SADA’s Safoian on Joining Insight Enterprises: ‘The Best Possible Home'
With a few months as part of solutions integrator Insight Enterprises in the rearview mirror, SADA CEO and president Tony Safoian has no regrets.
![SADA, an Insight Company's Tony Safoian SADA, an Insight Company's Tony Safoian](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltef42b2569287a879/662032facbbc760c564059c9/Tony_Safoian_Insight_feature_2024.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
SADA, an Insight Company's Tony Safoian
Channel Futures: What has it been like being under Insight? Wat has changed and how are you growing?
Tony Safoian: It's great. … Four months into this coming together, the foundational integration ... stuff is behind us now. Now we’re able to move forward and execute together, talk to customers together, talk to Google together. … [It’s still] very early in the year. … I feel like a lot of what we uncover with customers is going to actually get done this year. … We’re seeing great velocity in penetrating [Insight’s] account base, pursuing RFPs together, pursuing engagements together, us walking them into our opportunities. … We've closed a handful of deals already and it just makes it very rewarding. Because for me, this journey is about proving the thesis, which I was so passionate about, that Insight is the best possible home for SADA.
CF: You’ve built this family business and now you’re entrusting it to someone else. That’s a big deal.
TS: It is a big deal. And fundamentally it came down to [Insight] being even better on the inside than it looked from the outside. I was like, ‘These people are great.’ But it’s a courtship, right? After we get married … well, it’s even better. I mean, they're just extremely talented, sharp, smart, straightforward. They want to win. They're ambitious. They're direct. They're demanding. They're fair — all the things you want.
[Teaming with Insight has proven] the core thesis of what happens when you merge this family business that has world-class capabilities and a high demand area, and you remove all the barriers to entry to customer acquisition — because our biggest challenge has always been that we’re never the incumbent. We're always the new vendor, the new RFP. … And now we get to draft behind 30,000 customers, thousands of [master service agreements], tens of thousands of procurement vehicles and contracts and say, ‘If you really want this thing, you can actually buy it tomorrow. It's not going to take a year or years to get into your vendor system.’ So Insight was the ideal home.
CF: Let’s talk about how SADA’s growth as part of Insight propels you into new areas.
TS: So services are where the value [lies]. … There are four areas where we're [mainly focused, starting with security].
We’ve developed incredible capabilities on Google security products. … And also, because Insight brings SOC capabilities, we want to draft off of that as well.
Another one is collaboration, productivity. … Google's putting a lot of muscle and energy and incentives around driving as much net-new Google Workspace wins as possible using Gemini capabilities. … The productivity paradigm is shifting and customers who've never evaluated Google Workspace before [are doing so], and we're really excited about continuing to win there.
And you know, all the changes around VMware — we've spent the last couple of years building Google Cloud VMware Engine capabilities because running VMware native in Google Cloud is the best hyperscaler destination for VMware workloads. It's been the case for a couple of years. So the timing around this Broadcom thing is really fortuitous, and also [Insight has] a massive install base of VMware customers.
And then of course, everything around Gemini. … That’s leading to a lot of POCs and experimentation, some production work.
Then also because of the work Sandy Hogan did when she came in, I immediately saw that we're underserving public sector. Insight has an incredible public sector business; they have all the contracts that we could ever dream of. … Our public services business is really accelerating, above and beyond the Workspace work that we're really known for. So app modernization, infrastructure, work and public sector − state, local and federal − are the four or five major growth areas for us.
CF: Speaking of Google Workspace, what’s your take on the recent changes around the partner margins?
TS: Nobody likes it when somebody moves the cheese. Yet I think it’s done in the right spirit. And the spirit is, no partner should be living off this, not growing, not expanding, not bringing in Gemini capabilities. Because any customer that's stagnant, that doesn't have a great engaged partner relationship, that’s not using all the capabilities that they're paying for is a churn risk to Google — and to us, because Microsoft's going to come in or somebody’s going to say, ‘Look at all this cool stuff on Copilot. Where’s Workspace?’
So what [partners] need to drive is what the ecosystem needs to drive, what Google needs to drive, which is much more new customer acquisition. The incentives on new are huge. They're tremendous. So [Google [says], "Look, we don't want you to be fat, lazy and happy. We want you to take care of the customers you have and you'll make more money on them. If you upgrade them, upsell and cross-sell and do all the stuff you should be doing anyway, not sitting on renewals, we'll pay you great incentives on new customer acquisition — help us get new." [That's] fundamentally the right thing.
But the issue that I do agree with is the notice period. It’s hard to argue that 30 days is enough time, that that’s enough for us to shift and migrate … because we need to move resources and incentives around.
But also if you're a partner that hasn't scaled themselves and broadened capabilities and have been just coasting, [that’s not enough]. We have to make ourselves fundamentally valuable not just to our customers but to our partners — every year. We have to earn the right to get the best customers and the right to get the best incentives.
CF: What are you most excited about for the coming year?
TS: I'm excited about, "What can we prove in the first year of this amazing thesis?’ The first five massive wins together and some of the pursuits that we're in — these are logos that we could access but could do very little work for, or that we couldn't even get into and now we're in.
… I'm excited about bringing [everything] to fruition and having a tremendous year and … really standing out for … exceptional solution delivery, exceptional service delivery.
CF: What are you most excited about for the coming year?
TS: I'm excited about, "What can we prove in the first year of this amazing thesis?’ The first five massive wins together and some of the pursuits that we're in — these are logos that we could access but could do very little work for, or that we couldn't even get into and now we're in.
… I'm excited about bringing [everything] to fruition and having a tremendous year and … really standing out for … exceptional solution delivery, exceptional service delivery.
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.
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