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EDUCATION

Digital Transformation for SIs: Think Big, Start Small

Savio Lee Systems Integrator

Savio Lee Systems Integrator

Turning digital transformation initiatives into new business is the North Star for many systems integrators. What if you could deliver holistic end-to-end solutions—from proof of concept to final deployment—without huge investments?

In this podcast we explore the possibilities with Ingram Micro, a global IoT solutions aggregator supporting SIs, ISVs, and OEMs. In our conversation with Savio Lee, Senior Business Leader for Digital Transformation, we explore:

  • How to accelerate digital transformation by taking an architectural approach
  • Where SIs can fast-track their IoT practice with minimal investments
  • Why thinking big and starting small delivers customer ROI more quickly

Related Content

To learn more about how SIs can accelerate digital transformation efforts, read SIs: Fast Track Your IoT Development Efforts. For the latest innovations from Ingram Micro, follow them on Twitter at @IngramMicroCA.

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Transcript

Savio Lee: But at the end of the day we encourage our customers to think big, but allow them to start small while mitigating the risks.

Kenton Williston: That was Savio Lee, Senior Business Leader for Digital Transformation at Ingram Micro Canada, and I’m Kenton Williston, the Editor-in-Chief of insight.tech. Every episode on the IoT chat I talk to industry experts about the technology and business trends that matter for developers, systems integrators and end users. Today I’m talking to Savio about the way systems integrators can help their customers accelerate digital transformation by taking an architectural approach to the Internet of Things, and what this means in terms of new business opportunities. We’re also going to dig in to the ways you can rapidly create proofs of concept without blowing your budget in applications like industrial automation, fleet management, and environmental monitoring. So, Savio, welcome to the show.

Savio Lee: Thank you very much, Kenton.

Kenton Williston: So, like your title, there’s quite a lot going on there—Senior Business Leader for Digital Transformation. What exactly does that mean, and how does that relate to what Ingram Micro does as a business?

Savio Lee: So, as Senior Business Leader for Digital Transformation, I’m currently responsible for leading a business unit focusing on emerging technology, and by emerging technology I’m talking about IoT, mixed reality, robotic process automations, and so on.

Kenton Williston: Oh, that’s very cool. And digital transformation, of course, has been a big buzzword for the last few years, I’d say. I think 2020 really brought it to the forefront, kind of out of necessity—everyone had to rethink a lot of their business models. So why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you see happening in terms of enterprises moving towards digital transformation, and how that relates to the business that systems integrators are in.

Savio Lee: Yeah, I would say digital transformation—the term itself is a very broad term. Organizations are starting to recognize what digital transformation potentially means to them. And they’re able to cut through all the noise and floats around things like IoT and digital transformation, and so on. And there’s time to make investment, and these investments are not necessarily in the millions of dollars to do massive organizational-wide overhaul to help them to become smart overnight. But these are investments in the form of new roles being created—such as chief innovation officer. Or the accounts they’re assigned to put together what is called—commonly called—the innovation team, right? That comprises individuals from different departments and different parts of the business who come together and innovate, right?

And the best thing about these innovation individuals or teams is they are not bound by the typical corporate bureaucracies. And they have their own budgets to conduct various POCs, allowing them to be flexible and move fast. And if they don’t succeed, they move on to the next task. And what this means for the traditional systems integrator is with digital innovation you’re talking about new people. So it’s very important that they understand the macro as well as the social norms, as well as the organizational structure within an organization—to make sure that they start to build good relationships, have meaning around digital transformations—what digital transformation means for the customers, so that the SIs can align themselves accordingly.

Kenton Williston: And what is Ingram Micro doing to help systems integrators through that journey?

Savio Lee: Yep. So at Ingram Micro we play the critical role of an IoT aggregator, right? If you look at IoT as a whole, it creates new opportunities, but with new opportunities also come new complexities, right? Because we are talking about not just new technology, but we’re also talking about new entrance to the market, as well as new stakeholders. So Ingram Micro plays the critical role of an IoT aggregator and an orchestration platform. From an aggregation point of view, it just aligns very well with our core function as a distributor, where we function as a one-stop shop for all the IoT needs from an ecosystem perspective.

As of today, we have an extremely robust IoT ecosystem that spans all the way from the sensors to the cloud and IoT application, and anything and everything that is in between. Now, we have gone a step further in recognizing that, because IoT is also a collection of similar systems, we function as an orchestration platform to unify and pre-integrate the ecosystem. And by doing so we are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, so that by the time it gets to our partners they can focus more on solutions and selling business outcomes.

Kenton Williston: Yeah. So I think Ingram Micro is a pretty well-known name in the marketplace as a distributor. It’s certainly a company that I think of traditionally if I’m thinking of—okay, I need to go get a certain set of parts to put together some kind of solution. But I think what I’m hearing you say is that your business has really moved beyond being a parts catalog, to now offering already-integrated solution stacks, as well as services to support them. Do I have the right idea there?

Savio Lee: Yeah, that’s exactly it. When I started this business unit initially, we recognized very on and very quickly that the traditional fulfillment for just a pick-pack-ship model—that’s not going to run. What the market demands is more around solutioning, right? So, that was sort of a 180-degree turn from what we’re typically used to. And then we started offering out-of-the-box solutions, which is an end-to-end solution that is plug and play from the single vendors. Now, not all vendors can do everything, and where there is a gap, we leverage our ecosystem to bring pre-integrated or integrated solutions to the market as well.

Kenton Williston: Yeah. So I want to talk about this word “solution,” right? This is kind of a catchall term that can mean just about anything from—hey, I’ve got a chip—to something really huge and comprehensive. And I think what’s interesting about what I’m seeing Ingram Micro doing is that you’re really thinking about the approach to the Internet of Things from an architectural perspective—by which I mean, like you were saying, everything from the sensors, to the network connectivity, to the data processing, to whatever else there might be. So, can you give me a sense from your perspective of what it means to have an architectural approach to IoT applications?

Savio Lee: Absolutely. I would say—and the reason we had to take an architectural approach is—as of today, or even a couple of years ago, you would ask 10 different vendors what IoT is, you would get 10 different answers, right? You ask a network vendor what IoT is, they’re going to tell you it’s all about the PoE switches. You ask a cloud company what IoT is, they’re going to tell you it’s all about a graph, right? I am not saying they are wrong. They are right. But the problem is each of them is approaching IoT from their own lens, and defining IoT in their own terms, right? And because of that, it created a lot of confusion in the market in terms of knowledge and skill sets. What we saw is that we really need to take an architectural approach to IoT. And what that means is, not looking at IoT from a particular technology stack; architectural means holistic, end-to-end, flexible, right? And also comprehensive.

Kenton Williston: Yeah. Absolutely. So, can you give me an example of what that looks like in practice from one of the markets you’re serving? Like, say, industrial automation, or whatever you would like to use as an exciting example there.

Savio Lee: Yeah. So I would say in the area of industrial automation, by taking an architectural approach, we start with trying to define what the challenges and objectives of the end customers are like, right? And then from there we try to understand—okay, what are the current processes? What is the current system that’s in place, right? Because IoT is not always about rip and replace. A big part of IoT to achieve ROI is about working with the existing system. By taking an architectural approach we have the entire view of—okay, what is required from a technology point of view that is—. What is required from a technology stack to achieve that business outcome? And what is currently in place? Where are the gaps, and what can we do to fill those gaps—but, most importantly, connect all the dots together.

Kenton Williston: Got it. So it sounds to me like a big part of this is that, if I’m thinking about this from the perspective of a systems integrator, I might have expertise in certain applications. I might have expertise in certain technologies. And what I can get out of working with Ingram Micro is sort of a partner in the space who can help me fill out all the rest of it, so that I don’t have to learn it all myself. I’ve got someone else who’s going to support me through the process of thinking about this on a more, sort of, global scale, if you will.

Savio Lee: Absolutely. You couldn’t be more right on that note. We have all types of partners. We have partners that want end-to-end solutions from Ingram Micro that may be out-of-the-box, or it could be an integrated solution that is built by an Ingram Micro that involves multiple vendors. We also have partners that are specialized in a certain level of the IoT technology stack, but they don’t have the complete picture. right? Those kinds of partners, say as an—. Let’s take an example of an ISV, right? They may have the IoT applications that make sense of all the data collected, but they have challenges in terms of instrumenting the physical world and how to get data to their applications, right?

In that sense, we allow them to be the data or the application of IoT, right? By working with traditional IT vendors—as another example—they want to focus on what they’re best at, which is network and security infrastructure. In that sense, we let them be the IT of IoT. So our approach in terms of partnership—we are very flexible, and we recognize that there’s not really one-size-fits-all.

Kenton Williston: Got it. That makes sense. So, again, I want to kind of dig down, and sort out the practical terms of how this plays out. One of the things that I think is really interesting about what digital transformation really means that you were talking about, is this idea of very quickly trying ideas out and moving on if they don’t work, right? Doing a lot of proofs of concept to see if a certain idea is even going to be feasible. And that certainly makes sense from the perspective of the end customer, whoever it is that’s wanting to explore these new ideas. But if I’m a systems integrator, honestly, that sounds a little frightening, because it’s like—okay, I’m going to get stuff thrown at me left and right. And my customers are going to want my assistance putting together these proofs of concept. How am I going to be able to very rapidly respond to those demands? What do you think about that?

Savio Lee: Yep. We’ve seen that time and time again, and that’s a very good example that you just gave me. And there’s a couple of other examples as well, where customers are looking for IoT solutions but they don’t want a really permanently installed IoT solution, right? So what we have come up with is a program of what is called IoT on Demand, right? So, IoT on Demand is essentially a pre-built, custom-selected set of hardware for different use cases and verticals that customers, or our partners, can partner or leverage to allow them to conduct POC rapidly, right? And at the same time, if they to choose to buy it because the way it’s designed is—because it’s designed to be flexible, it allows the partners to easily repurpose and redeploy the solution and the infrastructure for different use cases.

Kenton Williston: And what about the financial elements of this? Because in addition to the time crunch that I think this would put on systems integrators, it also strikes me that this could be a pretty big financial burden—potentially to have to keep spending a lot of money on spinning up these proofs of concept. Are you doing anything particular to address that end of the challenge?

Savio Lee: Yeah. So, as part of our POC on Demand, which is—part of our on-demand program is we also have what is called a POC on Demand program, where you can turn any budget that you have for conducting POC into an OpEx model. That takes away the need for having to own or permanently buy IoT sensors, and so on, right? We have a large pool of IoT devices, and so there’s technology for different use cases—pre-built solutions that allow our systems integrators to leverage and conduct POC rapidly without making significant investment. And when the POC is done, they simply have to return the equipment and everything to Ingram Micro.

Kenton Williston: Got it. And presumably this is kind of like a win-win-win scenario. The end customer gets to explore all of these ideas very quickly. The systems integrator gets to assist them and help them arrive at a final architecture that they want to deploy—we know—without making a huge investment. And then, of course, the systems integrator in Ingram Micro itself gets the benefit of retaining that business over time. And once that proof of concept becomes a real, scalable, deployable sort of idea, then there’s that revenue stream available.

Savio Lee: Exactly. So the idea of a POC-as-a-service is to—by taking the need for owning hardware on a permanent basis—what that essentially does is it allows and frees up the budget to conduct multiple POCs simultaneously, as opposed to just one POC simply because they have to buy the equipment.

Kenton Williston: Yeah, totally. And I think I just see pretty much everywhere, folks moving to as-a-service kinds of offerings, and I think it totally makes sense to offer that here in the IoT space as well. Now, something that I’m really curious about—we’re talking about having an architectural-level viewpoint of things, and on the hardware side that kind of makes sense to me how you would do that—on the, like, say, cloud platforms and the software platforms point of view—that makes sense to me. But there’s all this glue that needs to be put in between to make all these parts work together and to surface actionable information to the end customer. So, is there anything that IoT systems integrators can do to make that sort of last step in the process of bringing everything together simpler?

Savio Lee: Yes. Absolutely. That’s actually a very good question, because one of the key requirements to build an IoT practice as a solutions integrator is that you must have software development resources or skill sets in-house as well, right? Which the traditional IT systems integrator does not possess, right? So as part of our architectural approach to IoT, we focus heavily on data because we understand the value of IoT is in the data. And in order to mitigate the need to have software development in-house, we launched what is called Project Last Mile, right?

Project Last Mile, which has been completed, was actually a two-year project in Europe. Project Last Mile essentially allows end customers, or our systems integrators, to easily and quickly build custom IoT applications on our IoT platform with little-to-no software coding required. And because our IoT software platform is microservices-driven and it’s modular in nature, we have gone a step further to pre-build templates for different use cases and verticals—different types of IoT solutions that our partners or systems integrators can simply download and customize the last 10%.

Kenton Williston: That’s really cool. So, I assume what you’ve done here is specifically set up these dashboards to work with the rest of the offerings you have. So, for example, if I’m doing some environmental monitoring, let’s say, that you’ve got dashboards that are already able to interface with those environmental conditions sensors. Is that right?

Savio Lee: Exactly right. We would have, for example, a pre-built template for fleet management or asset tracking, right? Because the reason we have to pre-build some of these templates is because, as important as, and as cool as IoT is, the other missing part of the equation is domain expertise, right? By taking this templated approach, we incorporate some of the best practices into the template in terms of how the data should be represented, and so on.

Kenton Williston: Yeah. So that’s a really good point. I think that’s one of the key value-adds that a systems integrator will bring to the end customer—having a lot of domain expertise. But I think one of the challenges with digital transformation is that it brings together such a broad scope of what that end customer might be doing, that a systems integrator may have expertise in one area—so it’s like, take the fleet management, I think it’s a good example—maybe you’ve got a really good expertise in, say, onboard monitoring of the fleet to make sure the engine is running fine, the drivers not driving too fast, etc.

But now the end customer wants to also track the location, and more efficiently route all their vehicles. Well, maybe you don’t have that expertise. So it sounds like what you’re saying is—don’t worry about it. We’ve thought about these problems already, and we can help you not only just deploy these systems with all the different bits and pieces where you may or may not have expertise in the specific technologies, but we’re also going to bring some domain expertise to the table.

Savio Lee: Exactly. And on the topic of domain expertise, we have a separate program, what is called the IoT Co-Creation program. The IoT Co-Creation program is really our strategy of how we bring in domain expertise to build various applications, and help our systems integrators and their end customers derive additional value from the data. Take the example of energy management, right? I mean, we are great at visualizing all the different types of data coming in from the sensors, but how to represent that in the context of energy management—that’s a whole different story, right? For example, how do you convert gas into carbon consumption? What is acceptable in that domain? What is bad? What is the threshold, right? And that’s really where the IoT Co-Creation program comes in—to help us to co-create programs, and allow us to represent data in proper context.

Kenton Williston: Yeah. That makes sense. Because I think—and when you get down to the fundamentals of what digital transformation is about, it’s partly about the digital part: digitizing things, gathering that data. But then you’re not really transforming much if you’re just gathering data—you need to have it in a form that’s actionable and intelligible so that you can actually do something with it.

Savio Lee: You’re absolutely right.

Kenton Williston: So I love this example about the energy management. I know there’s a whole bunch of other markets that you’re very active in having some pretty sophisticated platforms and templates already built—like fleet management that I talked about. Any others that you think would be really good examples to highlight here?

Savio Lee: Yeah. A really good example where we get a lot of traction is in the area of AI-based video analytics, right? I may be getting a lot of surprise here, but at the end of the day, if you look at the IP cameras, it’s really an optical sensor, right? The reason we are able to get that, we’re able to get a lot of traction and interest from customers—that includes cities and organizations as businesses—is because the smart video analytics leverage the existing IP infrastructure, right? And similar to how the single pair of human eyes can perform multiple functions, it’s exactly the same thing with the Intel-based video analytics as well. The project that we have done that leverages Intel architecture, AI-based video analytics in the area of smart cities would be, for example, smart traffic counting. So we actually use regular IP cameras that are mounted on a pole.

We fit a live video stream into an AI engine that has actually analyzed the video and recognized and counted objects such as pedestrians, cyclists, vehicle types, direction of the objects. The data that’s generated by the AI engine is pushed to a dashboard for further slicing and dicing of data, and visualization that allows the cities to use that data to help them optimize their urban planning. If there are a lot of cyclists in here—maybe if they see a lot of cyclists riding on the roads or on a pedestrian pathway or sidewalk, maybe there’s a need for a bike lane, right? They can also use those data to help them optimize the maintenance schedule for those roads that have cyclist bike lanes, right? Whether they need to have any maintenance scheduled, especially during winter to make sure there is no snow in those bike lanes.

Kenton Williston: Got it. That totally makes sense. So, something I’d like to do now is dig just a little bit deeper. We’ve been kind of glossing over, I think, what it means to have an architectural approach. And I’d like to kind of dig a layer deeper and talk about some of the specific elements of the technologies and expertise that need to go into overall architecture, and just highlight some of the places where I think Ingram Micro has some interesting things going on. So, first of all, fundamentally, if you’re going to do anything in the IoT, it’s all about taking real-world data and digitizing it.

So of course there’s sensors needed, and sort of those Edge processing elements needed, to take that raw data and turn it into something consumable. And of course, as we’re talking about, that’s really Ingram Micro’s history and fundamental strength, and you’ve got that huge catalog of parts. So that kind of checks that box for me. But then the next thing—and you talked about this early on with this idea of orchestration. So I’m wondering if you could talk to me about, what does that mean? And how does that relate to deploying IoT systems?

Savio Lee: So, by taking an architectural approach to IT, it means, as I mentioned earlier, an end-to-end approach—unified, holistic, and flexible, right? And diving a lot deeper than what I just mentioned, leveraging our strength as a distributor, we innovated—. We looked at IoT as a whole, identified the areas where there are challenges that Ingram Micro could bring value to the table, right? The number one challenge would be instrumentation of the physical work. As much as 70% of the IoT projects fail simply because you cannot get data—not the application problem, it’s the data. So we have 200-plus ready-to-deploy sensors and gateways, right? For all types of use cases and verticals. That challenge is also about reliable hardware and quality data.

So we all make sure that we use tested, industry-certified and ready-to-deploy standards, right? Now, the next piece is, as you know, with great complexity also comes lack of industry standards, and so on. So what we have is really a middleware, or an orchestration platform, which connects our ecosystem of hardware vendors together, right? And that itself allows us to address the challenges of lacking technology standard in terms of protocols, and allows us to normalize, to unify the data and send it to any applications or to our own applications.

Kenton Williston: Got it. That totally makes sense, and I agree, that 70% failure rate surprises me—how big of a number it is. But I know that that is indeed one of the biggest challenges for folks—is just being able to gather the data and get the various systems that are gathering that data to even talk to each other in the first place. Major, major challenge.

Savio Lee: Yeah. Absolutely. And we’ve gone multiple steps beyond that, right? I mean, it’s great we have an orchestration platform that serves as an abstraction layer for our ecosystem of partners, because the number one rule we have for all our technology vendors is that they have to have an open ecosystem approach to share the data, right? So that’s really our orchestration platform that unifies the ecosystem to create one common data layer. The next thing is we also have what is called a plug-and-play approach that allows end customers and systems integrators to easily onboard IoT devices by simply scanning the QR code, right? So no longer do you have to go and upload and find a serial number and type in that 16—alphanumeric device ID, which can be time consuming and error prone as well.

Kenton Williston: Yeah. And I think that’s a really good point, and I think it really highlights one of the advantages of working with an aggregator like Ingram Micro. So, I know there are individual technology providers who have these sorts of plug-and-play onboarding capabilities, but obviously it’s only going to be for their own solutions. And what you can offer as an aggregator is the ability to do this for all the solutions that are in your portfolio.

Savio Lee: That’s exactly it, right. It really goes back to your comment that we serve as an orchestration platform—obviously aggregating the ecosystem aligns very well to our core function as a distributor. But as an orchestration platform we sort of pull all the pieces together and unify them.

Kenton Williston: Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to ask about: we’re talking about the challenge of getting elements at the Edge to talk to one another—it’s not just the protocols and the data normalization and things like this that are challenging, but it’s even the networking itself. So what are you doing to help systems integrators deploy networks in these use cases?

Savio Lee: Yeah. So, as you know, there are certain wireless networks or non-wireless networks that are very specific to IoT. So, what Ingram Micro is doing is that we are actually standing up the infrastructure to provide a wireless network for our systems integrators as well as the end customers, because the network is a very critical component of the entire IoT infrastructure. And we feel that we have the size, as well as the financial resources, along with the technical resources to take away a lot of the heavy lifting required just to stand up IoT networks. So by taking that burden away from them, we allow our systems integrators and your end customers to quickly tap into a network that is managed by Ingram Micro, and get the data to the cloud fast.

Kenton Williston: So, if I can kind of wrap all of this up. I think a big element of what I’m hearing here is that, whether you’re thinking from the perspective of the end customer or the systems integrator, a lot of the reason that digital transformation efforts fail—a lot of the reasons that proofs of concept fail—isn’t because the fundamental idea is a bad idea, but just because there are basic technological hurdles to get past that are pretty difficult for an end customer to get past, and maybe even challenging for the systems integrator to get past because they touch on areas where they maybe don’t have all the expertise—or even just things like talking about this onboarding process where, they can do it, but it’s just a question of can they do it fast enough and cost-effectively enough?

And what you’re doing is really kind of clearing the field by doing these basics of a technology by creating an OpEx sort of model, so that people don’t have to make massive investments. So that you can actually rapidly innovate, and not just get totally stuck at step one of the basics of technology.

Savio Lee: Absolutely. Right. I mean, we recognize the fact that digital transformation is not an overnight thing, and it means different things to different people. Everyone is talking about smart cities, smart manufacturing, maybe even smart galaxy—whatever, right? But at the end of the day we encourage our customers to think big, but allow them to start small while mitigating the risk. So that for each small modular project that they do, they are realizing ROI and how to optimize it before they go to production.

Kenton Williston: Yeah. That makes sense. And I’m also wondering—it seems like there’s an opportunity here for the systems integrator to rethink their business model, and what kind of offerings—and even the kinds of opportunity space that’s available to them. And it strikes me that there’s probably a piecemeal way of attacking all of those opportunities as well. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on, sort of, the step-by-step approach that systems integrators can take to expand their capabilities—expand the opportunities they can address without biting too much off at one time.

Savio Lee: So, the opportunities presented by IoT are certainly broad. It’s very important that the systems integrator must understand the picture. And, in the grand scheme of things, understand where they want to focus on, what they want to build off, right? The quickest route to market is really understanding that the customer really wants end-to-end solutions. They’re not looking for technology. They’re not looking for sensors. They couldn’t care less about what the sensor looks like, right? And the good thing is, we have pre-built, out-of-the-box solutions that allow you to easily sell to the customers—allow them to try it, along with our various innovative services and programs to help support you all the way from the sales to implementation and post-sales.

Our approach is really learn-as-you-walk, right? Or learn-as-you-grow type of thing, right? Without making any significant investment, because we have that infrastructure in place to help them build. And over time, hopefully our system integrated, they will realize that—once they understand what is required to succeed in IoT, then they can decide what role they want to play in IoT. Do they want to focus on—if it’s an IT systems integrator—do they want to just focus on IT and be the IT of IoT by just focusing on the network and infrastructure for IoT, right?

Or do they want to be a solutions integrator over time by building additional, and hiring additional, resources in-house, such as op software development, and so on, right? And there are going to be guys who say, You know what? We don’t want to be the solutions integrators; we want to focus on the data because that’s ultimately where the value of IoT is. And they want to build a data practice by helping the customer derive additional value from the data, and to drive organizational change in efficiency.

Kenton Williston: So, I’m wondering also how systems integrators can bring this story—put the scope of what they can do by partnering with an aggregator like Ingram—in front of their customers, to help their customers reconceptualize the relationship they have with the systems integrators and the sort of projects they can embark on. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Savio Lee: Yeah. Absolutely. IoT is anything but a fulfillment-for-business for Ingram Micro Canada. As part of a high-touch, white-glove process, we take a very collaborative approach with our systems integrators in terms of engaging with the end customers. What I’m trying to say is, we are actually out there course selling, engaging the end customer directly a lot with our systems integrators. And because we have a seat at the table for the end customer, we get an in-depth look at what the opportunities are, what is required for the end customer to succeed.

And we are able to hand-hold them—architect the entire solution end-to-end, and work with a systems integrator to deploy the solutions. And we’ve seen it time and time again, where this high-touch collaborative approach really works after a couple of times, and all of a sudden the systems integrator gets it—they start to have that business-outcome discussion with the end customers outside of IT. That includes the lines of business as well.

Kenton Williston: Perfect. So this has been really great. I feel like I’ve got a whole new perspective on what digital transformation even is—let alone how systems integrators can approach it. Any questions that you wish I had asked you?

Savio Lee: Yeah. I think one of the key messages I want to get out there is that IoT—to our systems integrators—is that IoT is a journey and not an overnight thing, right? Because we have created that ecosystem, done the job of unifying the ecosystem, innovating at every layer of the IoT technology stack along with the capabilities for our IoT applications. What that means is, partnering with Ingram Micro—we have essentially fast-tracked your IoT practice by a minimum of two to three years, right? And the best part is, you can start your IoT practice with little-to-no investment because of our high-touch, white-glove approach, where we’re actively out there doing a lot of course selling, engaging any IoT opportunities that you may come across so that you are really learning as you grow.

Kenton Williston: Perfect. I love that. With that, I’d just like to say, thank you so much, Savio, for joining us today. This has been really interesting and informative.

Savio Lee: Thank you very much, Kenton.

Kenton Williston: And thanks to our listeners for joining us. To keep up with the latest from Ingram Micro Canada, follow them on Twitter @IngramMicroCA. And if you enjoyed listening, please support us by subscribing and rating us on your favorite podcast app. This has been the IoT Chat Podcast. We’ll be back next time with more ideas from industry leaders at the forefront of IoT design.

The preceding transcript is provided to ensure accessibility and is intended to accurately capture an informal conversation. The transcript may contain improper uses of trademarked terms and as such should not be used for any other purposes. For more information, please see the Intel® trademark information.

About the Author

Kenton Williston is an Editorial Consultant to insight.tech and previously served as the Editor-in-Chief of the publication as well as the editor of its predecessor publication, the Embedded Innovator magazine. Kenton received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2000 and has been writing about embedded computing and IoT ever since.

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