Product information management (PIM) is “the beating heart of our organisation”, one IT distribution leader said last week during an event dedicated to the sector’s growth and development.
Executives from organisations including the GTDC, Westcoast, Exertis, CMS Distribution, Ci Group, Pax8 and CoreTech assembled in a central London cinema room to share views on the increasing importance of product data.
The discussion soon broadened out to encompass the possible advent of ‘AI distributors’, and why distributors are rebranding themselves as marketplace and platform companies.
It was put on by Pimberly, a PIM SaaS start-up whose early customers include Westcoast and Exertis.
“My aha moment”
Pimberly VP Tim Bodill said he was flattered that attendees had chosen the event “over Rachel” – in reference to the Budget that was being unveiled by the Chancellor on the same day.
The SaaS start-up’s Founder and CEO Martin Balaam revealed that his “aha moment” came during his time leading Apple reseller Jigsaw24 a decade ago.
“I looked at it and thought, ‘you know what, you’ve got CRM for customers, ERP for your transactions and HR platforms for talent management’ – but there was very little that would manage product data,” he recalled.
“There were MDM solutions, but for us product data was increasingly about the actual images and the whole gamut of what a product means – the digital representation of a product. If you couldn’t show that to a customer, they wouldn’t buy from you.”
“It was a nightmare”
Exertis UK Head of Master Data Liz Hale and Westcoast CIO Karl Harris took to the stage to swap stories on how they’d implemented Pimberly in their respective businesses.
Hale joined Exertis in 2023 with a brief of rolling out Pimberly across the £2bn-revenue distributor inside three months.
“They were only using the PIM system for imagery. My mission was to use the system to its best advantage rather than something that was serving just a very small part of our organisation,” she explained.
Since then, Exertis’ product completeness has risen from 6% to 96% and its go live has been cut from two weeks to 24 hours.
“It’s not my ERP system anymore that’s important; the PIM system is the beating heart of our business, and we can’t manage without it,” Hale said.
Westcoast deployed Pimberly in order to syndicate its data to multiple channels and audiences, Harris revealed, meanwhile.
“It was a nightmare – we had people with spreadsheets all over the place and a ‘he who shouts loudest’ [policy]. It was a very unhelpful culture around data in Westcoast and this allowed us to democratise a lot of that,” he said.
Product data presents a unique challenge for distributors, Harris explained.
“It’s always the IT distributor’s problem: the vendor thinks it’s the distie’s problem, and the reseller thinks it’s the distie’s problem – we’re stuck in the middle,” he said.
Alex Tatham, who was MD of Westcoast at the time it deployed Pimberly but was at the event representing Ci Group, backed Harris up.
“The way I measured it was from a sales perspective. I was able to sell the fact that we had something more flexible than Cnet and Icecat, and therefore something more flexible than Ingram and Tech Data,” he said.
The advent of ‘AI distributors’
The discussion at the event quickly broadened out to encompass the future of the distribution market, with Balaam predicting the imminent advent of ‘AI distributors’ (see the panel’s additional comments on AI-fuelled job cuts here).
“When’s the first AI distributor going to start?,” he asked.
“You’ve got all these LLMs popping up all over the place. You’ve got lots of corporates whose biggest issue is which they should use, how safe is it and whether their data is really secure.
“There’s a little bit of a vacuum the IT distie community can fill.
“They can be the people getting the answers to these things and giving some sort of confidence to businesses in terms of how they could and should be using them.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an AI-only distributor that turns up,” Tatham agreed.
“I’m sure Pax8 and QBS have all got software elements within their business that are going to do that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Ingram, TD Synnex and Westcoast-ALSO do the same thing.”
The panellists also weighed in on arguably the biggest distribution story of the year in the shape of Pax8 and Ingram’s aggressive positioning as a ‘marketplace’ and ‘platform company’ respectively (see here and here).
What’s driving this, Bodill asked?
“If you’re a marketplace or a platform – or Pax8 takes an advert out in the New York Times – all of a sudden you’re worth more,” Tatham responded.
“And that’s what driving it, because you want to be seen as not a distributor, because a distributor is box shifting and therefore worth less.”
“Product data has got to be number one”
Product data will become increasingly important as suppliers face more questions about the carbon footprint and GRC of software, virtual products and agentic AI, Pax8 Senior VP Phylip Morgan predicted.
“Compliance is really important because, sooner or later, people will be going backwards up the supply chain and asking, ‘does this new AI software comply with the EU AI act?’” Tatham agreed.
“Ultimately, the IT distributors will be selling tokens to this LLM and that LLM, and who knows where they’re going to go with the carbon footprint of that,” Balaam concurred.
“We’ve been working to make sure that our attribution databases are flexible enough to think about things like that.”
In the final panel session of the day, Balaam had the last word as he pinpointed product data as the most important thing to prioritise when it comes to digital transformation.
“More and more people are going to be buying those products, or at least researching those products, online and so product data has got to be number one,” he concluded.
This article was produced in association with Pimberly and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
