TechTalk Transforming the Enterprise by Consolidating Your IT Vendors
Vendor consolidation is fundamental for streamlining IT procurement processes.
By Insight Editor / 23 Jul 2020 / Topics: IT optimization Procurement
By Insight Editor / 23 Jul 2020 / Topics: IT optimization Procurement
Once you’ve leveraged vendors to enable better IT performance, the next step is optimizing those relationships. Insight Marketing Manager for Supply Chain Optimization Matt Quirk and Senior Account Executive Todd McGregor discuss how your business can engage in vendor consolidation to drive productivity and rethink procurement strategies.
To experience this week’s episode, listen on the player above, watch the conversation below, or scroll down to read a complete transcript. You can also subscribe to Insight TechTalk on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Audio transcript:
Published July 22, 2020
[Music]
MATT
Hey everybody and welcome again to another Insight TechTalk. I'm Matt Quirk, the marketing manager for the Supply Chain Optimization business here at Insight and with me today is Todd McGregor, a global account executive here. And, we're gonna talk about the importance of leveraging the opportunities in front of you around vendor consolidation…and helping to transform the enterprise by actually taking a look at streamlining your IT procurement processes. So, Todd, I love it if you could do a quick introduction of who you are and how you're currently helping clients today.
TODD
You bet, yeah, it's Todd McGregor. I've been with Insight now for 14 years and really as a sales person within Insight, my job is to help our clients to leverage technology from hardware sourcing, software sourcing, integration, maintenance and support, really to help them drive efficiency within their organizations to save money and hopefully to drive more profit for my clients.
MATT
That's awesome and that's exactly what we're here to talk about today. So, the theme, as you can see below, is transforming the enterprise by consolidating your vendors. And, sort of, a deeper dive on that is really, we're looking to help businesses operate through these unplanned changes and really thrive through those strategic IT vendor relationships and consolidation.
So, with that in mind, Todd, I know that you're doing a lot of things today trying to help clients, sort of, navigate this whole pandemic situation in many different ways, right? And I think it's important to set the stage with some of the things that people are currently experiencing from your perspective, and how we're looking at helping them from the get-go. It’s not always through the same channels, right, we're doing a couple of different things.
TODD
Yeah, and I think with the unsettled pandemic, a lot of clients who are just forced with trying to enable their employees to work remotely, right, how do we ensure that they've got the right connectivity, how do we ensure they got the right equipment, how do we ensure that they're linking in to our corporate, or their corporate system securely, right?
So, really the first couple of weeks of the pandemic was all around trying to enable our clients, leverage the technology that was available and some creative things we ended up doing is when those kind of stock and inventory started drying up because the demand's far outweighed the supply, right, we really started working with them with their corporate equipment and how can we enable that corporate equipment to work from home, you know, enabling WiFi and security and re-imaging and basically just re-engineering a lot of that equipment so that their employees could take that equipment and be productive working from home.
And then, as things have kinda settled down and people are working and they're being productive, now it's a matter of, for many companies, a lot of that budget that they had set for this year, has probably gone in most points. So how do they continue to be productive? How do they try to drive new solutions for their clients and for their customers? And, so that whole vendor consolidation piece is an area where they can look at reducing those total number of partners or vendors or OEMs that they're working more and really look to work with people like Insight that can be that single point for them. [We] help them drive efficiencies, we have our B2B solutions, we have extremely aggressive pricing.
But there're many ways that their clients are looking at, "Hey, I don't necessarily need to work with hundreds of partners.” If I can reduce that, they can gain a lot of efficiencies there – kind of improve reporting, invoicing, etc.
So those are some ways that they're able to actually maybe find some additional budget for this year and going into next year.
MATT
Yeah, I think kinda sticking with the theme of optimizing cost and looking at budgets. You know, it's one thing to look at procurement directors and director of IT, they're really focused on their own departments and divisions. Whereas, you go up a couple of levels, up to the CIO or CTO level, and they're really thinking about the strategic spend across the business and how do we actually make what we have work today and last us through any of the difficulties we've maybe had in the past couple of months – anything we might see in the short-coming future – and then how do we make sure that we're still aligning with those strategic growth initiatives that we'd already planned for 2020 but are now shifting into 2021.
So, I love what you are talking about in really helping clients that we don't have new devices necessarily, 'cause like you said supply was definitely lower than demand when this whole thing started. So, being more strategic and helping them operationalize what they had in office so that their employees could actually take at home, it's still be, remain safe by keeping the businesses and operation.
TODD
Yes.
MATT
So now, I'd love to use that as a jumping board into some of the specific cases that you've been helping clients with over the past several months throughout this whole pandemic and even maybe going back further and looking at how you helped certain clients prepare, unknowingly prepare for this sort of pandemic situation.
TODD
Yeah. Another example with the consolidation efforts of partners from my clients, where they may have in the past had certain partners or relationships with cloud providers. And they'd also worked with Insight on more of their core IT sourcing and integration support. And they’re working separately and on various timelines based on those clients, but the pandemic really consolidated that. They really needed to look and leverage those cloud solutions immediately and leverage the relationships that Insight had not only with those cloud providers but all the other OEMs and technology providers and the marketplace.
So by coming to one source or we can help do all the consulting work to help them, okay, you're at point A today, we've got a lot on-prem services but you need to leverage the cloud now because you can't get to your locations. So, we're able to quickly tie in that and do a quick app analysis, right, how quickly can we help them get from point A to point B?
So, I think being able to leverage Insight to really help them transform and get those folks immediately working and then leverage the cloud to do more of their infrastructure workloads, that was huge. For many clients, we are able to do that in a matter of weeks just, you know, pressed by the pandemic. And it's been quite a ride to say the least.
MATT
Yeah, I bet, (laughs). So, that kinda covers one of our areas that we like to talk about, vendor sprawl, making sure that we're being strategic about how we’re aligning all of the vendor relationships within our organization. I mean, we do it here at Insight. We're constantly evaluating these relationships. I'm curious now that we worked on that consolidation with a couple of clients, specifically of yours, where does that lead us and what're they looking for with that consolidation? Are they looking for reporting statistics? What's the benefit there?
TODD
Yeah, I think for many of them the immediate was need to just get their folks productive, you know, working from home. But now that they're there working, now it's a matter of managing that workload, managing the infrastructure, managing productivity – ensuring that, through the tools that we can help them implement, they're able to track that.
So, depending on the client needs, there's several solutions around that, not to get into specifics. But, part of that support that we provide is the ongoing maintenance and manageability of that environment. As their tasked with keeping their operations flowing, we can help with more of the infrastructure and back office information to ensure they've got that information and availability. So, any of those things we can do is a part of manage service to ensure that they've got Insight into that…visibility, into that. You know, really working with us to help them ensure that they can continue to operate at the highest levels.
MATT
Yeah. I love that and honestly that's one of the things that really sets, I think, us apart. Being able to provide the breadth of services – not only from our traditional business of, being able in that IT procurement space – but opening it up so that we're really that business consultant with an IT expertise and capabilities.
I think that's been really important for a lot of our clients – that were existing clients as well as new clients – that have come to us looking to solve these same challenges. Because the pandemic was non-discriminatory, it just raised havoc a little bit with pretty much everyone.
TODD
Yeah.
MATT (cont’d)
So, there're a lot of opportunities there. What do you think from the next step forward standpoint? And I know we're coming out on some different times here with the pandemic, but I think 2020, it's looked a lot different than anyone really planned for, and there's a lot of speculation on what maybe 2021 will look like. So, I'm just curious, as you're continuing to work with clients, what're you hearing, what're they asking for and how are we helping them to see that path forward?
TODD
Yeah, I think again, with the huge time crunch that we had to ensure our clients and their employees can work remotely, what's gonna be the quickest way in order to do that? And, now that things have somewhat settled in and people are working remotely and we've got real creative around those solutions, now it's about optimizing those solutions. Right? Now that there's a little bit more time to look at what was in that existing environment, things that we had to tweak in order to make things work, quite frankly is, now, is there a more optimized way to do this so it's more efficient, right?
So, for a lot of those clients, they didn't have the time to do that. They have no little bit more time to do that. So I know many of our clients are actually looking, end of this year and early into next year, is driving any more of the strategies around the optimization piece – Cloud and Data Center Transformation…continuing to do that, Digital Innovation, Connected Workforce. How do we ensure that we're making our employees as productive as possible? So, kind of those future state pieces people and my clients are starting to talk more about that, now that they have more time to do so.
MATT
Yeah, that's excellent. I think understanding that your vendor relationships are very crucial for any future growth, despite the conditions of any market or the globe, is really important for a lot of businesses. I think, in years past, we’ve maybe looked at that vendor relationship as "I just need a thing”, "I need you to get me a thing."
So, we can get you a thing but what're you actually planning for the next three to five years? And how can we help you achieve that?
TODD
Yeah.
MATT
So, I guess that's honestly a great place to end. We're right at time here. So, Todd, thank you so much for joining us for this TechTalk and if anyone who's watching is curious about Insight – what more we can offer you or even diving into that vendor consolidation message – you can check out insight.com/startsimple.
So, Todd, thank you so much.
Thank you everybody for watching and we'll be back again with another TechTalk soon.
TODD
You bet, take care.
[Music]
Marketing Manager, Supply Chain Optimization
With more than 10 years of marketing experience, Matt leads Insight’s marketing initiatives supporting the Supply Chain Optimization solution area. His team helps identify problems, introduce solutions, build great relationships and enhance the way businesses manage IT.
Sr. Account Executive, Global Sales
With more than 23 years of IT industry Account Management experience, Todd helps Global and Enterprise clients leverage technology to enable business transformation. He focuses on building meaningful connections with clients and technology partners to help their businesses run smarter.
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