TORONTO – At the Ingram Micro Canada Partner Experience event Dave Mason, the vice president of sales informed the audience of about 250 channel partners that the distributor would be entering into a unique partnership with sports apparel manufacturer Under Armour.
The Baltimore-based Under Armour has already spent more than US$710 million acquiring MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, and Endomondo three digital app vendors to spruce up its focus on big data and the Internet of Things. And it followed those deals up with an alliance with smartphone maker HTC. The two companies have developed connected fitness hardware called UA HealthBox. This offering is a package consisting of three new devices from Under Armour. UA Band is wrist worn activity tracker designed for athletes, UA Heart Rate is a chest strap heart monitor to measure workout intensity and estimate calories burned, and UA Scale is a Wi-Fi weight scale that also measures body fat percentage.
Mason said that Ingram Micro is going into non-traditional areas such as wearables and ruggedized products.
“You may see these products pop-up at Loews, Home Depot and Mark’s Work Warehouse,” he said.
Another new development for Ingram are non-IT branded products such as Dewalt and Caterpillar.
“Brands such as Dewalt and Caterpillar resonate with people who buy power tools and they may want a ruggedized Dewalt branded smartphone,” he added.
Recently Ingram Micro acquired Greenville, S.C.-based NETXUSA, Inc. This company offers unified communications and collaboration (UCC) product distributor focused on VoIP and IP phones.
Mason said the company plans to bring this functionality to the Canadian market in a managed UCC approach.
“This is UCC-as-a-Service or hosted UCC that will be managed for the partners. This is what we are going to market with. There will be new vendors that we will be onboarding such as Cisco and Polycom that will add to the line card,” he said.
Ingram Micro Canada is also going to improve its insurance coverage for lost or stolen smartphones as well as warranty coverage. The company has also been named the only distributor to repair Apple products with authorized Apple parts.