Solution Provider Red8 Taps Industry Vet As New President

Solution provider Red8 has brought in a new top executive with previous channel experience.

Frank Wiacek, who joined the company in October and this month took over as its new president, replaces outgoing president Richard Heard, who is taking over as president of Insight Investments, the parent company of Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Red8.

The Insight Investments umbrella also includes Insight Financial Services, which provides financial services for IT purchases, and 2ndGear, which supplies recertified and refurbished IT equipment and software.

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Prior to joining Red8, Wiacek served as chief revenue officer of a behavioral health organization for the past two years after several years of executive roles at EMC and at Berkshire Computer, a Boston-based solution provider.

Red8, in its 31st year of operation, is a privately held profitable business with nine-figure revenue, Wiacek said.

The company helps its customers manage their mission to find better ways to manage their IT infrastructure via a combination of on-premises, cloud, software-defined, everything-as-a-service, do-it-yourself and outsourcing, he said.

"A lot of customers find that if they're not putting the right workloads on the right infrastructure, they become more inefficient," he said. "If they don't do software-defined in the right place, they will end up with a team of people trying to keep an inefficient software-defined Frankenstein in place."

Red8 works with the top cloud players including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, as well as top IT infrastructure vendors including NetApp, Dell EMC, Cisco, VMware, Palo Alto Networks and Commvault, Wiacek said.

Traditionally, most businesses have based their IT infrastructures on private clouds, he said.

"We want to be neutral," he said. "It's impossible to approach clients without being open to what's best for the customer. We have to be open to what customers need and offer a path to the right solutions."

Wiacek said he wants to continue driving growth for Red8 along three paths, including addressing more projects and plans with customers, increasing the solution provider's headcount, and pursuing acquisitions where it makes sense geographically or culturally. Red8 to date has made one only acquisition, that of Voyant Strategies in 2015.

Wiacek would not discount the possibility that Red8 might someday be acquired, although he said there has been no talk of the company being an acquisition target since he joined.