When John Dathan became Insight Canada’s senior vice-president and general manager more than a year ago, he was eager to bring some of the company’s more advanced capabilities from the U.S. into Canada.
After completing the $581 million acquisition of PCM last week, Insight is poised to do just that, he said, going from a value added reseller to a well-rounded global solutions provider.
“I thought to myself, ‘how do we develop those capabilities in Canada?’” he told Channel Daily News after the deal closed. “The acquisition of PCM accelerates that journey significantly.”
It’s a big deal for Insight overall, but the deal has the potential to leave an even greater impact on the Canadian business, explained Dathan. Not only does it boost Insight Canada’s revenue by 75 per cent, it helps them develop a real national presence by nearly tripling Insight’s workforce in the region with approximately 200 service delivery teammates, and adding a physical presence in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.
The three main services-led areas of tech Insight is pursuing are the connected workforce – anything to do with a device – cloud and data centre transformation, and digital innovation. Dathan said he’s surprised at how quickly application development is growing in the small to medium-sized business environments.
“What’s also important here is the style of development that’s happening in Canada. Businesses are moving away from traditional application development to a more agile one,” he said, meaning businesses no longer have to wait months to deploy a new service through an application. That process can happen much faster now, and developers can respond to feedback much faster as well.
Stratiform, a small Canadian consulting company acquired by PCM in 2017, will play a significant role in this services-led approach, said Dathan. Stratiform, now part of PCM, is an industry-leading provider of cloud solutions specializing in Microsoft Azure that provides consulting, professional, and managed services to clients across Canada.
“There are a large number of clients saying I want someone to take this away from me so I can focus on the core business. That’s where we see this market heading,” he said.
Two of the hardest things to do in the IT industry is add capabilities and grow an accessible client base, according to Helen Johnson, chief financial officer for Insight North America.
“I think this move helps us signficantly with the second point, and gives us a deep reach into a new set of clients that we don’t interact with much today,” she said.