Last year Mark Snider lost his co-president Charlie Spano, who left for a great position outside the industry.
In 2009, Snider basically replaced Spano by promoting David Mason to the role of vice-president, sales for Ingram Micro Canada. Snider said that the Mason will enable him to focus more on the strategic vision of the distributor.
As he added Mason, he lost Brent McCarty, who himself was promoted to vice-president and general manager of DBL Distributing, Ingram’s recently acquired the consumer electronics-focused distribution business. The news that got everyone talking however, was the partnership with Dell, but CDN addressed that story with the No. 11 newsmaker slot.
The economy provided the biggest challenge for Snider in 2009. Sales were down and that resulted in downsizing. The Canadian subsidiary was not spared.
Ingram also had to pay a US$15 million penalty for “channel stuffing” with McAfee that took place over a two-year period during the dot-com heydays.
But not all the news at Ingram was negative. The Ingram/Nimsoft partnership providing IT performance and availability monitoring solutions for its Seismic group of solution providers.
The distributor signed AVG Technologies, offered a POS security bundle for small retailers, teamed-up with EMC (NYSE: EMC on a partner training centre for data centre solutions and inked GN Netcom, a headset solutions provider.