Ingram Tech Forum 2016 Introduces its Partners & End-Customers to THE NEW FUTURE

Ingram Tech Forum 2016 organized in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru was an eye-opener for customers and enterprises and attempted to answer relevant questions on technology disruption - 

Ingram Micro would also like to take this opportunity in thanking their Participating Vendors – viz HP, VMWARE, EMERSON, IBM, AXIS , CISCO AND DELL EMC, in its first year
The wholesale provider of supply chain services and technology products, Ingram Micro has recently organized the Ingram Tech Forum 2016, a series of sessions in three major cities of India- Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. Aimed at establishing a strong connect with CIOs and its partners, the Forum covered the day in 2 sessions – the morning session and the evening session. 
While the morning session was designed for the end customers, the evening session was kept entirely for connecting with its channel partners. Both the morning and the evening sessions in all the cities tried to update and take its customers and partners through the bouquet of its enterprise-grade solutions. 
By organizing a Forum of such grandeur, Ingram Micro also became the first national distributor in the country to be conducting an event where it brought together all the top OEMs in the country, and which no other distributor has attempted earlier. Ingram plans to make it an annual practice and is contemplating of coming up with such events every year. 
The top OEMs of the country such as HPE, VMware, IBM, Axis Communications, VMware, Emerson and Dell EMC participated in the forum, promising high level of premiumness to all the guests attending the event. Some of the notable industry leaders who attended these sessions include names like Santosh Shriyan, Channel Business Leader – West, IBM India; Prasun Talukdar, Country Manager-Channel, HPE; Rohan Bhasin from IBM, Sanjay Achawal, Executive Director, Ingram Micro India, Kannan Rangamani, Director Sales, Ingram Micro.

The Morning Session…
The Tech Forum 2016 envisioned focusing on areas of development, challenges and notions that surround the IT industry. The Forum brought to light and discussed several industry norms and notions pertaining to digital transformation, ongoing trends in the IT distribution space, besides discussing the entire IT eco-system at large comprising of latest trends in Big Data, Power Management, data security, the printing industry and so on. Industry leaders like Santosh Shriyan, Channel Business Leader – West, IBM India; Prasun Talukdar, Country Manager-Channel, HPE spoke about the challenges that customers face in the new digital disruption era and about the Cloud Security landscape that needs to be a high area of concern for end customer visibility.  
In the Bangalore session, “The changing face of distribution and SI biz in India”, Sanjay Achawal, Executive Director, Ingram Micro India put forward his views on the cloud competencies of Ingram and also discussed how partners can reap benefit from these offerings. He also highlighted the fact of how Ingram’s transformation has taken place from a conventional distributor to an end-to-end player in IT distribution space over the years.
In Delhi, the session was initiated by Manoj Pandey, GM, North, Ingram Micro India. Continuing on the theme of the session and keeping the agenda of Secure, Analyze and Prosper intake, he addressed various accounts on how to power the Next Gen Enterprise. He also affirmed the position of Ingram Micro as the Giant Distribution Network and defined the company’s pan India coverage that will be of outmost help for the partner community.
In the Ingram Micro TechForum 2016 organized in Mumbai, the forum focused on the future roadmap and strategic vision to improve industry portfolio. Atul Gaur, Executive Director – Mobility, Ingram Micro India who opened the session mentioned that Ingram Micro has continuously increased the product offerings and also enhanced its services. He further highlighted that the company at present has more than 20,000 channel partners and over 100 vendors and that it acts as a link between technology provider, OEMs to fulfill customer needs via its capabilities.
In all the cities, different formats of interactions were designed which aimed at a 2-way communication with the audience. So while there was an interactive Coffee session organized in Mumbai, there were respectively an open discussion and a panel discussion designed for the cities of Delhi and Bengaluru.

The Evening Session…

Transformation to Digital is not easy. Vendors always need the support of its partner eco-system to serve its clients in order to bring bigger dividends for their work. The evening session of the Ingram Tech Forum 2016 put forth several opportunities harping at the greater good for the partner community and on how they can leverage these opportunities. 
Senior Ingram Micro executives set the agenda and roadmaps for the future association between the leading technology OEMs and the channel fraternity. Since the company’s business model was entirely partner driven, Ingram Micro emphasized that the thrust of the sessions with partners was to decide what the business solutions that they develop should look like. 
Vendor Presentation & Solution Displays…
Prasun Talukdar, Country Manager-Channel, HPE dealt with the challenges faced by companies in his interaction. He stressed upon the buzzword of a phenomena that disruption of technology is becoming the new norm and showed several statistics as to how 70% of the Tech landscape is wireless in support of his statements on current trends hovering over the technology circuit. “India ranks 77th in the league of Digitized nations. Going by the inroads made in the nation’s tech circuit, by 2020 we might be in a position to witness the value creation of India’s landscape to peak billions.” He was also quick to opine that 2020 will be the eventful year in which we will see the Nation adding another feather to its cap, by earning the sobriquet of ranking in the order of countries that will be having the highest GDP growth by making inroads in verticals ranging from Social Mobility to IOT.
Milind Sonawane, Sr Sales Engineer, Nimble Storage on his part elucidated Nimble’s school of thought and relationship with buyers and partners.
Discussing about security, Santosh Shriyan, Channel Business Leader –West, IBM India said that as 55% of the attacks are from insider threats, only the perimeter security is not enough. Cloud security is the first step towards end user visibility. He also mentioned that IBM has a diverse and wide security portfolio. “There is a need for a holistic and integrated approach towards cybersecurity that takes all factors into consideration. IBM has the most diverse and deepest security portfolio,” he said.
 IBM also provided a demonstration of its security systems for servers since on-premise security was a crucial area of concern. 
Santosh Kulkarni, Country Manager, Business development- Smart Solutions, Emerson Network Power touched upon the points that stand advantageous for partners, whosoever will avail Data Center Solutions from Emerson. He quipped that in the case of Data Centers, there are some pre determiners which are there by default such as metrics ranging from monitoring to smoke detection, water leak detection, temperature measurement, fire suppression and cooling features in-built within the rack of Data Centers that are critical for the health and congenial functioning of the Data Center Installation deployment itself. He informed that Emerson in the Data Center segment has a large product offering in store. “Emerson India is becoming Vertiv in 2017 and is currently undergoing a transition. Our transition shall not impact any areas of our business,” he announced. Kulkarni also expressed a great degree of knowledge with regard to Big Data. 
Vincy Kwatra, Distribution Account Manager, Axis Communications held a session on surveillance and physical security. He shared some of the latest surveillance technology by Axis Communications. Some of these were being used in border control applications and other areas demanding the highest degree of security. He also shed some light on the work that Axis was doing towards the Internet of Things (IoT) since it was a strong emerging field. Kwatra said, “Zatar is an IoT enabled platform that makes it easy to build IoT enabled devices and apps.” 
There were also sessions that focused on the role of the Internet of Things, the opportunities in analytics and cognitive computing, disruptive technologies such as 3D printing.

To conclude…
Amidst all the powerful presentations, what became clear is the fact that Information Technology as a standalone entity has come of age and it stands tall. It is no longer a part of the business, like it used to be a few years back. The audience also agreed that cloud security is a crucial aspect for quality end user visibility as hackers generally attack devices rather than security systems. At a time when the world is witnessing paradigm shifts in the global technological circuit, Data is the new buzzword and “Digital Disruption” is the new phenomena. Also, in the wake of digital technology and start-up ecosystem gaining pace, the industry is leveraging technologies such as analytics, datacenters, cloud computing, networking etc. 
The Ingram TechForum in the coming years aims to reinforce the relation with its CIOs further to help them easily undergo the transformation. The Forum also served as a realization that the leading Distributor tried to wake up its partners to, before it became too late for them to catch up with the new business developments discussed during the course of the event.