Women in the IT Channel: Carmela Orlando

Carmela Orlando has two roles at Insight. One is to be the public face of the Canadian Enterprise, based in Montreal. Her second role is the senior vice-president at Insight North America, an IT solution providing powerhouse that carries more than 200,000 products and services for customers in Canada and the U.S.

Click here to view Part One of our Women in the IT Channel slideshow.

Click here to view Part Two of our Women in the IT Channel slideshow.

Despite the fact that its parent company is one of the biggest direct market resellers in the U.S., Insight Canada was unable to crack the Top 10 in CDN’s Top 100 Solution Provider rankings. In a matter of just five years, Orlando grew the business to the point where it reached the No. 2 spot on the Top 100 list in 2007. After climbing the ranks of senior management at the company, Orlando was named GM of Insight Canada. at the age of 40. Before that, she spent more than a decade at distributor Merisel Canada, which was led by Sue Miller. Orlando left Merisel as a high-ranking North American vice-president of sales when the distributor was acquired by Synnex Corp. in 2001.

At Insight, Orlando understood that the Tempe, Ariz.-based company needed to be local and go beyond just product fulfillment if she was going to take it to the next level. Her plan was to spread account services across the country and give them the technical resources and expert knowledge necessary for all areas of IT.

The strategy worked and this move launched Insight Canada to the No. 6 position in the CDN Top 100 Solution Provider rankings for 2005, and eventually the No. 2 overall position.

Then came the Software Spectrum acquisition. From a Canadian standpoint, Orlando told CDN that the deal completed the company she wanted to build from the outset of taking the job back in 2002.

“We wanted to be a trusted advisor, and for me trust is a word that equates with expertise. We have a strong hardware position and we dominate in the mid-market, but we did not have a strong presence in the enterprise space. (Software Spectrum Canada) really fit the bill from a software expertise perspective and they straddled both the enterprise and mid-markets. They were a shoe-in,” Orlando said in a previous interview.

Follow Paolo Del Nibletto on Twitter: @PaoloCDN.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Paolo Del Nibletto
Paolo Del Nibletto
Former editor of Computer Dealer News, covering Canada's IT channel community.

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