Insight CEO: ‘Digital Transformation Will Continue to Accelerate’

‘It’s not just about getting a client to the cloud or working at the edge. It’s all about where you can go from there to profoundly change what you do,’ says Joyce Mullen, president, and CEO of Insight.

As digital transformation continues to reach new heights, Insight President and CEO Joyce Mullen said it’s not just about getting clients to the cloud or working at the edge, but the opportunities beyond that.

“Digital transformation will continue to accelerate,” she told participants at the virtual keynote at CRN’s parent company The Channel Company’s virtual Best of Breed event on Tuesday. “It’s not just about getting a client to the cloud or working at the edge. It’s all about where you can go from there to profoundly change what you do.”

Chandler, Arizona-based Insight Enterprises is No. 14 on CRN’s 2021 Solution Providers 500.

“There’s a lot more spending on innovation and transformational technologies [such as] SaaS and edge,” Mullen said.

Insight recently worked with IDG for a study gauging where clients, competitors, and the market, in general, are on their digital transformation journey. More than 400 CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, and other IT leaders were surveyed on where they stand on their path to digital transformation, according to Mullen.

“We wanted to know how they’re investing their IT dollars and what’s tripping them up,” she said.

The study showed that about 87 percent are actively pursuing digital transformation and nearly half of those are enterprise-wide initiatives. Ninety percent expect IT modernization to have a significant impact on their long-term growth including improvements to the quality of service, user experience, business continuity, cost savings, resource optimization, agility, and innovation of new products.

“Companies are embracing IT and saying we are going to keep doing this in a much more meaningful way,” she said.

She said that while the impacts of the pandemic are still being felt such as inflation, labor shortages, and the Great Reshuffle, issues such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and soaring gas prices are also affecting how clients do business.

However, sustainability is emerging as a new growth frontier and hyper-automation is a new and evolving trend, she said, as it’s essential to mitigating pressure on labor resources.

And all these changes open the door for opportunity.

As Insight helped its clients work through the transition to remote work caused by the pandemic, and solidifying business continuity and agility for the future, some extremely specific areas of need have emerged, Mullen said.

“The market demand for integrated solutions is greater than ever,” she said.

Transformation efforts tend to center around six fundamental areas: modern workplace, data and AI, modern infrastructure, cybersecurity, intelligent edge, and modern applications.

“Data is our most valuable commodity but too many organizations still do not have a handle on how to manage all of it,” she said. “We’ve become highly focused on these areas at Insight because this is where our clients need our help most. We work closely together to simplify the complex and speed up adoption and benefits without breaking the bank to make it happen.

“Everyone is talking about sustainability,” she added. “Many of our solutions can help a client meet their own goals for sustainability from asset recovery and recycling to ensuring we optimize power consumption and data centers to leveraging the public cloud to building more intelligence at the edge,” she said.

Michael Goldstein, CEO of LAN Infotech – a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Microsoft partner and member of CRN’s 2022 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500, said the way Insight itemized and figured out six different areas of market demand exactly mirrors what he is seeing at his company.

“For me, to hear Insight and someone of [Mullen’s] caliber talk about the same initiatives that we’re seeing out there, it’s right on.

“A lot of customers realized coming out of the pandemic that they had to modernize to be more productive,” he added. “And I can see $11 trillion being small. A lot more people are asking cloud questions and we’re seeing a lot more cloud adoption, tied to that is modernization.”

To help accelerate clients into the future, Mullen said IT businesses need to be “loud, proud, fierce and strong.”

“We need to be loud about our collective capabilities within the channel to help organizations be more ambitious about what they can do and what they can become through the smarter use of technology,” she said. “We need to be proud of how we helped our client's abilities to adapt to some pretty dramatic changes in the last couple of years, and to innovate along the way.”

She added that clients can no longer think like a technology company, they need to be a technology company.

“We also need to be fierce, fiercely protective of our client's best interest to help them see around the corners and be ready for the next inevitable wave of unpredictability,” she said. “We must fiercely defend their organizations from cyberattacks and bad actors and change the narrative that our businesses and governments are more vulnerable than ever. We need to be fierce about bringing our ‘A’ game to our clients meaning we need to be truly in tune with your unique and ever-changing needs.”

Finally, she said IT companies need to be strong “in the conviction that technology will help solve the world ‘s most vexing challenges.”

“Digital Transformation is a powerful equalizer in education, improving health care, engaging citizens, and improving customer experience,” she said. “Digital transformation can bring us closer together. Therefore, we should, as an industry, be strong in our commitment to helping our clients use technology as a force for good.”

By C.J. Fairfield