Ingram Micro is putting AI to work to make Cisco SMB deals faster and easier for partners with SMB Quick Buy, a new click-to-purchase experience aimed at cutting complexity and automating the buying process.
Distribution giant Ingram Micro has revealed a collaboration with Cisco Systems aimed at simplifying the technology buying process for SMBs.
SMB Quick Buy is an AI-powered, click-to-purchase experience that helps partners quickly grow their SMB businesses by automating manual processes and simplifying transactions, executives from Ingram Micro and Cisco told CRN.
“I think now we’re going to be able to meet the partners where they are [and] address their needs in a far simpler way—almost a click of a button away from being able to deliver a solution to an end customer, and then they’ll get the full Cisco value in an SMB package,” said Bill Brandel, Ingram Micro’s executive vice president, North America.
Cisco and Cisco Meraki offerings will be the first vendor technologies added to Ingram Micro’s new SMB Quick Buy offering, which will be available through Ingram Micro Xvantage, the distributor’s digital commerce platform.
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SMB Quick Buy will serve up quicker quoting and ordering to help partners move from quote to close faster, as well as guided, validated solution selection to make it easier for partners to pursue a higher volume of SMB solutions in a single purchase order, and access 24/7 to the offering through Xvantage, without the need for representatives, Ingram said.
“[We’re] taking Cisco’s intelligence coupled with Ingram’s intelligence through our platform, and creating a simpler SMB buying motion,” said Brandel (pictured). “SMB is really fast-moving [and] a volume-based type of approach … The goal is really to reduce complexity and time to market for Cisco SMB solutions and partners.”
The goal is to expand SMB Quick Buy globally after its rollout in North America, and continue to use AI to enhance workflows, increase accuracy, and improve partner productivity.
The distributor will be evaluating the success of SMB Quick Buy by measuring time savings, increased transactions, and partner satisfaction, Brandel said.
“If we can simplify getting products to market, we can open up opportunities for our partners to be more consultative and be able to bring more solutions to market faster … how much more of our business can we deliver as automated as possible [so partners can] focus on relationships and be that consultant for the future,” he said.
While Cisco built a strong enterprise business, its offerings have traditionally been more difficult for SMB customers to navigate, Brandel said.
“I think Cisco has done an amazing job listening and identifying how they can make changes to their process and programs to address the concern and the need to be able to move quickly in the space,” he said.
The initiative aligns not only with Cisco’s broader AI strategy to enhance customer and partner experiences, but to help the tech giant pursue the all-important SMB customer segment, said Andrew Sage, vice president of global distribution sales for Cisco.
The initiative also marks an “unprecedented” level of systematic integration between Cisco and one of its distributor partners, Sage said.
He called Quick Buy a “perfect example” of how an agentic integration can change the experience for a partner and support a new kind of workflow.
“We see our IT integrations with our distributors moving away from a more static transactional approach, to being more about using AI and agents to enhance that sort of experience and using those agents to connect to one another, beginning to blur the line between the vendor and the distributor, and the partner, and ultimately even the customer,” he said.
