Insight Enterprises' Burger: Solutions Integrator Vision Will Double Customer Share
"I want to focus on picking a set of things that we're absolutely great at – not just running the inventory list," Dee Burger told Channel Futures.
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Channel Futures: Tell us about your decision to move to Insight? What drove that move?
Dee Burger: It’s an easy one to answer. I’ve actually got a sticky note still on my desk from when I made the decision. I had a very long career, and I was ready to do something different. I knew that. I started a very intentional process on my end around looking at the market. I started with the idea of joining either a traditional big services company and doing something really unique, going into the startup world, or a technology company that also did services. Insight fell in that latter category. I talked to probably 30 or 40 companies, as I went through a process that ultimately took about six months. Where Insight was so unique was really three things.
Joyce is point one. It struck me that I had spent my whole career never getting to select my boss. If you can do that for a first time, Joyce is a really good choice.
The second reason was that I had 12 interviews – six with executives and six with board members. I had 12 different discussions about the importance of culture, values and where we were going. When you’re making a life choice and thinking about what you’re going to do, that’s a really important aspect.
DB: The third factor is simply the opportunity. If you look at my background at Capgemini, I did almost every job you could do. I ran every major business Capgemini had. I did it globally. I did in the U.S. I ran vertical industries. I built hundreds of relationships with great people. And so I asked myself, “Am I going to go back to a VAR?” There’s that initial question of “What is this, and is that really good idea?” But then you get into it and hear Joyce talk about being a solution integrator. It’s really her vision.
You started thinking about what the components are. There are 34,000 businesses in the US that do more than $100 million in revenue of any type. We have 29,000, customers largely from the same list. To put that the reach and level of relationships into perspective, Capgemini, despite having a much larger services footprint, would be some very small single digit percentage of that customer base. So you start with the reach, and then you say, “What do we really do?”
At Insight, there’s tremendous depth in architecture – like actually helping clients figure out what to do – that I had kind of taken for granted. On the system integrator side, there is a massive set of partner relationships, including a lot of depth and significant organization at the top. There’s the ability to procure, there’s ability to manage logistics, there’s ability to do all the configuration, and then there’s a full range of IT services I was familiar with.
Here’s what the solution integrator opportunity really is. We are competitive in any one of those things, but there’s plenty of people that do each of them. Where we’re really unique is our ability to do multiple categories together. There’s nobody with the level of balance that we have across those. It gives us a unique ability to help many, many different types of customers out there. Dealing with Walmart and dealing with a startup business in Connecticut are very different animals. But we can use that to be a different Insight – to be the right Insight – for each of those customer segments as we go. As I saw that opportunity and went through many discussions, I saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime.
We’ve had a good history. We’ve had something like six or seven straight record setting quarters. The business by all measures is going well. But we’re in our very early stages of where this potential goes. That attraction combined aligning with Joyce and with working with a fabulous set of people was just way too much pass up.
CF: Are there any examples of customers who benefited from that multi-pronged approach?
DB: For a homebuilding client with 300 sites, their ability to have very efficient networks within those sites was really, really important. Having efficient networks becomes their IoT strategy – the backbone of how they do much of their advanced processing. I would never have attempted this from my previous station, but Insight can go in and basically say, “We’ve got A-size, B-size and C-size, in terms of your network. We will handle that. We will order the equipment. We will do the architecture. We will design the network. We’ll install it in the buildings. We’ll run it as a managed service. We’ll give you a monthly bill.”
DB: There’s many people who could do any one part of that. But otherwise, the customer is trying to piece all this stuff together and see if it is actually going to work. Another example is a national convenience store and gas station chain. We went in and installed a bunch of hardware, both in store and at the pumps and turned that into a whole customer analytics platform. In my old world, I could absolutely gone after the analytics job, assuming somebody else had done all the hardware sizing and architecting and installing, and there are other people that could have done that front end part. We’re very unique in our ability to do both. Most of the VARs and, frankly, Insight in the past, saw services as an adjacency. In an overly simplified way, it’s the National Enquirer at the checkout stand. “I’m doing a bunch of stuff – wouldn’t you like some services too?”
DB: What we’re saying is, let’s start with the customer. Remember those 29,000 Insight customers out of 34,000 [that do more than $100 million in revenue] that I mentioned? While those aren’t completely overlapped, let’s say we’re doing some level of business with half of the possible customers in our universe more or less. Our market growth is about depth and not breadth. Going and finding the other half is a fool’s errand. We’ll always add more customers, but that’s not really where our growth is going to come. Going into customers where we’ve got 1% market share and going into 10% because we can combine is the opportunity. That’s how we can really advance the ball in what we do. Our goal with services is to say, “Let’s start with the relationship we want to have with the different types of customers. Let’s be the right Insight for that type of customer. And let’s build a services portfolio that drives depth in that relationship.”
CF: What are the the implications of the solutions integrator model when it comes to how you engage with vendors?
DB: I think it’s going to do two things. First, it will probably mean we engage with fewer vendors. I’m going to say something that is going to seem counterintuitive; I want fewer things in our portfolio and ultimately fewer customers that we focus on. Because I want to focus on picking a set of things that we’re absolutely great at – not just running the inventory list.
That’s tremendously valuable to our partners, because at the end of the day, they’re going be able to count on us more and because we’re going to have more leverage with customers that we can then bring to them. The relationship with partners is typically a two-way street. Sometimes they bring us in, and sometimes we bring them in. There’s a lot of different ways that works. Building more strength with customers and longer term relations customers makes us more attractive to partners. Ultimately, we’ll probably focus more with fewer partners.
CF: How does this pivot of Insight into a solutions integrator relate to how the larger partner community has evolved over the years? Is this pivot the next logical step after VARs evolved to add managed services?
DB: It could be. I do think we’re going to a unique space. There’s definitely more services going on in the VAR world, and there’s some acquisitions that back that up, but I still think I think the fundamental distinction is that their model is, “We’re a VAR, and as we do that there are some services opportunities we might as well take advantage of.” Our model is that we’re going to be a certain Insight to different customers. And the range of historical VAR capability frankly represents a capability spectrum more than a business model, as does our services side. We’re going to actually bring those things together in a unique way for customers. I’m not sure anybody’s thinking quite like that.
I think about having competed for years in the system integrator world and the dynamic of competing there. And then we’ve got a massive team of people who have competed in the product world all these years. Frankly, the competitive dynamics start to merge. When you think about a network-as-a-service type of deal with we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars. It’s a very significant deal that’s very valuable to a customer. As we think about that dynamic, there isn’t a natural competitive set to do it, other than “Mr. Customer, you’re the integrator, and here’s the four or five things you’ve got to coordinate amongst various other companies to go do. You can get the OEM, you can get the VAR/retailer to ultimately handle it. You can get the various installation teams. You can get somebody to run the financing and create a managed service.” We’re starting and saying, “What’s the outcome you need?” and going back into our kitchen with this menu of capabilities to bring you the right solution.
CF: What are your priorities in 2023 and beyond?
DB: Coming in new, I was in a really unique position, because the stuff I knew, I knew really well and better than most, and the stuff that I didn’t know I really didn’t know about. And the team I joined knew a ton about the latter. We’ve together come and built a transformation agenda for where we’re headed; start with the customer, build out services and focus on the portfolio and customers.
We’re looking at [this year] this as massive growth opportunity. Evrybody else is talking about recession and being scared. We’re going to be prudent, but now’s our time to bet. We are betting on this strategy, and we are looking at aggressively growing in the face of a market that may be weaker than normal, with the idea that you can gain more ground as a winner in a bad market than as a middling player in a good market. So we’re going to be very aggressive at this time.
CF: How does being a solutions integrator impact your technology portfolio?
DB: We are going through our portfolio and making choices. When you don’t do that, and most companies don’t, your portfolio becomes happenstance. You effectively become the compilation of all the series of events and transactions that you do, and at the end of the day you don’t really know what that is. We are very intentionally going to be focusing on our cloud business, our data business, our applications business, our cybersecurity business, and then bringing together our services and product business with intellectual property. We’re going to narrow down our portfolio in terms of where we focus. Think about it much more from the standpoint of picking the field where we’re going to play offense. It doesn’t mean everything else goes away. We’ll still do that. But in terms of where we’re going to bet, invest, focus, measure and incentivize the team, it’s going to be a pretty select set of things.
CF: How much deeper have you gone with those customers? And how do you measure that?
DB: We’re starting to measure that. We’re thinking about the different segments of customers. In some of them, we want to bring the entirety of our portfolio and the entirety of our focus. In others, we may want to just do services. In others, we may want to face off like a traditional VAR, and in others, we may want them to be a web customer. We’ve done tremendous investments in our e-commerce capabilities. At the top end of the spectrum, we’ve got a tremendous focus now around having segmented out a relatively small list of – counts in the hundreds – and a different model to actually cover them and a bigger sense rather than just thinking about as a sell-to situation, more on the account management. It’s back to the idea that our opportunity is depth. What we really want to do in that set of customers is to double our share. Our share typically as low single digits. For some of them it might get to 10 or 15%, as these are typically bigger spenders. But we want to ultimately double our share in that segment.
CF: How much deeper have you gone with those customers? And how do you measure that?
DB: We’re starting to measure that. We’re thinking about the different segments of customers. In some of them, we want to bring the entirety of our portfolio and the entirety of our focus. In others, we may want to just do services. In others, we may want to face off like a traditional VAR, and in others, we may want them to be a web customer. We’ve done tremendous investments in our e-commerce capabilities. At the top end of the spectrum, we’ve got a tremendous focus now around having segmented out a relatively small list of – counts in the hundreds – and a different model to actually cover them and a bigger sense rather than just thinking about as a sell-to situation, more on the account management. It’s back to the idea that our opportunity is depth. What we really want to do in that set of customers is to double our share. Our share typically as low single digits. For some of them it might get to 10 or 15%, as these are typically bigger spenders. But we want to ultimately double our share in that segment.
For Dee Burger and Insight Enterprises, cornering the newly minted solutions integrator market requires narrowing the partner’s focus.
So said Burger, who joined Insight in May 2022 as the president of its North America segment. He joined the company after a 29-year stint at Capgemini, where he led multiple business units. He said he moved to Insight partially due to its vision to establish itself as a leading solutions integrator whose capabilities span from consulting to design to installation to management to analytics.
Burger said although many partners can handle individual aspects like sourcing or managed services, his new company can bring them all together.
“There’s nobody with the level of balance that we have across those categories. It gives us a unique ability to help many, many different types of customers out there,” he told Channel Futures in a recent interview.
Insight’s Dee Burger
The 35-year-old publicly traded company has evolved from the label of a traditional value-added reseller in the last decade. Insight in 2015 acquired technology architecture firm BlueMetal with the stated goal of adding more services geared toward customer experience. Insight went on to acquired a cadre of managed service providers, consultancies, cloud service providers and other partners over the last seven years. CEO Joyce Mullen in 2022 detailed a five-year plan to turn Insight into a solutions integrator.
Multiple MSP 501 wins have helped validated the transformation the company is making.
Focused Investments
But in order to achieve that solutions integrator identity, Insight will be focusing on “depth and not breadth,” Burger said. That means narrowing the vendor portfolio to the technologies it does best and focusing on cross-selling services into existing customers.
“It doesn’t mean everything else goes away. We’ll still do that. But in terms of where we’re going to bet, invest, focus, measure and incentivize the team, it’s going to be a pretty select set of things,” he said.
Burger sat down virtually with the Channel Futures to discuss why he joined Insight, what he means by “solutions integrator” and why he believes Insight is primed to accelerate its investments in 2023 despite a beleaguered macroeconomy.
Scroll through the 10 images above to view the Q&A, which Channel Futures has edited for length and clarity.
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