Small steps take people to bigger changes, and Insight Enterprises is one such example. Insight Enterprises is an Arizona-based technology company, which started as a computer storage sellers and turned into one of the largest business-to-business IT service providers in the world. The company specializes in B2B commercial and public sector IT solutions and have been offering its services to its global customer base for the past 33 years. The company is best known for its direct marketing strategy of selling brand-name microcomputers, peripherals, and software through the catalogue, phone, and Internet.
About the Company
Since Insight Enterprises is a B2B service provider, its services include helping organizations manage their resources and be future-ready. The company provides its hardware and software solution to big enterprises and expertise in spanning cloud, IoT, managed services, etc. Insight Enterprises have helped many industry leaders and has established its offices in 19 different countries across the globe.
Insight Enterprises currently is serving in various industrial sectors, including construction, enterprise business, finance, retail and manufacturing, etc. The major field of work of the company includes data centre, devices, servers, software, licensing, Power, Storage, IT Services, etc. As per the 2019 records, Insight Enterprises earned annual revenue of $7.73 billion and around 11000 people working at its global offices.
The Back History of Insight Enterprises
Two brothers and then college students, Eric Crown and Tim Crown founded Hard Drives International in 1986 with a cash advance of $2000 from a credit card in a rented 100 square feet of office space. The company started as a computer storage selling business, where the customer could place their orders through mails. The two were successful at selling hard drives at a lower price and eventually, made a $20,000 profit in the first year of their company.
In 1988, they renamed the company Drives International to Insight Direct and chose magazine ads and toll-free telephone lines to sell mass storage products. The founders changed the name of the company to Insight Enterprises in 1991 and started to sell computers and their accessories, by investing around $1.5 million each month on ads in print media. By 1993, the company had started to focus on corporate customers and launched its one-day shipping service with the name, Air Insight. During the same time, the company also started to manufacture its own products, including computers and peripheral devices, and just in 7 years of its inception, in 1995, the company had its first IPO on NASDAQ.
The International Expansion
By the year 1997, Insight Enterprises started to expand its operations overseas and acquired the Montreal based TC Computers. The next year, the company went on to acquire Choice Peripherals Ltd., Plusnet Technologies Ltd., and Force 9 in 1998, helping the company enter Europe.
The 2000s have been the years of expansion for the company, as it took over the operations of Action Computer Supplies Holdings PLC (2001) of the U.K., Comark (2002), Software Spectrum (2006), Calence LLC (2008) and Minx Ltd. (2008).
In 2015, Insight Enterprises opted to be more focused on customer relations and interaction. The company acquired Boston based company BlueMetal in the same year to expand its operations in the design and technology architectural field, and the next year, it acquired Australian-based business technology consulting company Ignia.
Insight also acquired the Minnesota-based Datalink for $11.25 per share in 2016 and purchased the Dutch cloud service provider Caase.com in 2017. In the following years, the company made major acquisitions like Cardinal Solutions (2018) and PCM, Inc. (2019).
The CEO at Insight Enterprises
Ken Lamneck is the current CEO and the president of Insight Enterprises. He completed a bachelor’s degree in Science from the United States Military Academy at West Point and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas at El Paso. Lamneck has got more than 25 years of experience in corporate.
Lamneck started his career with the U.S. Army and has been one of the contributors in the development of the software used in the army known as the Patriot Missile System. After serving the arming for five years, he joined IBM as an engineer. Later, he worked at various ranks in Arrow Electronics and was promoted to be the president of the Industrial Computer Products business of the company in 1997. In 2004, switching his job from Arrow Electronics to Tech Data Corp., Lamneck then joined Insight Enterprises in 2010 as the CEO and the President of the company.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.