Driving Intelligent Growth: AI, Partnerships, and Transformation in Latin America’s IT Channel with Luis Ferez

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to day two of Ingram Micro One, and we're having a little chat about what's going on in Latin America with my new friend Luis here. How you doing, Buddy?

Hi, Mike. Nice meeting you. Nice to meet You.

What is the state of the market in Latin America? I think a lot of our folks who are watching this may not know, but I know it's highly competitive and I know it's highly fragmented, so, you know, what are you seeing out there and what's going on? Yeah.

We're seeing a, you know, the dynamism in the market today. I think it's one of the best times for that. So the market, it's, it's growing.

The future is bright for the technology market because of all these changes that are happening, right? All this evolution on technology, AI adoption, and, you know, the cloud business, which is exploding in some, in some countries drive that, uh, the, the optimism is across the board, right? You know, that in Latin America, we have a lot of countries that are catching up on technology.

So that open also the door for, you know, big opportunities. A lot of those countries are also maybe skipping generations of technology because they're going to the latest and greatest. They're not just going through the last thing, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely right. They are catching up on the new trends that are seeing and, uh, you know, the new, the new necessity also of all the businesses to become much more productive.

So the technology is helping and, and enabling those, those companies also to become much more effective. Are there partners in this various countries getting better at differentiating themselves, and do they have some ability to say, I do something that the other one doesn't? Yeah, I, I think it has been a journey, right?

It has been a journey. Obviously we have huge partners that have big different differentiators in the, in the markets, right? Another ones that start, like their journey of transformation, right?

From being legacy partners or partners that were focused on transacting now to, to become, uh, solution providers, right? So it has been a, a huge evolution from the, from the channel, I would say. We had very, very good partners that provide solution or have that have been very innovative on, on developing solutions that today are sent across the world.

One of the themes of the conference has been this notion of becoming more of a business process consultant, a little more focused on the business outcome and less on the enabling tech, per se. I think a lot of partners focused on being the trusted technology advisor for years, which is good. Yeah.

But it feels like there's a ship going on where they end customers saying, I need you to be more involved in the business process. Are you seeing that in Latin America? Absolutely.

Absolutely. Right. The, the, the businesses are requiring that the it guys become much more consultants and become part of the, the solution of the company, of what the company is requiring.

And we have several of our, of our partners that have gone through that transformation already, right? They, they have become like the trust advisor for our end users, where they rely on, on, on their, their advisors, on their, on their, uh, partners, uh, you know, to come up and build solutions that help the company become much more effective, right? To really drive, uh, their, their results that they are expecting, right?

The companies today, they don't have, I would say all the vision on what they could get out of the technology, but when they got a good, a good advisor, that changes, right? The advisor helps them are, and our channel helps them to understand what are all those opportunities that could be, that could be fulfilled with technology, you know, and we are seeing that, we're seeing a, a lot of, uh, adoption in cloud, for example, right? The adoption in cloud that we're seeing in several countries is huge, and it's because the demand has increased at the end user level, right?

They want to be much more secure. They want to have their, their information available at any time. So we, we've seen that, uh, level every time going up and up and up.

The requirements have been, you know, raising the, the bar. I think every channel partner around the world wrestles with this following issue skills, getting the right skills, making sure their teams are up to date on skills. Now we're asking them to kind of become more business experts.

Where do they get that expertise to kind of converge the business acumen with the technology skills? Right. Well, first, First of all, I would say start with a willingness right of them to change on moving from selling hardware now to sell solutions or, or be together with a, with end user.

Uh, and we work together with them. We have several programs through the region where we start with an assessment on where are they today and what do they need to do in order to become much more a solution seller, a real integrator that will help the, the end user. So we have seen great changes in some partners that went from selling hardware that today they're, they are very good service providers, right?

That went through the whole process with us from understanding where they, where they were and where the, where those, uh, what were those requirements that they need to start process analyzing their sales force and also their skills, right? To become much more integrated with their end users. So it has been a fantastic, a fantastic journey in, in several channels and in several countries.

I think there's also a fine line between the skills that I go higher versus maybe relying more on you and Ingram for professional services, as far as I can tell. Walking around, you guys have built a fairly deep bench, so are the partners starting to tap into that to kind of achieve that goal? Absolutely.

Absolutely. I would say today, one of the most difficult things today is to get a customer, but once you get a customer and you are partnering with us, we can basically complete your value offering without having you, or without the, without the channel having to build the full infrastructure because we are behind. So we can support a channel with our infrastructure, with our expertise, with all our technical resources to really support their value proposition so they can go out and sell anything without necessarily having a full infrastructure to support the requirements of the customer.

So we have a, a full stack of professional services, a full stack of technical resources that could support the end user requirements together with the, with a, with a partner. So it has been a, a very good, uh, a very good journey and alignment with our, with our partners, supporting them with our professional services offering. This is my assumption, but I think if you're selling more of a consulting engagement and a, and helping with a business outcome, there's less conversation about, um, you know, how to compare the price of one server versus another, and we don't wind up in this kinda, you know, race to the bottom kind of feeling.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I would say the price is not the most important piece anymore, right?

Obviously, it's a, it's a, a big piece because they want, everybody wants to maximize their, their margins and, and their profitability, right? But at the end, when you build up a solution, it's not necessarily easy to compare on the price, right? When you build up a solution that comes together with, uh, uh, with services, but also because also what we are looking with the services is like to create the thickness to the customer, right?

So the customer, once they start seeing the benefit of the services, they start asking for more and more and more and more because they see the benefit in their, in their, uh, in their company results. So that, that's, that's what really the vision that we want to accomplish, right? We want to create a huge thickness to the customers so they won't have to look for another, for another partner.

Right. We're here at the show, and I don't think you can walk maybe 20 yards without running into somebody talking about ai. Um, what are the partners telling you about the opportunities there?

What are they looking for? What do they need? You know, I, I would say it's, it's in two levels.

There's a, a big piece of our channel that today is trying to understand what, how to sell ai, how to use it first, and then how to sell it, right? Those are the ones that we are still working, you know, that we have an AI enable enablement program with them where we, where we took them again, with an assessment on where they are all the way until they, they become really experts on selling ai and the other one, it's a channel that, that I would say was born more on the, on the solutions space that quickly adopted the ai, uh, the AI trend, right? Those guys, we have set, we have seen, uh, you know, huge, uh, use cases in retail, in manufacturing, uh, in, in, uh, in health that are helping also the, the communities and the end users, you know, to become much more, uh, I would say the, the use of the, of the technology.

It's helping them to become much more productive and more effective. And so, so we have clear examples in several countries. Ingram, of course, has invested heavily in AI to take a lot of the friction out of the, the process of transactions and all of the things that's involved with that.

Um, is that gonna play out with the partners or the partners also investing in AI on their side and the two together might, you know, create a, a channel that is friction free maybe, or something? Yeah, yeah, Yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely.

You know, that we have been developing our platform, right? Expand, touch. We have been already for over three years developing the, the platform, and every day we see more traction where right, we see the, the partners using it much more frequently, taking the advantage of all the data and all the insights that they could get out of the, out of the, out of the platform.

Now, the platform, it's also helping us to become, to become much more proactive on bringing opportunities to the channel, right? That we saw through the data, through all the analytics that the platform is giving us through all, all of these, uh, AI models that, uh, that the platform works with. Uh, it's creating, you know, a lot of, uh, opportunities that today, or that the customer that, that our partners weren't seeing, no, now they're seeing it because we're putting them on the table.

We're telling now, okay, you, if you're selling this, a lot of customers that they sell this also sell this, so you should also explore, right? Complimenting your offer with all these products or with all these solutions, or with all these services, right? So I think it's, it's getting traction.

And on the other side, the customers are also seeing the benefit, the operational benefit of being, working with the platform today, right? It's much more effective for them to devote time, you know, to the, to the relations and to the, you know, to the, uh, strategy development with us while the platform takes care of all the transactional piece, you know, so it's, it's, we are gaining traction every time. Mm-hmm.

Historically, the best partners, I think, have built some sort of solution or something that differentiates with them, and a lot of times they work with you guys to kind of craft that. I think AI is gonna drive that further and deeper, because I need something that is tailored specifically to a business process. So are you hearing more from the partners about collaborating with you guys to build some unique solutions?

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, that we, we have basically all the, all our vendors solutions.

So we promote all our vendors, ai, AI solutions, right? So there's a stack of already I would say use cases, opportunities already there. Uh, but what we do with the customers is that we work together on the specific requirements of their customer, of the end users or, or the users, right?

So collectively, we build solutions that are much more effective according to what the end user's requesting today. So we have all these, uh, I would say processes and communication. We are all the time with, uh, trainings, we're working with trainings, we're working with seminars, right?

In order to, to work with them. And we also go with them to create demand, right? To generate demand without the end users.

Like talking about all the opportunities that AI could bring to those companies. So we are, it's, this is a, I would say an ongoing, an ongoing process. And obviously we start with those guys that we're already selling solutions, right?

Because that's, I would say that those, those are the most feasible to, to start, like accomplishing or building that business model that could support the end users. We, of course, live in a global economy, and of course times are interesting, but still we see more international cooperation, especially around IT solutions. How is that impacting the partners down in Latin America?

Are they working more closely with vendors and partners around the world? Absolutely. I mean, uh, we have examples in Latin America of countries that are really, are well advanced in the adoption of the technologies.

One, a clear example is Brazil, right? Brazil is one of our, I would say worldwide, one of our top subsidiaries on the adoption or selling on cloud and solutions. So we have huge partners in Brazil that deliver great solutions.

So we took advantage of that also, to go and train and share best practices and also share those solutions to other countries. So we're trying all, all the time to learn and to try to, you know, to export from those countries that have really good practices to export them to the rest of the, of the LATAM countries, and in some cases, to the world, because we have really good, um, and develop partners in, in, in our countries also. Are there partners in these various countries working with each other across borders to build solutions themselves?

Ye yes, and we are starting now to build our trust tax alliance community for Latin America, right? Where we want the customers or our partners to start in, uh, you know, uh, interacting between them through the region so they can, they can expand to other latitudes with their, with their solutions, but not necessarily having to have, or having to have the full infrastructure based in those other countries so they can go much more quickly or much more rapidly expanding their solutions to their countries. All right, so we're coming up to the end of the year.

You get your little crystal ball out. What's 2026 look like to you? It's, I, I think 2026 is gonna be a bright year, right?

The adoption continues, uh, the adoption and the necessity of tech, of technology continuing, continue growing rapidly, right? We just saw all the trends and what I disease predict, predicting for, uh, for next year. And we saw a huge growth, double dig growth basically in everything, even in devices.

The growth is not gonna be that high, but will start, will continue growing because the devices will be the base for the usage of the technology, right? At any, at any level. So we, we still see, uh, all our, our technology and products with good trends of growth for the, for the following years.

So that is exciting for us, right? So we just need to continue building and complementing all, all these solutions that could help us, you know, build a huge value proposition for the end users, right? So that's, that's, I, I think that's what we're gonna be continue working on, right?

Alright. Hey folks, like the man said, things are happening in Latin America and I can't wait to see what you guys are doing this time next year. Thank you, Mike.

Thank you. Thank you. And we'll be back in a minute.