Sanjib Sahoo won Personality of the Year at last year’s Stockies, and his passion and drive are helping to ensure that Xvantage continually develops to provide an optimum platform for partners and customers.
When Sanjib Sahoo starts talking about Xvantage by Ingram Micro, his passion for it is clear, in the animated way he talks and his clear message about the advantages it brings to those that use it.
His passion and pride in Xvantage shine through as he has overseen it from its ideation and development days and continues to oversee the Global Platform Group driving Ingram Micro to become a platform company. But for Sanjib, passion for what he does is a key part of his personality.
“I have passion in everything I do, because if I don’t have the passion, I don’t have the purpose,” he says. “I do what I do because I love what I do. I wake up every morning with my passion to do something.”
This passion was part of the reason why he won the Personality of the Year Award at the Stock in the Channel Awards – aka the Stockies – last year. “I was humbled with that, especially as there was a lot of competition in the category,” he says. “It’s not just another executive award or a design award, it’s personal. So, this award is incredibly special to me because it’s about who I am, not what I am. It is my personality that was acknowledged, not what I do for the channel. That’s why I’m humbled for the recognition.”
But passion is only part of what makes Sanjib, there is also fashion – he is noted for being a sharp dresser. “You have to combine passion with a little bit of fashion,” he adds with a smile.
“But it is also important to have compassion. You must not be arrogant but compassionate because everybody has good in them, every company has good, everything has good, and they have also bad in them. It’s our choice to be compassionate about the bad and focus on the good in them.
“Finally, you must also have execution – you must deliver what you say and say what you deliver. These four things – passion, fashion, compassion and execution – are what makes me and drive me on to try and make things better for people.”
Xvantage journey
It is these qualities that Sanjib uses to lead his team on Xvantage and travel the world to extol its virtues to all those involved in the channel and encourage them to join the platform.
Global integration is integral to the Xvantage story – and not just because it is a global product. While it was launched more than two years ago, Sanjib likens Xvantage to a journey, as it is constantly evolving. “We’re on a journey to become a B2B platform ecosystem company,” he says. “Every day we are building Xvantage, every day we are launching Xvantage, every day we are listening to our partners about Xvantage.
“We started with the vision of not building fragmented marketplaces, but connecting the ecosystem between our OEMs, vendors, us in the middle and our channel partners who then connect to their end customers, all seamlessly through a platform. We also wanted to solve key challenges such as how do we price real-time, how do we provide a personalised experience for every single persona, and the same platform for every entity’s different persona? How do we use AI and data to find opportunities? How do we create a new and better experience for our partners on a single pane of glass, and how do they build their business via our platform ecosystem?”
While the vision was huge, so was the drive to make it a success. To this end, a lot of talent was brought in from Silicon Valley to focus on developing the experience-first approach that Xvantage has. “It starts with customer experience, and then automation second,” Sanjib adds. “We worked on how to create a B2C experience in a B2B envrionment. It’s not easy: B2B is hard. How do you create the consumerised experience? We are learning all the time to get closer to that for partners. So that’s the journey we are on.
“The journey is about every day understanding what works well but also what does not work so well, to take feedback and keep on listening to our partners to be better. We will never be perfect with Xvantage. It’s a journey that we’re on to become a B2B platform ecosystem and connect our partners seamlessly to our vendors. And the way we can prove it is by solving those complex problems in this industry through Xvantage. It is not a tool, nor a website or a marketplace, but a journey and a platform ecosystem through which our partners can build their business.”
Technology delivering value
Of course, the technology Xvantage uses is constantly evolving too, but any new technology must have a benefit, Sanjib adds. “I’m not a believer in using shiny technology that no value,” he says. “Many times, for instance with AI, a lot of the industry try to work on some AI algorithm, then try to find a business problem that they can solve with it. In my mind, that’s not the right approach. You identify and really understand a business problem and then you find what technology can do to try to solve it.”
Data foundation
The foundation of the Xvantage platform is data. “It’s not just about building another data lake,” Sanjib says. “It’s about creating an operational data mesh that we have patents for. We have more than 30 patents pending. We have created an AI centre of excellence.
“We are not building a fragmented marketplace. We want to have hardware, software, cloud, subscriptions and everything in one single platform, creating a unified experience for our partners. We are not just transacting, but looking at data insights, looking at every single technology, finding opportunities, and then helping our customers to grow.”
AI is central to Xvantage and has been from the beginning. “We started with data as a foundation,” he says. “My first hire was bringing a chief data officer to build the data foundation, and we then focused hard on AI models to create a different experience.
“Today, it’s not about how we are using AI in Xvantage. Xvantage is AI and we are solving complex problems using AI. For instance, we are using AI to build our pricing models.
“We are using AI as a tool to make every decision on the platform. We have emails to orders using AI. We have PDF to SKUs using AI. We have integration times that have gone from months to minutes by using AI. We have complex quotes that have gone from taking minutes to produce to seconds using AI.
“Is it always perfect? No. It’s an iteration. It learns over time and is getting better over time. It is imperfectly perfect, but it’s a little more perfect every single time. The biggest mistake we make is needing AI to be perfect from the start.”
Xvantage Integration Hub
One of the latest innovations is the Xvantage Integration Hub, which is an AI-powered platform designed to facilitate quick and secure SaaS integrations. Its aim is to simplify the process of connecting to Xvantage with business systems such as CRM and ERP. “If you have a login, within a few minutes, you can connect to us and get access to Xvantage,” says Sanjib.
“You can automatically connect to it without going through an API or an integration process. It’s automatically connected to you. If you are a partner, you can go into Xvantage Integration Hub and connect sales for the account within a minute or two, then immediately access Xvantage data, quotes and the like.
“The Xvantage Integration Hub uses our machine learning and AI model framework, which we call Vendor Customer Agnostic Framework. I’m super excited about it because IT integration in B2B is hard. It takes a lot of time, resources and focus and the Xvantage Integration Hub takes that complexity out. What used to take months can now be done in minutes.”
Future
When it comes to the future of Xvantage, Sanjib is just as excited. “We are constantly working to innovate,” he says. “We are working on building a better experience for resellers to go to their end customers.
“We have our teams talking to our partners about what they need Xvantage to do for them and we then come back to them with the art of feasible. You can’t always jump on the next cool feature. There’s a healthy balance between the art of the possible and the art of the feasible to create what I call the art of the viable. We are constantly providing new iterations of our capabilities for our customers, rolling out in different countries, adding components, but also thinking about the groundbreaking technology to solve more problems for partners and customers.
“Xvantage will never be 100% finished because we will always keep on working on it, we are not doing something and moving on to the next thing. We perform as we transform. Our roadmap is developing these capabilities but also listening to our partners and continually improving their experience.
“We touch almost 90% of the world’s population in an industry that is one of the most complex ecosystems. And that’s what excites me every morning to wake up. Are we perfect? No. But if we can improve a partner’s experience, and they email us and talk about how about the platform changed their life and business, that is what I’m here for. That is what makes me happy; how we can change things and make their lives better.”
