Driving Success in Australia’s MSP Market: Customer-Centric Growth in a Globalized, AI-Driven Era with Hope McGarry

Hey everybody. We're at Ingram Micro One and we're talking about innovation in the channel. My new friend Hope here.

Hope. Welcome to United States Hope's from Australia. It's a very competitive marketplace in Australia.

What are the challenges that you're dealing with? I think many of our MSPs are facing a number of challenges in the Australian market, which is highly competitive, as you've mentioned. I think one of the areas that a lot of our MSPs are, are really struggling with is profitability.

A recent study suggested that 95% of MSPs in Australia have listed profitability as their number one concern moving into 2026. I think one of the other areas of concern is the skill shortage that we face in Australia, particularly in the areas of cybersecurity, cloud and ai. So our partners are having to invest in upskilling their existing teams or invest in capability, which is very expensive and difficult to find.

And I think the third area where a lot of our partners are really facing challenges is our market is highly complex. Our ecosystem, which was once linear, is now evolving rapidly and it's a 360 ecosystem. So we're seeing far more complexity around licensing models, multi-cloud, multiple vendor solutions, and end customers really expecting higher return on investment and strategic advisory services from our partner community.

So given all that, what distinguishes the MSPs who are succeeding in that marketplace? We've Got a number of MSPs that are also thriving despite the competitive challenges in the headwinds that they're facing in the market, where we see our MSPs with a very clear value proposition that they've defined and they can execute against. We're seeing them have a great deal of success where we're seeing MSPs align to business outcomes and solving business challenges.

We're also seeing a great deal of success with our MSPs. On the other side of that coin is the ones who are maybe struggling a little bit. What do you see them doing that maybe they should be thinking about fixing?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the lack of clarity on the value proposition is, is hard. I think customers, MSPs that are struggling with that complexity and not really able to navigate that are finding the market difficult to, to navigate and, and the high degree of competition.

So really being able to understand where you add value, where you play, whether that's niche or more, more broadly, but really sticking to your capabilities and then expanding upon them within your accounts, I think is a, is a big challenge for many of our partners. Given those issues, one of the things we talk about at the show a lot is business outcomes and focusing on those business outcomes. And that's a lot more than just providing an IT service per se.

Um, what are customers looking for from you? What are, is that changing? Are the expectations changing?

Absolutely. I think as the market becomes even more complex, I think our role as distribution needs to evolve with the changing needs of our partner and vendor community. My team and I recently this year traveled all around the country, uh, and our exec connect series, we spoke to 500 C-level within our partner community to really understand what the challenges are that they're facing, where they see the opportunity, and to really lean into areas where we feel Ingram Micro can help support their growth.

I think that where we're focused is really around making sure that we're investing in the areas of opportunity to support our partners. I mentioned the skill shortage issue. We've really invested heavily in some of those areas to ensure that our partners can leverage our skillset and our capabilities to not have to invest in that headcount themselves and to really leverage our expertise.

So I think that's one area where we're really supporting our partners to be successful. Another area of huge focus for us is on enablement. So making sure that our partners and their teams are enabled around what's currently moving the solutions and stacks that are really accelerating, but also future proofing them around ai.

We recently launched in Australia enable AI where we're able to provide assessments for our partners development tracks for our partners to help them capitalize on the, a opportunity that's currently accelerating in market, although a little bit slower than the rest of the world in Australia, but certainly a big mover in the next two years. How are the partners themselves gonna evolve along that part of the conversation? Are they changing their business models a little bit?

Are they getting a little more nuanced about how they deliver something in terms of cost structure? I mean, you know, walk that through the final equation. I think we're all looking for operation operational efficiencies.

We're all looking for productivity gains. I think our gram micro ourselves through our Advantage platform is really leading the way there. It's all about how do we remove operational friction and how do we free up ourselves and our partners and our vendors to do more and sell more and grow more.

So I think we're, we are playing a pivotal role in helping our partners evolve their own operating models to be more platform orientated, to be more digital in nature so that we can do more for less essentially. Mm-hmm. And following up on the skills conversation a little bit, in your professional services, do the partners need to get savvier about who they hire full-time versus what they're leaning on from a distributor partner like yourself?

And it seems like the model's a little more fluid. I would say it is a little more fluid, and I don't think it's a one size fits all. I think that you could have partners, for example, who have got a huge amount of PS capability, professional services capability, whose talent bench may be fully utilized.

And so they need capacity and that's where they can lean on distribution to do that. We have other instances where we have partners who maybe haven't got that skill set right now from a PS perspective around ai, and they can leverage our skillset and our capability not just locally, but also globally to help augment their capability and give them access to opportunities that perhaps they haven't got the skillset to access. Today We started talking about how competitive the marketplace is, but are the partners working with each other?

Are they trying to leverage up a little bit, not just Ingram, but each other and there's, that's being facilitated through you guys? Absolutely. So Trust X Alliance is a, is a global program where we essentially bring together uh, you know, 150 plus partners into a shared community or ecosystem where knowledge is shared, ideas, uh, are born and ideated and, and that shared knowledge is what makes our ecosystem stronger and we facilitate that.

I'm really proud that actually at Ingram one this year we've launched our own Australian Trust X. So we're part of the global community now and it's really born for the reason, allowing our partners to share ideas, crosspollinate, uh, leverage each other's skill sets and strengths to do more together. And I think that's a really powerful role that distribution can play.

We talked about the skills gap a little bit, but are there particular skills and areas where you're seeing partners need more expertise than others? Are there a, it seems to me there's a lot of emerging technologies these days. I might not have anybody who knows anything about those things, but um, where's the pressure?

Yeah, I think, um, beside profitability, there was a canal study that was recently done that indicated that the skill shortage was also one or two top priority of concern for partners in the Australian APAC and even global ecosystem today. So I think where we're seeing partners struggle is around those technology stacks that are really accelerating. So cybersecurity, cloud modernization, um, ai, they're really the areas where partners are struggling to fill some of those skills.

The shortage of talent, particularly in Australia is, is exceptionally high. The cost to get that resource into the business is extremely high and they're all looking to do more with less. So it's a little bit of a conundrum that I think many of our partners are facing today.

Mm-hmm. And the type of people you're looking for if you're a partner or a kind of a little bit different than if I'm just an internal IT organization where I'm looking to hire somebody. 'cause they have to have some nice ability to have a good experience with a customer, right, right.

That's requires a lot of patience is usually the first attribute. But, um, what kind of folks are you guys looking for and are there, are there things that you and Ingram are doing to kind of coach and train people that become more suitable for being in a professional services role in a partner organization? Yeah, So I often say we're looking for unicorns Because The skill set is actually really hard to find.

So you're looking for higher levels of technical competence, but you're also looking for people that have an element of charisma and, and a sales bent to, uh, how they engage with customers as well. So being able to be technically competent but also be able to communicate with partners around business outcomes and partners, customers around business outcomes, I think is critically important to the success of people in those roles. We do a lot of work with the technical community at Ingram Micro around enablement, uh, sales enablement and technical enablement to really ensure that our partners resources are equipped to be able to go out and successfully manage end user environments.

Mm-hmm. Are you doing anything with the local universities or colleges that, uh, help maybe expand the bench a little bit? We are actually, so we have a relationship with a university in Queensland that we work closely with to really help develop nurture and foster talent coming out of their cybersecurity, um, university courses.

And we incubate that talent into our own organization, but also expand that into our partner base so that our partners can identify talent early and bring them into their own organizations as well. Now we're here at the show, so I've had the benefit of walking around, but people are talking about, um, X Advantage and Growth Tracks. What is that exactly?

Yeah, so we launched Enable AI in Australia in July, August of this year, and it's really about enabling our partners to assess their own skills, understand where they are from a skills perspective on the, on their AI journey, benchmark themselves against other similar partners to understand their readiness. And then for us to build growth tracks bespoke to those partners that help them enable and accelerate their AI capabilities so that they can capture that market opportunity. So we're well on the way there.

We have 25 partners in Australia already that have started that journey. I think really interestingly also with enable AI is the number of use cases by vertical that partners can pull down and learn from, but also use to position to position with their end users to capitalize on AI opportunity as well. Mm-hmm.

How do you make sure that the self-assessments that people are taking are, shall I say valid? Because, I mean, I know I have a very grandiose opinion of my own capabilities, but to probably not realistic. So how do you make sure that partners kinda, you know, answer those questions in a way that are truthful In Australia?

I think culturally we're very hard markers and we're very critical of ourselves and others. So I feel as though that the partners probably do a fairly good job of assessing themselves. I mean, at the end of the day, you need to be honest in that process in order to maximize the opportunity and, and the enablement tracks that we have.

So I do think that the partners are, are fairly good critics of themselves and they know that to really make sure they can leverage that program, uh, they have to do an honest self-assessment so that we can help them appropriately. Hmm. Talent is everything in this business.

What's your advice to the partners to make their organization like the most attractive place where the best talent wants to work? I think it's really important that we nurture our people. Um, I think being a people first organization is super important.

You hear Paul Bay talk about it all the time, uh, and we live it. It's in our DN at Ingram that, you know, we we're customer and people obsessed, um, and we put our people and our customers first. And I think if you can provide that in an organization, I think you become quite sticky and I think you get, uh, you know, a lot of loyalty, your attrition drops and it's somewhere people want to stay.

I think providing people with the opportunity to learn and to grow and to adapt to what's happening in our market, um, but enable them to be ready for what's next as well, I think is critically important. So I think investing in people, being a culture that people are in inspired to, to, to be in each and every day and and to feel purposeful about their work. I think if you can do those things, it's easier said than done.

I think you're able to retain top talent and attract top talent, which is super important for us in this industry. Do you think that it's important for the folks that run the organization to exhibit this one attribute that I think is important, but um, they seem to be always have an appetite for continuously learning. They're constantly curious and one of the things, you walk around the show floor, everybody here is kind of checking out the latest and the greatest.

And I cannot help but wonder if that's like one of the, the core attributes that is overlooked about success in the channel is that everybody in it seems to be fundamentally curious and always learning. Absolutely. And I think that's what makes our industry amazing.

That's why I've been in the industry 25 years and I can't imagine being anywhere else. I mean the transformation in this industry from the, you know, the birth of the internet to, to cloud, to ai, um, just, you know, cyber it, it's constantly evolving and you have to remain curious and you have to be willing to challenge the status quo and you have to be willing to expand your mind beyond what you ever thought was possible. And I think that's the beauty of working in this industry.

And I think I'm very lucky to be surrounded by partners and vendors who are always curious, always evolving, always ideating and innovating. And I think that's what keeps us young. Maybe not biologically young, but mentally young and, and really, you know, keeps us all super interested and committed to the ecosystem that we operate in.

Keeps us young and second part stressed. Yeah, so it's an east missing combination, young And gray. There you go.

So as we've mentioned, you're from Australia, but we're here in DC or just outside of DC and there's a lot of international cooperation. The globalization is still a trend. I mean, there's a lot of issues in the world, but still people are doing business across countries.

How is that playing out in Australia? Are you partnering more with people from overseas? Are you seeing more of that and what does that look like?

Yeah, absolutely. So globalizations absolutely impact in the Australian market and I think you can look at that positively or negatively depending on how you frame that challenge. So I think for many of our partners, it means that the competitive landscape has become heightened because we're now not just competing locally, we're competing globally.

I think on the flip side, what that presents is an opportunity, however, for partners who are looking to expand into other geographies and locations. And I think Ingram Micro Australia is very, very well placed to be able to support our partners to type into the globalization opportunity, um, where a, a local distributor with massive global presence, uh, and the backing of a very large global organization, we can scale into 57 countries with our partners out of Australia. So I think for us it's more of an opportunity collectively to harness that opport, that growth that we see in other parts of the world and in emerging markets.

We're a very mature market in Australia. Organic growth is hard to find, and I think geographic expansion is critical for our success and our partner's success. All right folks.

Hey, if you are looking to partner with folks in Australia, find hope. Yeah. She knows everybody.

Yeah, we'll be back in a minute. Thanks. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Thank you.