Most people are “nowhere” with AI, TD Synnex’s UK&I MD said as he laid out the distributor’s role in the AI era and claimed it is outgrowing the UK market.
At its Explore event in London last week, Dave Watts told the audience that ecosystem access, rather than size, will determine which partners win on AI.
Asked to distil TD Synnex’s role in AI in a follow-up interview, Watts said the distributor’s channel partners will need “a lot more help, and a lot more partnerships” on AI than they did on either cloud or security.
“Most people are nowhere with it,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
“They’re using ChatGPT. They’ve got it on their search, and that’s it. Most businesses are in that position too, so that’s our role – to build up the capability.
“If you’ve got a vendor-specific proposition, we’ll have a team that works with you. If you just want to find out generally where you are, we’ll work with you. I think Microsoft’s phrase, “we’ll meet you where you are on your journey’, is a nice way of thinking about it.”
“Not a lot of Exertis’ business went to us”
TD Synnex cemented its status as the world’s largest IT distributor last week when it unveiled fiscal Q3 gross sales of $31.8bn – 40% up on the previous year and ahead of market expectations.
The UK business shares CEO Patrick Zammit’s aspiration of outgrowing the market, Watts said.
“And we are,” Watts said.
This includes in TD Synnex’s “key market” of SMB, where Watts said the UK business now consistently has a market share of over a third.
“We put on five percentage points of market share in SMB in four years through deployment of teams, resource, electronic tools, and all that stuff we talked about earlier,” he said.
Watts played down suggestions TD Synnex’s UK business has bagged more than a marginal windfall from the collapse of £1.5bn-revenue peer Exertis UK.
Exertis UK was a “fast-dwindling business” that played mainly in a consumer space from which TD Synnex has mainly de-invested, Watts said.
“We took over one or two lines, so the short answer to your question is that not a lot of it went to us,” he said.
“I don’t know where the rest of it went. I imagine the vendors did a lot of it direct, and I think probably Westcoast did quite well out of it, but I don’t know.”
“Very interesting from a DE&I point of view”
The onset of AI is enabling TD Synnex to redeploy more headcount into partner-facing roles, Watts claimed.
Its UK Microsoft and NVIDIA teams are “as big as they’ve ever been”, while the resource it is dedicating to component vendors like Micron are “really expanding”, he said.
“Order processing is a really big one,” Watts said.
“There’s always been some human touch involved in getting that through our system. Now AI can pick up certain orders and just drive it straight through our system. As we release resources from there, we’ll move it into customer-facing roles in the business.”
The “retirement corridor” which Watts admitted he himself is now in has enabled more females to be promoted into TD Synnex’s top team, he said, meanwhile.
Lynnette White was in August promoted to run its Dell business, following Amy Brady’s elevation the previous month to Sales Director for Major Accounts, for instance.
“That’s very interesting from a DE&I point of view, because one of the things we always said was, regardless of all the efforts we were putting in, there needs to be just a demographic change at some point,” Watts said.
“We had so many women who were just ready for that next stage. They’re two great examples of people who have moved into our senior team.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
