GenAI and the Future of MSPs with Dham Pathervellai

Hey everyone. Welcome to Ingram Micro one. We are on the ground here at the event on the floor.

I'm Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum. Excited to have this conversation. Today.

We're gonna talk a little bit about ai. We're gonna talk about a lot more here as well. Excited for this conversation.

Talk a little bit about the eye and the lens of the CTO, the MSP and how they're thinking about their business transformation. And for that, I am joined by Dom. Dom, welcome to the show.

Good morning. Good to have you here. Happy to be here.

Yeah. So, um, let's start. I mean, Ingram is in the middle of its own transformation, right?

People that had followed the company for a long time probably knew it best for being one of, if not the enabler facilitator, uh, for all of that infrastructure that is being deployed now. That's a hot topic itself today. Yes.

But you're, you're becoming so much more in many ways, becoming a platform company yourself, kind of interested in your role, you know, how you're thinking about that. Um, you know, CTO role, the transformation of a big business. Love to start you out.

Just talk about what kind of, what you're doing there with Ingram. Yeah, great to be here. Thank you for the opportunity Right after it.

You know, when I started, uh, at Ingram Micro, this is one of the best opportunity in my lifetime. We don't want to build technology for the sake of building technology. The reason I joined here is to build technology, which will bring outcomes.

Yep. Not only for Ingram, it's for our e partner ecosystem. So if you go back and see what we did with X vantage, we built based on the data, the data is the new fabric.

We knew this three years ago. We took a big bet on AI three years ago, build and centralize all our data to a one single data lake. And now our AI factory is what's based on that data lake.

And now we got like 400 a models and like, you know, 30 plus patterns pending. It sits on like, uh, four petabytes of data. We are able to sit in the middle and understand, not only distribute the data, not only distribute the technologies, we are able to distribute the intelligence to the community.

That makes a humongous difference. That's what is X one is all about. You know, I love what you said, you're kind of right in the middle of it all, but like you have thousands if not millions of, of, of integrators that that depend on in integrators, MSPs, channel partners, consultants, that all depend on Ingram to get equipment and software and services.

Then of course, you have thousands of vendors, uh, OEMs and others that you guys are basically handling distribution. Like was it, did they come to you and say, you know, Dom, help us. We need to build, uh, something that a data lake we need to, or was this kind of the foresight that you had to say like, we see where this is all going.

We're gonna need to build something that can connects the end users and implementers all the way up the food chain to those that are building the most advanced NVIDIA servers on the planet? Yeah, Great question. So B2B industry was not that far ahead.

Like three, four years ago when we saw from our lands, the B2B C industry was up there. Yeah. But the B2B industry wasn't.

Yeah. So our vision was bring that B2C experience into the B2B ecosystem. If you wanna bring that, there is no other better place than England.

We, we always know data is the new currency. If you're able to bring the data into one place every time, Dave, when you go to them, you know what they ask, don't gimme the data. I have dashboards, I have reports, I have bi, I have this gimme intelligence.

That was our spark. If you really wanna give them, distribute the intelligence, like if we, the way we started was we started with our customer platform. Simple as that.

Hey, listen, we just sold the last 10 orders, can you please tell me which one I missed? Attach a warranty. They just didn't know.

We knew That is the beauty of having all that data. So you basically, if I, if I break that into a couple parts for the audience, it's like, one is, you know, you were sort of looking at the Amazons and the Shopifys and the com and it sort of revolutionized, you know, I know we talked off stage a little bit about E-Trade and different, like the platforms that sort of brought consumers in retail to things that were always done in sort of a B2B behind the wall with, you know what I call it, the Abba Cadabra object, you know, and you're saying, why are we doing it and making it so hard? Why don't we democratize this?

Why don't we, if you can get anything you want ordered and delivered to your house in 12 hours, why is our system, you know, a bunch of, uh, a black screen with orange text on it? Right? I mean, but that is kinda what it, what being at times like it moves slow.

Um, so talk about how you pick which things to do For, for us is, you know, we don't wanna build technology for the sake of technology. We wanna build technology which will bring the outcomes. Yeah.

Because like I said, there is people can, people can build more chat bots, more dashboards and more techno. No, we are, we are not in that business. Focus is outcomes.

Can you remove complexity? Can you remove friction? So if you look at, if you focus on outcome, and when it comes about prioritization, that becomes our biggest, biggest focus.

Let's say if you take, if you wanna save time, time is the biggest commodity. Right? You know, when you talk about outcome, there is like, oh, it's a top line, it's bottom line.

But everything starts with time. Where is the bigger place you can save time for your partners today? Like we built so many things and it's all about saving time.

Like, you know, if you want things like xon integrations Yeah. Where before the partners used to call us, us email us, and the orders used to take hours and days sometime to get processed. What we said, listen, please come as you are.

Don't change your system. The integrations gets complicated. You got Excel sheet with a bunch of information about your transaction, just send it to us.

We will process that using ai. We will normalize the data. We will go transact.

You don't have to change your system. We just save time for them. And same thing with, you know, pdf ft SKUs.

So there's so many ways where these partners are strong in the way they do stuff. Yeah. Either they're coding, they're ordering, they're invoicing, their subscriptions.

Now we made that all that so simple for them. Yep. The money you simplify.

That's our focus because you, like you said, there is a million things to do, but if you focus on outcome, not just for Ingram, also for your partners, that will distill your priority straight out. And that somehow has to flow to the MSPs and partners focusing on outcomes for their customers. Yeah.

Because now what you've done is you've taken some of the monotony out, you've taken some of the, you know, the extra layers of work. You've probably enabled some of them to reduce some of the back office overhead and invest more in front office and growth. And like, what are you seeing there?

So, you know, outside of just efficiency and uptime, like what are you seeing in terms of your MSPs translating what you're doing in the platform and, and what are they building for their customers? Yeah. See, I would say my humble ask to the MSPs, they gotta become this AI enablers.

There is no more break fix and maintaining infrastructure and all that. They really gotta get into this train of what's happening. I can tell you from Ingram perspective, my own experience, how we and our jobs change.

You know, how we transform, we distributed intelligence through our customer platform where they can come download their business review, they can see what is they're selling, what they're not selling, what is a cross-sell upsell. We distributed that intelligence through the customer platform on the web. Then we moved on to the next level is, hey, we wanna make integration simpler.

We use AI and completely changed the made all those autonomous work. We just automated it. But now what they want is they want the data, their data with our intelligence into their ecosystem.

Which means if they use CPQ, Salesforce, any CRMs, anything they got, now this MCP connectors are all over the place. You go to AWS, you go to hp, you got Gram, everybody has provided these MCP connectors now where it can provide their intelligence into your system. And that's what M Ms P has really keep their eyes open.

Don't train to do everything by yourself. Look out for your partners, look out for Ingram, look out for those integrations, and look out for so many technologies, what we provided. How you can become the first platform mindset and then you become that a enabler your life is going to change for good.

Have you seen any, you know, I know it's early days, but have you seen any anecdotal, have you seen any, you know, with the MSPs you talk to work with like really cool implementations, applications even theoretically that you could show, I'm just kinda curious like, oh yeah. You know, things that you're seeing them now do with that extra capacity that you're giving them. So Where, where they will go is like going from what we really want them to make is go from auto takers to auto makers means save time.

Don't be in doing this autonomous job of doing stuff, which you don't have to do. We, when we save the time, now they're doing that in the proactive sales where they're able to go to take care of their end customer. What is their job?

Their job is to take care of end customers. Not doing this middleman job of just, you know, typing in codes and orders and invoices and splitting. We, we completely take that now.

We clearly see their teams are able to go back and do a proactive sales with their end customers. So what about the MSPs from all the work you're doing right in terms of, you know, building agents, building platforms, like you do it at such a big scale and I think sometimes, uh, when you're a smaller company, you know these MSPs that you work with, some of them are a handful of millions, some of them are hundreds of millions, some of 'em billion dollar companies. But in compared to your scale, some of them are, they're all still maybe smaller, many are still, what are you seeing?

What do you think from the experiences of the work you're doing translates? I mean, the things that they can learn from to, to build in their own businesses? Great Question.

You know, automation, I would say that's a common denominator for all of us because they also have their right ecosystem. So go back and see where you can automate, automate, automate everything possible. And that could, you can take help from like people like Ingram Micro or like go do AWS or HP or any of these vendors.

So for example, you take your A one L two ticketing system. You don't have to do this with a multiple vendors and multiple ways. Now you can use these agents to harmonize all the data, bring a single pane of glass for your end customer.

So to me that automation is a common thread. And they can use AI to a very large extent where not only they can create their own L LMS and their own agents, they should automate and connect that with every other players in the ecosystem. Once they connect that, they will bring that a single unified experience because standardization is key.

You can't let your end customers go to five different system to see five different things that's written, that's climbs their tickets, their codes, their orders, their invoices. They cannot be in a multiple in multiple systems. If they can bring all that into a single unified experiences through that automation, that's gonna make everybody life easy.

It's funny, I keep thinking about when Sam Altman talked about the one person billion dollar company. I mean, there's probably orders of magnitude in between where we are and there, but what you're saying and what at least we're finding even in our own business is, look, so many of the processes can be done. It's either 10 x or one 10th.

Like you need one, like with automation. And it's kind of the promise that we never had with RPA, right? Like RPA just it, it did some things well, but it was always too fra.

I, fragile is the word I would use. It was just too fragile to scale. And now with, with automation and ag agentic, we can do these things like much, much faster.

Much like I have built APIs, I built RPAs, I built screen scrappers, I built all kind of technology. I can see it, I can say my job has changed as a chief technology officer in the last two years. The way we build platforms and now we build this agents.

Now it is become, I can go to market so fast right now with these technologies either writing code or writing the agents, and they are making things so fast. So good for us. I'm telling you, that is what this industries and MSPs has to cat, get onto the train, understand how these technologies work.

Please lean on your partners. Go look at integration hubs. So many plugins, so much is available for you to take it and make things easier.

That's a great, great way to maybe sort of end. I wanna ask you about just the role of the MSP, because what I'm hearing from you is you're a believer, you buy into the power of AI as someone who's done development work, not just kind led technology, you're kind of saying it's making things better. It's, you know, 'cause there's a lot of that debate.

Like is it eliminating the code? Is it, but like for the MSP that is seeing all the power, all the potential, everything that it, automation, ag, agentic, that ai, that data, uh, and and into integrations can do. Like, how do you recommend that they think about evolving their businesses to make sure that they're gonna be successful throughout this transformation?

You Know, my first ask to them is like, go centralize your data. The technology, like ai, it's cannot work without the data. If you got multiple sources, your code, your orders, your invoices, your if, if these are in different, different systems and places, you are going to have a very hard time harmonizing this data.

Start there, harmonize your data, try to put them in one place, and there is multiple technologies available to make it so easy for you. Now, before, like five years, 10 years ago when I was trying to do that, it was a lot harder. Right now, harmonizing all your data in one place, it is going to make it so easy.

Then you can plug and play any AI you want. That's a general DOI or even even your AI agents. They can come and consume the data and bring intelligence to you and automate anything what you want.

But start thinking about how you can harmonize the data across your systems that will set you for a very long time. Sounds like a great way to end this conversation, Dom, what a pleasure. Congratulations on all the progress you're making.

Love to keep chatting to you more. Have a great rest of your Ingram Micro one event. Thank you Daniel.

And thank you everybody for joining us here on the ground at Ingram Micro one here in Washington, dc Great conversations stick with us here on the channel for more to come.