SADA’s Safoian on Joining Insight Enterprises: ‘The Best Possible Home'

With the first full quarter as part of solutions integrator Insight Enterprises under his belt, SADA CEO and President Tony Safoian has no regrets.

“We're seeing great velocity in penetrating their account base, pursuing [requests for proposals] together, pursuing engagements together,” Safoian told Channel Futures at this month's Google Cloud Next 2024.

Indeed, the Google Cloud-only managed service provider has cemented some major deals, thanks in large part to its new routes to market via Insight Enterprises, and launched some gen AI production workloads. Along the way, SADA just scored its latest round of awards from Google Cloud for 2023’s efforts.

“We're thankful that we bet [on Google Cloud] really early and we achieved a certain scale,” Safoian said.

That Insight Enterprises head Dee Burger attended his first-ever Google Next with Safoian last week and got to see his new acquisition land that recognition − including global sales partner of the year − was no small development. After all, Insight made a $410 million bet on SADA.

“I feel a great deal of accountability to really ... transfer to [Burger] all the excitement of what we feel year after year,” Safoian said.

For Safoian, the excitement is mounting. The last four months have only solidified to him that combining SADA with Insight was the right move, despite the potential for risk. Recall, Safoian’s parents founded SADA; so, pairing a longtime privately operated family business with a large corporation beholden to Wall Street could have backfired. But Insight Enterprise’s intentions and treatment have proven authentic, starting with the “courtship” of SADA, as Safoian calls it.

“There were no games,” Safoian said. “It was so straightforward. And everybody stood by their word.”

And the marriage, if you will, of SADA and Insight Enterprises, has only heightened those qualities, per Safoian.

“For me, this journey is about proving the thesis, which I was so passionate about, that Insight is the best possible home for SADA,” Safoian said, as you’ll read more about in the slideshow above.

To that point, in addition to SADA’s soaring revenue potential as an Insight Enterprises company, Safoian finds himself exhilarated about his own growth.

“I'm really intellectually stimulated by this new challenge,” he said. “Personally and professionally, I'm challenged in the right way that makes me wake up and want to solve problems. … I couldn't ask for better mentors and a better boss and a better team.”

As such, Safoian is leaning into the urge to keep growing, especially given that SADA, a group within a publicly traded company, is accountable to shareholders. He feels “no level of satisfaction with the past,” he said. Rather, “customers tomorrow will expect more and Google will expect more, our people will expect more.”

In this slideshow, read more about Safoian’s views on joining Insight Enterprises, as well as where SADA is headed next.

We have edited Channel Futures' conversation with Safoian, which includes more of his views on joining Insight and where SADA is headed next, for length and clarity.