Hope McGarry at Ingram Micro Australia on the memory shortage, burnout and AI

The country VP and CEO sat down with CRN Australia discussed the “standout” year they had last year, and the plans for 2026.

In 2026, Hope McGarry, VP and country CEO at Ingram Micro Australia began her year with a new title, and a “standout” 2025 due to growth in several portfolios at the distributor.

“We saw good growth in end user compute. We all know what drove that around Windows 11 refresh and AI compute,” she exclusively told CRN Australia.

“We also saw good growth in cyber security, in our infrastructure business, our data centre business, also our point of sale business, our data capture POS business and our cloud business.”

McGarry added, “[We are] very grateful to our partners and our vendors for choosing to work with us and exceptionally proud of my team. It was a great year. My team worked incredibly hard, it's always nice to deliver a good, strong year.”

With her new title, McGarry noted that it doesn’t mean a new remit or additional KPIs, it is simply an organisational “alignment”.

She said, “We're a global organisation, so we do try to standardise titles. It was more that, and probably a little bit of recognition of the 2025 year that we delivered as a team here.”

Looking at the results from last year, McGarry doesn’t call it luck or a surprise, but the result of her team’s hard work.

“We worked for every bit of it,” she stated.

“I don't think that anything comes easy. It's about consistency, it's about putting the customer and the vendor first.

McGarry said complacency doesn’t “necessarily” build the right resilience in a team.

“Having to having to push and having to strive is a good thing,” she said.

“We definitely did that last year, it was nice to see the fruits of that labour, because sometimes you can do all of those things and you still don't get the result.

"It was a great reward for the team to see that when we're consistent, when we focus on our teams, we focus on our partners, we focus on our customers, we can do great things.”

Discussing the growth of AI, McGarry noted that leaders can’t overlook the people element around the AI space.

“We always say, ‘we're aggressively digital, but amazingly human’, because the people matter,” she told CRN Australia.

While the distributor has recently obtained a Microsoft Frontier Distributor status, has an internal Intelligent Digital Assistant, and Xvantage has several AI tools, McGarry emphasised the importance of people in the application of AI.

“AI will only be as amazing as human adoption. The people element and the change management around it is critical.”

She added, “We put as much focus and emphasis on the change management piece with our people as we do the technology.”

Read more of CRN Australia’s interview with Hope McGarry below.

CRN: What are your plans for 2026?

Hope McGarry: Stay consistent. The leadership vision and the focus is simple. It's around true customer obsession and being absolutely customer first. If we work with that mindset, and we approach everything from that perspective, and we build back from that, or we build out from that, I truly believe the rest will follow.

For us, trying to be consistent, striving for continuous improvement around our customer experience, is critical for us to continue to do that. Focusing on our people is important.

It's challenging in any market to differentiate, whether you're a vendor, you're a customer, a partner or a distributor. We have a platform which helps us differentiate, but it is still difficult to differentiate.

If we equip our people to be the best they can be as well, through L&D, coaching, support, then they're best able to serve the market.

We've got a big focus on building out our leadership capabilities with our teams and our people, investing in our people, and making sure that they understand that it's a customer first culture, and that we put our customers and our vendors absolutely first, and we hold each other accountable.

CRN: There is so much going on impacting the channel from AI, to the memory shortage and the Middle East crisis, how do you as a leader prioritise what is important to you?

McGarry: That is when you have to come back to keeping things super simple. There's a lot that's outside of Ingram's control, our partners control, maybe even some of our vendor's control.

That's when you've got to focus on doing the basics well and putting the customer at the front and working back from there, because there is so much complexity, there is so much volatility.

Staying true to those principles is more critical in times of flux and fluidity than ever. Not getting distracted or not getting carried away in some of that noise and losing sight of what we're here for is important.

For us, being agile and being able to respond to support our partners and our vendors is critical in times of fluidity. That agility piece is important, being future ready and being able to adapt as things change as best we can.

Working in partnership is going to be more critical than ever. Working in lockstep with vendors and partners to better understand the end user landscape, to better understand, the short, medium and long term plans of the partners, end users, so we can forecast and get visibility of what's going to be required from a supply perspective, far earlier than maybe we've done in the past.

The tri-party partnership is probably going to be more critical than ever as we navigate the fluidity and the complexity of things right now.

CRN: How has the memory shortage impacted Ingram Micro?

McGarry: We're spending a lot of time with our partners and our vendors to understand their landscapes. It differs from vendor to vendor, and then working with our partners on those strategic conversations.

it's not to say partners are having strategic conversations with their end users. That's a given, but it's an opportunity to have longer term conversations around the next 12, 18, 24 months with the end user.

Those conversations have become far more strategic now for the three parties. We've seen a lot more of those conversations happen at scale.

We're having to think longer term, that's been an impact for us. For us again, that agility to make sure that we can respond as best we can, to support the partners and the vendors. But it changes daily.

Communicating as best we can is critical, making sure that when we are notified, that we're notifying our partners at the same time. So that partners, again, can try to forward plan, and we can help them forward plan as best we can.

The communication piece is important, but that tri party planning, that's more critical than it's been in a while, and thinking short, medium and longer term, about how we work together to get that forecast right and to try to help navigate some of these [issues].

CRN: What is the current vibe of the industry, especially partners with the shortage?

McGarry: As an industry, we're super resilient, we navigated Covid, we've navigated supply chain issues in the past prior to Covid.

We're a very resilient industry, and we'll come through this in the same way we've come through challenges in the past.

There's a recognition that this is outside of our control and so what's the next best logical step to take?

How do we try to manage customer expectation and customer experience? It is communication, planning, partnership, thinking longer term. They're the things that are important right now and there's a recognition of that.

CRN: How do make sure you’re supported as a leader?

McGarry: First and foremost, I could not speak more highly of my team.

I am so fortunate to be in the role that I'm in to be at Ingram Micro, to work with the most incredible bunch of humble, hardworking, committed people who truly care about what they do and who truly care about the impact they have in the market when they're working with partners and vendors.

That's where I draw a lot of my energy from. We're a very close-knit team, and I just feel lucky. I draw a lot of energy from that.

I've also got great leadership upstream. My boss, Diego [Utge], the executive team globally, there's a lot of humility in the Ingram culture. I have access to anyone in the business at any level, at any time, to ask a question, to seek support, to learn from what others are doing in other regions, other countries, and that's what makes us better.

I love that I have a lot of local autonomy to drive Ingram locally the way we need to support the local market and the needs of the local market, but what positions us uniquely is the ability to draw on regional and global teams to learn best practice, to talk to them about what they're seeing in their market.

Sometimes they see things in different parts of the world before we even know they're coming. I love that I have that support around me. Whilst I only have Australian responsibility, I'm not operating just in an Australian mindset, I get to learn and leverage some great minds regionally and globally, and that is a huge support to me as well.

CRN: What excites you about AI?

McGarry: I was up in Seattle with Microsoft, so there were distributors there, partners, MSPs and large partners, and mid-tier partners.

We got to hear from Microsoft about Frontier firms and what it means to be a Frontier firm. And they talked about this concept of ‘customer zero’.

What I'm starting to see a little bit, and even with us, as we sort of navigate our platform journey, is that it starts with us. We need to be customer zero, we've seen last year, particularly, as we drive a lot of adoption of Xvantage for associates.

We focused on internal adoption and internal acceleration of the platform. What I'm seeing is a real recognition and a realisation that for us to be able to monetise this, to help our partners monetise it, to build use cases, we have to be customer zero.

I loved the way that Microsoft framed that, last year locally, we were customer zero without knowing it. We saw a lot more adoption with our teams internally, around our quoting, around our pipeline management.

I'm seeing partners even being far more experimental with their teams [using AI], and allowing teams to create and innovate in a safe space to do so.

Looking at then, how do they build a viable business case or a viable use case around that, that they can then take to market. That customer zero concept I can see that's starting to get traction. When you talk to partners, I'm often asking them, what are you guys doing internally?

The partners who are doing work internally to spin up agents, to modernise their own business, to take operational burden out of their own businesses, who've proven that internally, are now able to take that to market as a packaged AI offering.

That customer zero concept is critical.

I was super proud of us. We got Microsoft Frontier Distribution certified a couple of weeks back, when I was up there, that was a very rigorous process for us to go through.

It was months of submissions and being able to demonstrate our own internal AI capabilities around the platform, to demonstrate that we have the right capabilities, the right skill sets, the right tools, the right platform to be able to support our partners to become frontier firms. For us to get that global recognition was amazing.

CRN: At your recent Ingram Micro IWD event, you spoke about burnout. What are some ways people, especially women, can avoid becoming burnt out at work?

McGarry: You’ve got to identify the things that do replenish you and do rejuvenate you. It's not the same for everybody. I can only talk from my personal experience around what rejuvenates me.

I truly believe, that when you are giving from that place of burnout resentment can build quickly and you start to feel super resentful for the giving, and that's on you.

It's not on the person you're giving to, because oftentimes they haven't asked you to give. We felt a responsibility to give because we're female and then you all of a sudden you're annoyed because you're giving.

But, they didn't ask you to give necessarily, or maybe you get you gave more than they expected or and that is on you to manage that.

To avoid feeling resentful of how much we do have to give, because women typically do the majority of giving in most systems we operate, you've got to make sure that you feel like you've got something to give.

If you're trying to give and you're on absolute empty, you're not going to show up as the best version of you. I take leadership seriously and if I'm not good, then I can't be good for my team, and I certainly can't be good for my customers and my vendors.

I took Thursday off [before Easter]. I did a call in the morning, but that was my choice. It wasn't a heavy call. I wanted to be on the call. I had lunch with a girlfriend. I went for a run.

As a leader, I role model that for my team. I don't want to glorify burnout. I don't want to glorify working 100 hours a week. Yes, I work long hours, but I also make time in small ways and bigger ways to make sure I'm able to give and perform from a place of overflow, not depletion.

CRN: Do you find burnout more common for women in the channel?

McGarry: There's so much going on all the time. We're having to be adaptable. We're having to learn about things that are happening, things that may happen, things that are coming, things that may not come.

We're all working incredibly hard. Whilst I speak from personal experience about my experience as a female, a lot of what I say is applicable to any gender. We all must take time to look after ourselves.

We have different challenges as women, absolutely. But I see so many men and talk to so many men that are tired, fatigued.

The challenge for men is maybe they don't feel like they can speak about it as openly as we can. There's a little bit more isolation around that, again, my personal view, not an Ingram view.

Women do a great job of cultivating community and men sometimes maybe don't have that. Then maybe it's a little bit, it's not as normalised to maybe talk about it. So same challenges, but nuanced.

CRN: What is your message to your partners?

McGarry: We're here to support you. We don't exist without you. Their success is what matters to us. It's really that simple.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.