This article is more than 1 year old

Enormo reseller Insight hires former Cisco man to run EMEA services

Old world tech supplier to spin up cloudy biz

Insight EMEA claims to have taken a step forward on the long and winding path to tech services glory by recruiting a former Cisco and PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting chief to head up a newly erected division.

A pan-regional services team will be fronted by newly installed veep Rolf Adam, who mostly recently served as industry sales director for the energy, manufacturing and transport verticals at Cisco across EMEA and Russia.

Regional president Wolfgang Ebermann, told us the Insight newbie will manage a team of 100 services sales people, and oversee a Partner Services Alliance Programme (PSAP).

“There are more elements [to come] that I am unable to talk about,” he told The Channel, hinting at details on vendor recruitment and the types of services it will offer will emerge in the next month or so.

Colt is the first PSAP entrant, but this trading partnership was already formed back in February when Insight agreed to resell its IP VPN access, vCloud services and cloud storage services including back-up and disaster recovery.

Beyond IaaS, Insight provides some consultancy in the UK and Netherlands for Microsoft customers that want to move from an on-premise licensing model to the cloud, but will roll out that model across Europe, said Eberrman.

“We want to scale that [across other countries],” he said.

Ebermann reiterated that IT sellers on the front line need to address perceptions among some customers that technology is a cost centre rather than a strategic asset, and cloud is a tool that can be used to do this, he reckons.

The challenge for Insight and other resellers is to keep its classic on-premise business spinning while winning over more customers that are keen to pay for and consume technology as they would any utility.

Adam has a job of work ahead of him: in calendar Q2 IT services accounted for just two per cent of Insight’s overall revenues in EMEA. That said, cloud market adoption is in its infancy, so in theory there is plenty of runway for firms like Insight. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like