It seems that Ingram Micro (Nasdaq: IM) constantly tinkers with is senior leadership staff.
New to the mix is Paul Bay. He will be Ingram’s new executive vice president for North America. If the name sounds familiar it should because Bay worked at Ingram from 1995 to 2006. Bay will be an important executive for the Canadian operating because he is responsible for the Canadian operation’s marketing, sales, technical support and vendor management. Bay reports to Keith Bradley who is in charge of the whole North American region. Canadian GM Mark Snider will now be reporting to Bay.
While Bay coming back to Ingram is interesting, it was Ingram’s next leadership move caught my eye. Kirk Robinson, who is an up-and-coming executive, was promoted to vice president, value-added reseller and GovED sales, market development and business intelligence for Ingram.
When you look at Ingram’s future I see Robinson playing a pivotal role in it along with Justin Crotty, vice president of services, North America at Ingram. Crotty created Seismic managed services and he has a knack for turning around underperforming divisions. With these two promising executives in the fold I think the future of Ingram Micro will one day be in their hands. Don’t be surprised if one of them ultimately takes over for Greg Spierkel whenever he decides to retire or move on.
Back to Bay, he left Ingram in 2006 to be the CEO of Punch Software, a Kansas City, Mo.-based 2D/3D CAD software vendor. While there Bay grew the company significantly but was never able to topple CAD powerhouse AutoDesk.
It should be interesting to see what plans he has to further the distributor’s North American region strategy.
When D&H Canada launched in this market place many executives and pundits said they would last about a year and then retreat back to Harrisburg, Penn.
Well three years later the subsidiary is still growing rapidly.
Today, the company announced that D&H Canada showed consistent sales growth of nearly 68 per cent year-over-year, with accelerated growth in the last six months. How did they do it? According to the company, mobility solutions, computer systems, networking products, VOIP systems and storage solutions remained best sellers for D&H Canada. The year also brought a 20 per cent increase in the number of new vendor partnerships increasing D&H Canada’s line-card dramatically.
The company recently expanded its digital imaging division with Olympus, Fuji, Kodak, JVC, Aluratek, Casio, Sony and Sanyo. All these signings bolster what was already a strong line up with Canon, Pure Digital’s Flip now with Cisco, HP, TrendNet and Logitech.
If you look at this strategy going forward, D&H is sticking to its original mantra of having the top two products in each category and nothing more. For example, the outright leader in personal portable digital video camcorders is the Flip, but Kodak’s new Zi8 model has enhanced audio features with an external microphone jack that lets you record in stereo. Now both are at D&H Canada.
The company believes that digital video and imaging will continue to gain in momentum in the business space because of video in online marketing and corporate Web sites.
