Insight Enterprises’ 7 Big IT Bets And Tech Trends For 2021: Joyce Mullen

Insight Enterprises President Joyce Mullen’s breaks down Insight’s biggest investment areas in 2021. ‘You have to have way more remote services, way more automation in the process, and managing all those devices is a big opportunity,’ she says.

Joyce Mullen’s 2021 Strategy To Drive Sales

Solution provider powerhouse Insight Enterprises has been able to skate to where the puck is going in the IT world for years with huge plans in store for 2021 to capitalize on next year’s most important technology trends.

The $8 billion Tempe, Ariz.-based company, ranked No. 15 on CRN’s 2020 Solution Provider 500 list, recently nabbed industry superstar Joyce Mullen, who was previously Dell Technologies’ global channel chief responsible for over $50 billion in channel sales.

Mullen, president of Insight’s North America business, explained to CRN the biggest technology trends her company is betting next year to drive sales growth and customer stickiness.

“Next year, it is very clear that clients around the world are going to look for, ‘I need help figuring out what my digital transformation strategy is and my priorities inside that strategy are going to continue to move around -- they certainly moved around in 2020. I need somebody to help make sense of the amazing plethora of technology options that can help me get there and I need whatever we come up with to deliver the outcomes I’m looking for, but they have to be at a lower cost,’” said Mullen.

Those demanding customer expectations is what Insight will be doubling down on next year – everything from the edge to more remote workforce services. Mullen breaks down the seven biggest technology bets Insight will make in 2021.

The Edge: Reinventing How Businesses Work

The edge will continue to be even more important next year. We’re seeing an interesting focus on things like contact tracing solutions and security solutions – physical and cybersecurity. I think this whole notion of, ‘How do I make the edge work for me? How do I make sure I have the right kind of infrastructure to support the edge? How do I make sure that that edge is secure?’ Those are big opportunities for us.

I’m going to continue -- probably to the day I die -- talking about the opportunity at the edge and with cloud, just because I see more and more use cases where technology is really enabling customers to reinvent their business and reimagine how they do work. There’s a ton of examples where we are seeing retailers and restaurant organizations needing to figure out how to change their business model from a traditional store to being able to deliver and pull stuff out and bring it to a curbside. Those were not projects we were thinking about this time last year.

‘We’re Not Going Back’: The Remote Workforce

The fact is that we’re going to be working, learning, playing, thriving and doing whatever we do remotely for awhile. Everyone is predicting that we’re not going back. So we have to reimagine what great looks like in this environment where people like you and I are working today: remotely.

It’s about how do we make sure that our clients and employees have the right kind of productivity tools, the right kind of security, the right kind of modern working tools like compute to allow them to not only do their traditional work – which is kind of where we’ve been this year – but also if it’s harder to come to the office, how do you make high quality videos at home? How do you make sure you that you can deliver high-quality training from home? All of that stuff is going to continue to be important. I don’t think we’re going back. I can’t imagine us going back to where we were before. We’re going to be in a hybrid modern workforce forever probably.

Automation Investments To Reduce Costs

There will be an increase in the level of automation around everything. This is all about cost reduction. All around cycle time improvement. It’s all around self-service. You need way more automation in the process and managing all these devices. It’s all around making sure our customers can run as efficiently as possible within their operations with as few touches as possible.

2021 Collaboration Will Demand More Remote Services

The impact [in 2021] of COVID-19 on remote working and remote learning is super obvious. Gartner predicts that almost 50 percent of enterprise employees will continue to work remotely -- and we’re seeing that too, at least some of the time. That’s going to mean that [businesses] are going to have to have a work set up at home, and a work step up at work. That could be good for us and our industry. But it also means they’re going to have to have some facility or some capability to drive some kind of collaboration. Whether that’s like the hotel-type workstations or things like collaboration zones because people are going to be coming in and out. They’ll come in for a specific purpose, which is to collaborate. And then if there doing solitary work, they’ll likely do that from home.

I think that means that not only do spaces have to be more flexible, but also the tools have to be more flexible and devices have to be more flexible. That’s hard. So those same studies talk about supporting a highly geographically diverse workforce is a lot harder for an IT team. So you have to have way more remote services, way more automation in the process and managing all those devices is a big opportunity for companies like Insight who have this underpinning supply chain capability but also the intimate relationship with customers to understand what they’re really trying to drive in their businesses.

More Managed Services For Edge, Data Center And Modern Workforces

We have a tremendous services business today. We also have a commitment that we are going to grow like crazy and increase our service mix. We know when we talk to our OEM partners, the most value we can bring to clients is wrapping their awesome technology solutions with the services that allow us to manage them in order to deliver the outcomes that clients are looking for.

So you will see more focus from Insight on managed services for sure. That’s going to probably span the edge to the data center environment to the hybrid environment, including the modern workforce. That is a huge focus for us and we have plenty to offer in that space.

Consolidated Services Sales Plays

I’d say we have too much to offer in that [managed services] space. What you’ll see is we’re going to get really focused on these sales plays where we are going to choose a handful or so of our manages services, and then we’re going to work really hard to deliver those exceptionally well to our clients. Those will line up around the areas of the modern workforce, the modern data center, security and the edge.

As-A-Service Customer Adoption Will Increase In 2021

I think as-a-service does increase next year. I just talked about how it’s much more difficult to manage devices rather than say one office building compared to a thousand houses and homes around the area. It’s a lot tougher to manage all of that stuff.

There was already a trend to more as-a-service. It’s probably not 50 percent [of businesses that choose as-a-service] but there’s probably 90 percent interest and 90 percent of customers are discussing as-a-service. But I do believe we will see increased adoption in as-a-service. At Insight, we want to drive that because we can deliver much more value to clients if we are managing the end-to-end experience and the lifecycle of those products.