CEO Joyce Mullen: 'Insight Will Become the Leading Solutions Integrator'

Top Insight Enterprises executives are outlining an aggressive five-year strategy to transform how the company sells and delivers IT solutions. At Insight’s Investor Day in New York, CEO Joyce Mullen explained the company’s plan to become a “solutions integrator.”

Mullen said Insight is creating this new solutions integrator partner category. The strategy, already in progress, leverages one of the largest IT product reselling businesses with its global systems integration capabilities. Further, Mullen is promising to lead it at an accelerated growth rate of 200 basis points faster than the market.

Insight’s Joyce Mullen

“Insight will become the leading solutions integrator, setting the pace and defining a new category in our industry,” Mullen said. “We really do believe we are defining a new category in this industry, because that is exactly what clients need.”

The plan calls for aggressive changes, prioritizing the solutions it emphasizes. But Mullen underscored that Insight isn’t dialing back on its core businesses.

“We are not abandoning our traditional technology business far from it,” she said. “We’re building on that capitalizing on that it’s an incredibly strong foundation.”

Mullen also noted that despite deteriorating economic conditions, the plan poises Insight for growth.

“We are accelerating our strategy and deepening our client relationships, so that we can outperform the market no matter what the macro environment,” she said. “We actually have unwavering confidence that our value proposition is resilient, and relevant and compelling in any economic cycle.”

Aggressive Growth Plan

Considering a possible recession in 2023, Mullen promises sustained growth through 2027. Insight’s plan calls to expand EBITA margin to 7% while delivering a 20% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR), Mullen said.

CFO Glynis Bryan acknowledged that Insight’s cash flow has been erratic in recent years. But she reiterated the company’s earlier forecast that the company will report positive cash flow for the current quarter. Bryan attributed that to issues surrounding hardware growth.

Insight’s Glynis Bryan

“When hardware is growing in the 25-plus range, it uses a lot of cash; a lot of our working capital is tied up,” Bryan said. “When hardware grows more normally, in the mid-single-digit range, as is forecast for the next several years, we generate cash.”

Mullen told investors and analysts that she knows what customers want in a partner. As Dell Technologies’ channel chief, Mullen said she oversaw 170,000 partners. In all, she spent nearly 22 years at Dell before Insight tapped her as president and CEO two years ago.

“I have learned a lot about what clients need,” Mullen said. “They need somebody who’s going to deliver results fast. They need a partner who’s going to guide them from traditional IT to modern cloud. They need a partner who actually bring solutions, a combination of hardware, software and services that can be integrated into their environment and produce meaningful results.”

But similarly, the focus on growing Insight’s cloud and services businesses will also drive more profitable growth, she said.

“This is the direction that we’re headed in,” Bryan said. “And the direction that we’re headed in says that services and the cloud can grow more than double the rate of hardware.”

Technical Experts

Mullen also emphasized the company’s 5,300 technical experts worldwide, with specialties in AI, cybersecurity and digital enablement, among other areas. Many are longtime Insight employees, and others came to the company through acquisition.

Last month, Mullen noted that Insight acquired Hanu, a Microsoft Azure migration services provider.

“They’re really good at what they do around cloud and help us build out more scale in this really critical area of the business,” she said.

Optimizing Insight’s Portfolio

Mullen introduced Dee Burger, a Capgemini veteran who joined Insight five months ago as president of North America. Burger said a key priority is rationalizing the portfolio and aligning sales and technical resources accordingly.

Insight’s Dee Burger

“We’re going to be very proactive about our portfolio, and less reactive, and be very disciplined,” Burger said. “These are long-term ways to anchor ourselves in these customers and build long-term relationships. We also are going to have scaled, highly cost-effective managed services that go with that. And these will take a range of flavors, ranging from a single service that we do for many clients and multitenant types of deals, to going into a single client or small group of clients and providing services at scale.”

Burger said that Insight plans to change how it compensates its people by incentivizing them more to sell solutions and driving margins. Bryan added that this effort started with a small pilot in 2021, which Insight expanded this year. The plan calls to have salespeople have fewer accounts, but for them to go deeper with each one.

“We know we can deliver higher value to our clients when we sell services,” Mullen said. “So we are providing the appropriate incentives to make sure our sellers are focused on that as well.”