Why Insight's CEO thinks that hardware's future is being 'underestimated'
Ken Lamneck explains why people are wrongly undervaluing the future importance of hardware
Insight CEO Ken Lamneck claims that the importance of hardware in digital transformation is being "underestimated", particularly when it comes to areas like internet of things (IoT).
Lamneck was speaking on an earnings call when an analyst asked him to outline how the reseller is planning to mitigate potential hardware sales declines with software and services.
However the chief exec pointed out that he expects hardware to continue to play a prominent role.
"I think one of the things that's been really, in my mind, underestimated in the whole hardware world is [that] everything that's going to be occurring with IoT at the edge," he added.
"I do believe that it's going to be a really significant driver for hardware solutions at the edge where it's not economical to do everything up in the public cloud there are latency issues so on and so forth".
Lamneck said that Insight's IoT capabilities are happening it win business with customers that would have never considered an IT solution in the days of analogue tech.
He claimed that vendors including Dell, Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are "very, very excited about what the opportunity is".
"That's an area I think that again the analysts have underestimated," he claimed.
"It's building; we see it on the frontlines. I think that will start to become in the next couple of years a pretty significant part of the hardware revenue platform.
"It's not all going to go away. It may not be the same footprint server and storage that we see today at the edge, but there'll still be a significant amount of business flowing through there."
Lamneck was speaking after Insight published its full year results, with revenue up six per cent to $7.1bn.
Sales in EMEA rose 13 per cent year on year to $1.5bn. Overall gross profit rose eight per cent to $993.7m.
Insight's share price rose over 12 per cent after the results were published.