Founders Tim and Eric Crown started Hard Drives International – the company that would become Insight – in 1988 from their Tempe garage with a business plan born from a college assignment and a cash advance from a credit card. Today Insight is a publicly-traded, Fortune 500 global IT systems integrator helping clients globally manage and transform their business.
- No. 417 on Fortune 500
- $7.1 billion in revenue in 2018
- 7,400+ teammates worldwide
- 1,800+ developers, architects, engineers, and technical consultants
- 5,300+ partners
- Locations in 19 countries
Steve Dodenhoff, President – North America
Innovation Story
Insight has come a long way from the early days of being a hardware and software reseller. While still part of our core business, we have since evolved our value proposition, teams, and services to help clients solve for their biggest business challenge: The need to balance day-to-day efficiency and cost-effectiveness while transforming the business through technology and innovation.
Our 2018 Insight Intelligent Technology Index showed that 87% of IT decision-makers across businesses of all sizes felt the department struggles to adapt to an expanding role that includes both adopting innovation initiatives while keeping core systems running optimally. These ambidextrous demands don’t always fit within the same business model – companies have historically either been cost-effective or innovative. But technology’s relatively short history – starting with the first mainframes in the 1950s through a rapid evolution into today’s emergence of autonomous things, quantum computing, etc. – suggests businesses also need to quickly evolve digitally or face disruption.
Most companies that are trying to drive efficiency and innovate are going two different places to get those activities, and generally, they’re missing what’s in the middle. To help them with this problem, Insight devised its Insight Intelligent Technology Solutions™ under four solution areas that are designed to simplify the working relationship and drive savings in one area to fund innovation in other areas.
Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.– John F. Kennedy
The four solution areas include:
Supply Chain Optimization – To reduce the amount of time IT departments spend on maintaining infrastructure, our supply chain experts work with clients to create processes to streamline procuring, maintaining, and replacing technology solutions. By optimizing the organization’s IT supply chain, we help them reduce the time and costs it takes to run their businesses.
Connected Workforce – The digital native workforce, the proliferation of mobile devices and advancements in cloud technology are changing the working landscape. To help clients attract, develop and retain talent, we work with them to build modern IT environments that create more collaborative and productive workplaces resembling the technology experiences people have in their private lives.
Cloud and Data Center Transformation – The Insight-commissioned 2018 IDG survey, “IT in Transition: How IT Leaders are Faring,” revealed that 64 percent cite legacy IT infrastructure, processes and/or tools in their list of the top five barriers to transformation. To help businesses over the hurdle and become future-ready, we work with them to optimize and modernize their virtual environments by choosing the right platforms for their workloads.
Digital Innovation – Increased competitive pressures, evolving customer behaviors, employee demands for smarter workspaces, and emerging technologies like the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud require organizations to innovate. This new normal has put a premium on data-driven insights and transforming customer and workplace experiences through modern applications, and our 825 application-development experts are on the frontlines with clients bringing these cutting-edge possibilities to life.
What’s creating all this change? It’s not the technology but increasingly demanding customer and employee expectations along with new entrant disruptors. It’s also competition – more often from untraditional places – challenging organizations to meet new needs. Because of these pressures, business leaders have taken the lead in innovation for the workforce through customer-facing technologies. We understand the incredible change that the IT function is undergoing and, in response, continue to evolve our vision of what intelligent technology should be not only to help alleviate the daily pressure points for IT, but to truly help organizations along a transformational journey that advances as quickly as the technology that powers it.
Why Phoenix?
There has been a specific focus on creating a favorable environment for tech companies to thrive thanks to increasing public-private collaboration. With government leaders who understand how to attract the right talent and an economic climate to support companies coming here, we have built a solid reputation as a pro-business and innovation-technology hub with a high-quality talent pool.
Advice & Best Practices
- Successful innovators start with the problem first to explore the underlying challenges before working on a solution.
- Test and learn, fail fast, bring things to market rapidly.
- Be adaptable. When you fail, be open to approaching the problem from a different angle.
