see where we go.

Robert Dutt: Thanks for the conversation, Mark.

Mark Sutor: Thank you, Robert. It’s been a pleasure.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Mark Sutor from Access Group.

I’d like to thank Mark for his time and for sharing his perspective on the Trust X Alliance community and the Canadian channel’s place in it.

A few takeaways from me on this one: the idea that peer communities like Trust X were arguably the first iteration of “distributor as platform” — not transactional, but network-driven — and that Ingram Micro’s Xvantage platform is now extending that same logic into digital insights. Mark’s observation that AI has shifted from curiosity to expectation in the channel is worth sitting with. And the note that Canadian partners, in his view, still underutilize what these platforms and communities can actually deliver.

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Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.