Why hiring the right people keeps Insight's EMEA boss awake at night

Insight to bolster European services arms with 200 new hires, but Wolfgang Ebermann admits the firm is in a fight for talent

Insight is planning to recruit 200 specialists to its Europe business over the next year, as part of a $10m (£7.8m) investment in bolstering its as-a-service business on the continent.

Speaking to CRN sister publication Channelnomics Europe, Insight's EMEA boss Wolfgang Ebermann said that a first wave of 100 solution sales specialists is expected to be hired in the next six months, with the final 100 coming six months after.

The 200 additional employees will work in Insight's three services-orientated areas: Connected Workforce, which is Insight's unified communications and collaboration offering; Cloud and Datacentre Transformation; and Digital Innovation, which includes harnessing AI and IoT.

Ebermann said that each business unit needs to become "a $1bn-revenue business in its own right" as Insight shifts towards adopting as-a-service models.

"Over the next 12 months, we are going to make the biggest investment in building additional intelligent solutions into the European business. There will be more than $10m of investment in new resources, coupled with global investment where we build an e-commerce platform around it as well as digital marketing to really drive that motion around cloud and services in those three solutions areas," he said.

"It is about people. We want to have solution sales specialists who are capable of joining our team to drive that relevant discussion with key stakeholders in businesses. Then it is investing in the professional service delivery organisation. Our intention is to go into an as-a-service world and to deliver that as-a-service to our clients. So we need to have the tool sets in order to do that."

The hiring drive will be made across Insight's 10 key countries in Europe, according to Ebermann, who claimed that finding talent in a market with a well-documented skills shortage will be challenging.

"That is what keeps me awake at night right now," he said.

"This is a huge opportunity but these are not your classic reseller people who do order taking, these are solutions specialists capable of selling value to stakeholders in businesses. Then you need to have a professional services delivery organisation which can take the deal and land with the client, then you need a managed service operation where you support the IT department in managing those new solutions.

"This is a skill set which is not that easy to find. They are out there, but we are in competition with everyone else."

The recruitment drive comes a little more than a year after Insight underwent a $3.5m restructure in Europe to tackle inefficiencies in its operations. At the time, the firm claimed its European business would see financial benefits from the restructure in the second half of 2017.

Yet Insight's Q4 results last year saw operating profit fall sharply, by 23 per cent, to $7.1m.

But 2018 has seen a welcome turnaround of fortunes for Insight's European business, which for the first six months of the year grew revenues by 19 per cent to $736m and earnings from operations by 74 per cent to $21.46m.

Services made up 10 per cent of Insight's revenues in the first six months of 2018.

"Fundamentally, the channel and the IT market needs to change. If we want to believe IT is the enabler to drive business outcomes and make companies digital ready, we cannot stay on course to do only transactional, classic procurement business," Ebermann said.

The EMEA boss also weighed in on SoftwareONE, one of Insight's biggest software licensing competitors, announcing plans to acquire its rival Comparex. He said the deal reminds him of when HP acquired Compaq in 2002.

"It is basically two companies that have a strength and core DNA in software licensing coming together. It is a scale approach in the traditional licensing way," he explained.

"It is a good scale acquisition, but they need to integrate that now. There is overlap; you gain clients, but you have a lot of overlap, and you have systems you need to merge. I don't think this is going to be a very easy integration."