Insight’s EMEA President wants to hoist services to 20-25% of revenues amid plans to become a “leading solutions integrator”.
Adrian Gregory took the reins of the $9.4bn-revenue reseller’s EMEA business in January from Emma de Sousa, having joined from systems integrator giant Atos.
“I was brought in to help Insight realise its vision of becoming the leading solutions integrator,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
“It’s about taking what we do in technology – helping customers buy the right technology, at the right price and configuration – and then also bringing in the ability to help them design, build, implement and run that technology as well.”
Services currently generate around 10% of Insight’s revenues, but the long-term goal is to boost this to around the 20-25% marker in EMEA, Gregory revealed.
“That won’t be done by the end of next year, but we want to have moved the dial on that by then,” he said.
“Customers have taken technology strategy back in house, and so they should”
Insight’s recent acquisitions of Amdaris and SADA show it has the freedom to invest in the higher-growth areas of services and solutions in a way some SIs can’t, Gregory said.
“I’ve got a nearly 30-year background in SIs, and have seen the nature of the relationship with customers change. They’ve taken the technology strategy much more back in-house, and so they should, because technology is becoming more central to every business,” he said.
“So rather than them having massive relationships with single organisations, it tends to be a whole collection of different partnerships and alliances to deliver on the strategy.
“With the SI community a lot of those relationships have got broken up, so then you’ve got to run a business that’s saying ‘how do I manage the transition from an old set of revenue and margin streams to a new set?’. And that’s quite choppy waters.
“For us, we don’t have that legacy.”
The heightened focus on services and solutions has prompted Insight to review its location-based resource model, with Amdaris handing it a base in Eastern Europe on top of its existing global delivery centres in Manila and India.
“If you’re just doing things on a local basis, you’re going to be priced out of the market compared with pretty much every service provider on the planet,” Gregory explained.
“We’re seeing a lot of under-serviced customers in corporate”
When it comes to Insight’s more mature technology business, the goal is to “grow with the market” in some areas and “grow ahead of it” in others, particularly cloud, Gregory explained.
Relationships with Insight’s key vendors have been “rethought”, with the firm recently signing off a new three-year strategy with Microsoft, Gregory said.
“I’m from a services background but part of my role is to make Insight feel really good about the technology side of their business and make sure that’s set for growth,” he said.
Insight styles itself as a provider of point solutions (including DaaS) to large enterprises, and a more strategic partner for corporates with 5,000 seats or fewer, Gregory said.
“I think the enterprise marketplace is quite saturated. There’s a lot of choice there. Not so much in corporate. We’re seeing a lot of under-serviced customers there, so the focus for us is in that sector,” he said.
While Amdaris handed Insight skills in software development and digital services, Google partner SADA will bolster its cloud offering.
“Even though you could say cloud is pretty mature, there’s a bit of growth left. And when you start bringing in things like data analytics and how that leads into AI, you need that cloud base that comes with that,” Gregory said.
Only seeing ‘tip of iceberg’ in GenAI
On that note, Insight bagged Innovation Partner of the Year at the recent Canalys Forums EMEA on the strength of its ‘Insight GPT’ GenAI offering.
This has been deployed both internally to streamline processes such as statements of work and legal documentation, as well as externally, Gregory revealed.
“With our partnership [with Microsoft], we were able to get early access to OpenAI and build our own solutions around it, and then help customers to adopt the technology too,” he said.
“One external example is with a producer of food and beverages, which uses Insight GPT to produce more specialised labels with better and different information. Another one is a consulting firm who [as part of what they do] look at documentation in customers and compare it to an ISO standards-based database. They run a compliancy check using Insight GPT to do that.”
“It feels like we’re at the tip of the iceberg at the moment,” Gregory added.
Has anything surprised Gregory in his first 12 months at Insight?
“Not having a legacy that has to be addressed from a solutions perspective is quite nice. It’s just all about the future and about growth,” he concluded.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
