Quick Bio
Name: Kevin Prewett
Title: Senior Director, Advanced Solutions
Company: Ingram Micro
SCN: What is your position, and what does it entail? What are your responsibilities?
Kevin Prewett: I’m the senior director of advanced solutions at Ingram Micro. I am responsible for setting and overseeing the execution of our growth strategies within Ingram Micro’s pro AV, UCC, physical security, and DC/POS organizations. I am also tasked with leading a great team of experts who forge, maintain, and build successful relationships with today’s leading and emerging vendors across several high profile and strategic categories and markets.
We share best practices across the organizations and work together to build our overall revenue, profitability, mind, and market share. We also collaborate to build our portfolio and find cross-selling opportunities that will benefit our channel partners and vendors.
SCN: How long have you been at this position?
KP: I’ve been with Ingram Micro for more than two decades, but in this role—where I am responsible for these four organizations—it’s only been a few months. For the past 18 months, I’ve led our physical security team and I’ve been a part of the pro AV and digital signage leadership team for more than eight years.
SCN: How has your background prepared you for your new role?
KP: I’ve been working with the IT vendor community at Ingram Micro for 22 years. These four categories—pro AV, UCC, physical security, and DC/POS—are all highly specialized and require a deep understanding of not only the technology, but the use case as well. I am proud to lead these teams and expand Ingram Micro’s depth and breadth of expertise, services, and solutions within these areas.
In his free time, Kevin Prewett is an avid golfer.SCN: What are your short- and long-term goals?
KP: Short-term and long-term it is about listening more to the needs of the partners and vendors, and taking action to be an indispensable business partner.
Ingram Micro has so much to offer beyond the technology. Professional services is one of our fastest growing and most valued resources, for example—especially for those channel partners in highly regulated markets such as finance, healthcare, and retail. Additionally, we’re seeing a lot more interest and traction around our Cloud Blue services; many channel partners are using this to incent deals and simplify the sale by removing the old technology as part of the refresh or engagement.
SCN: What is the greatest challenge that you face?
KP: Ingram Micro is globally known as a broadline distributor. Many don’t realize we have an incredible bench of specialists and a very strong, highly competitive, and in a number of cases, unique portfolio in advanced technologies, especially around these four areas. We have and will continue to invest in these areas to help our channel partners shorten the sales cycle, earn more, and bring greater value to the businesses and markets they serve.
SCN: Where do you see your market heading?
KP: It varies by each of the businesses, and we’re seeing growth opportunities across the board. We’ve demonstrated our ability to support, educate, and help our channel partners enter new markets and lines of business, and the fact they can work with us across the entire IT lifecycle is growing in significance and becoming a major differentiator for us and them.
SCN: Are there new initiatives we are likely to see from Ingram Micro?
KP: Ingram Micro is constantly adding new services and solutions to our portfolio, and placing priority on the business challenges and opportunities that partners deal with day in and day out. Compliance and movements including EMV are opportunities knocking for channel partners to answer. So is Microsoft’s lineup of refreshes and new technologies. Cloud is an open dialog with companies of all sizes, and IT security is always a top priority—or at least it should be. Collaboration, voice, and mobility—all technologies, sales, and service opportunities where we can help make the business case. If it’s in demand, Ingram Micro can help channel partners deliver it.
SCN: How can systems contractors better position themselves to profit from products and/or services that Ingram Micro has to offer?
KP: Leverage the resources that Ingram Micro has put in place. Don’t go it alone. By working with Ingram Micro, channel partners can speed the sales cycle, generate greater business value, and increase their profit potential by leveraging our expertise, our talent and our resources to help them close more deals. I’d encourage channel partners to ask us what more we can do to grow their business. The answers may surprise them and lead to greater success now and in the future.
Matt Pruznick is associate editor of SCN and Residential Systems.
