210 – How Does the Union of Two Remarkable Tech Titans Redefine the Category?

Dee Burger & Tony Safoian Join Ultimate Partner®

In this episode, I’m joined by two remarkable leaders and friends. Dee Burger is the President of Insight North America, and Tony Safoian is the CEO of SADA Systems, a Google Partner of the Year for many years.

Both Dee and Tony have been guests before on Ultimate Partner. Tony was one of our first guests seven years ago and was an inspiration to start the podcast. He is also one of only two six-timers on this podcast.

Listen as Dee and Tony share the story of their first encounter and why they came together.

We also discuss this incredible transformation: AI, Marketplace, Security, and the power of Microsoft and Google’s services. Plus, gain exclusive insights into partnering with the tech giants and other partners.

What You’ll Learn 

1. Tech industry transformation and partnership strategies. (0:02)

2. Business growth and culture alignment. (2:03)

3. The merger of Insight and SADA. (4:06)

4. Transforming the reseller industry with a new business model. (11:56)

5. AI-driven commerce and marketplaces. (21:15)

6. AI, security, and Google’s services. (25:35)7. Partnering with Google Cloud and Insight. (29:53)

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Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Summary Keywords

customers, years, partner, google, insight, work, microsoft, market, technology, ai, organisations, great, biggest, incredible, strategy, talk, marketplace, ag1

Vince Menzione 0:02 

Welcome to The Ultimate Partner. I’m Vince menzi own and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through a successful partner. I have the great privilege of being here on site in Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re inside enterprises is hosting amplify 2020 for its annual sales and partner conference for an incredible interview with two amazing leaders and friends. D Berger is North American president of insight and a previous guest on Ultimate Partner and Tony Savoy in the CEO of sada and insight company, and a five timer on this podcast, inside acquired sought on December 1 of 2023. A move de and Tony say turn their combined capabilities into a multi cloud powerhouse, as Insight has long been a top provider of Microsoft Solutions, while sada is the global Google Cloud Partner of the Year, multiple years. Gentlemen, I’m so excited about our discussion today.

Dee Burger 1:02

Thanks for having us. Thanks

Vince Menzione 1:03

for having us. Excited to spend time with both of you. I have a long history working with both of your organization’s going back to my days at Microsoft, in fact, a lot of time here in Scottsdale, and Tempe within sight, and of course many years working with SATA back in my earliest days. So I’m so excited to exclusively feature you here for this conversation today. Appreciate that. So first, we’ve seen this incredible transformation in our $5 trillion tech industry for more than a decade. First, the transformation to the cloud. And then the acceleration we’ve seen these last few years. I call it the tectonic shifts, both of your firm’s were on the forefront inside has been the most transformative of the large partners working with Microsoft. And SATA has been referred to as both a born in the cloud partner back in the days when I worked with you, Tony, and has pivoted the business to become the most successful partner in the Google ecosystem. I was wondering if you could share your perspectives on what we’ve been seeing in these last few years.

Tony Safoian 2:02

First of all, I want to say being a five timer. Kinda like on Saturday Night Live. I expect the jacket it’s in the mail with a firearm or jacket on it, because I know it’s quite a privilege. Vince, thank you. This is the sixth time Tony it is so like we’re just gonna get racking up the numbers until we’re gonna put all the jacket bars on. Yeah, I mean, it’s an incredible next chapter for us. Obviously, everything I’ve done for the last 23 and a half years has been creating best in class best in breed, I’ve been very focused on uneven in the playing field that every opportunity that you can grab, because like who wants to compete on an even playing field, like you know, who wants to be generic? I think speciality niches, scale, customer incumbency, being on the forefront is just so much more fun. And coming together in a way that was almost serendipitous is an incredible thing for our customers, and an incredible thing for our partners. And I have to say these my new boss. And he’s he’s awesome. I don’t have to say that I say that because it’s true. And the culture is what really matters as Joyce reminds us all the time d reminds us all the time. And you know, that is going to be the foundation of what allows us to make the most of this opportunity. And, you know, everything that I was hoping for, you know, prior to coming together is even more true now that being on the inside, but not just the DEA and the Joyce level. The executive team but everyone we’ve met hear the hundreds of people we’ve met at at amplify our first amplify it’s the same at every level. So this is a great launchpad for 2024 and beyond. And

Tony Safoian 4:05

our vantage point you watching the market change, you know tech 2023 was a tough year for the industry. There was there’s a lot of absorption from overbuying, and 21 and 2022. And a lot of different segments. But technology keeps firing away. Right technology is marching forward. Gen AI is changing a lot of things. But all the things we were talking about just a year ago, cloud cybersecurity data, they’re all there. And our job is to help customers take all that and take advantage of it. Like so their businesses are better, as we kind of thought through what what led us here today. You have to be multicloud to succeed in that world. You know, we’d love the partnership with Microsoft and Microsoft is right there on the leading edge taking the world forward to so as Google and if we start with the idea, we’ve got to be great for our customers. We felt we had to be multicloud Absolutely

Vince Menzione 5:00

brilliant move strategically. So I’ve been chronicling this rising dominance of the hyper scalars. And I think a lot of people don’t recognise the level of dominance, right? If you look at the data centres, the chips and the data centres, and the infrastructure and the go to market strategies, right, and securing large commitments from organisations at the C suite level, right, buyers are making decisions in the lines of business. But the C suite is where these large commitments are happening. And they’re estimating now that they’re about $340 billion in durable cloud budgets amongst the top three, was this a consideration for the move going forward?

Tony Safoian 5:41

I like how he says it, and I don’t want to steal his thunder. So I’ll let him describe the strategy because I think it’s he says it really well. Well,

Dee Burger 5:47

I think, no doubt, right, no doubt. So if you look at the investment, people are making the hyper scalars. Now, who would have thought, you know, 10 years ago that three companies were going to own a such a significant part of the infrastructure of the whole world. Everything happens in the cloud. Everything happens in the cloud. And again, back to our job is to be great for our customers, and whatever they need to do. We have to be relevant in those areas. Yeah.

Vince Menzione 6:14

So let’s talk about the merger. How did this all come together?

Dee Burger 6:19

We had to separate we had two separate pathways, don’t you start with your pathway, I’ll add mine will tell you how they came together. A couple of years ago, it became apparent to us that we need we needed to do something seismic, to continue to be able to grow at the level of trajectory and capacity and evolution that our customers and the market was demanding of us. Every one of our peers had done things way, way, way earlier in their journey than we had. And we were getting to a point where, you know, being broad and deep in this ecosystem, in itself was not, you know, sufficient to serve the needs of our customers and a evolving strategy of more customer centricity customers are asking us to be in more markets, that was very hard to do organically, they were asking us to be more comprehensive, which is hard for us to do organically, like, oh, we wish you could do the Microsoft stuff or wish you could do the, you know, the 50,000 store location work that we want, like, what we just couldn’t do that. So we looked at tonnes of options, kiss a lot of frogs looked at, you know, private equity and all this, you know, just essentially every option, including every strategic option. And it wasn’t really up until I started seeing Insite kind of show up at the big Google Events. And I was like, insights here that it even came sort of to the forefront of my mindset that this could be a potential destination. But as we started looking at it closer and closer, I was like, Oh, my God, they’re, they’re just like us. You know, they believe in the magic of products and services and solutions coming together. They are on their own transformational journey. They have the best incumbency of any potential strategic partner that we could ever dream of. And they are amazing people.

Tony Safoian 8:18

Tell him the restaurant where the name of the restaurant where you got the whole thing started. verse, verse,

Dee Burger 8:24

yeah, so So this is an interesting story. I know. It’ll be where the thing culminates. So different for me, you know? So I came to Insight summer of 2022. And we talked a lot about m&a. Joyce’s new into the CEO role, we talked about the different things we needed to build over the course of time. The fundamental idea is we touch a lot of customers. And we need to do more and more for those customers. Our mission is to do more and more, be more and more valuable doing more and more things. And started down the path of what are the most we historically have been close to infrastructure? So what are the infrastructure adjacent sorts of things, businesses to get in, we came up with a list. Being multicloud was the first thing we really wanted to do. And so I called a good friend of mine at Google, who will remain nameless, but senior guy at Google and said, We gotta get into Google. We’ve got to figure out a way to do a job there who is out there to buy and it took three seconds SATA. And so we started down this path. We then were contacted through Tony’s banker on Project verse happens to be the same name of the restaurant that they they got started in. We’ve met a bunch we had Tony out to Arizona with with his full team, we sell very much same thing like a fit. It doesn’t help to buy a company that is strategically aligned. That just won’t work. It just doesn’t work in your culture and insights gotta very culture really comes first. It had to fit. We saw the fit together. Tony and I talk because actually at one of these events, Tony, I had a call with Tony, I went out to the lobby, it was at our event called mastery that we do for our technology, or most technical professionals. And we talked and said, let’s figure out how to do this. And we spent three months we worked it out. And then the closing dinner, going back to verse was at the very restaurant that Tony got started November 30, the night before December 1 with Tony and his family and his team. It was really a great event.

Vince Menzione 10:26

That is fantastic. What a great story. You know, this reminds me of this conversation, I think about both of your organization’s is really being categories of one. Alright. And Tony, and I’ve had a lot of conversations about his strategy. I know it very well. I feel like insights been the other company as well, that has thought about this holistically. And you know, it’s interesting, because I spent almost 10 years in the Microsoft world, right? And I know that Microsoft and the others as well. Like to fit you into buckets, right? You’re either an ISP, or you’re an SI, or you’re a large scale partner. But it seems that you are redefining your category. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Dee Burger 11:10

Yeah, I’ll start. It was great. We just had Danica Patrick out. And she actually gave the answer. I’m going to quote for this, which was good. You know, they asked her if she had idols when she was going up. And she said, No, she wanted, she wanted to be the best her very much the way we think about it, you know, we are trying to build a business that we don’t believe currently exists. You know, when you think about a client and how hard it is, with a vast array of technology out there, how do you choose? How do you purchase? How do you implement? How do you manage? How do you transform that that whole cycle, we think we’re better positioned to help our customers do that, against the fastest evolving technology industry we’ve ever seen. And it’s only going to get faster.

Tony Safoian 11:56

No, it’s completely right. I mean, we’ve been talking to anybody who would listen and you’re an expert in this area, but it’s like you’ve covered channels, partnerships, ecosystems, you’ve worked in it, you’ve covered it for years, you know, like the traditional tendency to put us in like little buckets, right? Like, oh, like, they’re a reseller. And though they’re an SI and they’re no, they’re an RSI, no, they’re NSP? No, they’re an LSP. It’s like just make up random acronyms and pigeonhole. Listen to, you know, traditionally, the one thing we’ve done well, well, you know, I think cloud has changed what customers need us to do, and has forced us to change our own business models, because like, you can’t just like buy a bunch of software from you know, vendor A, and then hire vendor bcde and hope that they implemented well, it just doesn’t work for customers, and it doesn’t work for us in our business model. So and we were both built that way. And we’re on these independent journeys, bring it together just supercharged charges at all we can think of a good name inside had had. So we’re just using there’s like we are the leading solutions integrator, and creating new categories is hard. So you know, Noreen, and Hillary are gonna have a hell of a time making it roll off of everyone’s tongue over the next two years. But that’s what we expect a new category, our own quadrant, we are one of one of solutions integrator,

Vince Menzione 13:20

I love solutions integrator, I think it speaks volumes for what’s been missing, right. And we’ve, I’ve had these conversations, you have independent software vendors that do one thing, you have transactional partners that do another thing you have SI is that come and build on top of it. And if you’re lucky, they’re not si ‘s that are going to basically want to be there forever, right? You want to you want to get to the end result. And I think that’s exactly clearly what you’re saying, stating, you’re doing here for customer with the customer in mind and customer focus.

Dee Burger 13:47

Absolutely. So I think about it, you know, from the standpoint that the the reseller industry was ultimately set up as a way to sell salespeople to partners. Right, the history was set up that way, he had all kinds of OEMs somebody figured out, Hey, we should consolidate the supply chain. Somebody else said, All right, it’s really hard for all these people to get to all these customers. So the reseller industry came about, and economics worked that way. The emphasis ultimately worked that way. We’re starting in an entirely different place. So there are a whole position in the way we’re going to transform is you start with the customer. And you become very valuable to your partners by virtue of the value that you have for customers. So it’s a it’s a big flip. Okay,

Tony Safoian 14:36

it’s all about business model, incentive alignment, right? If you’re just selling, you care about selling as much as the customer will buy. If you’re just servicing. You want to be as slow as possible to implement the salvages before you get fired. You basically are aiming for a c plus, that’s right, right. But if you own the whole value chain, you want to you want them to buy X exactly what’s gonna solve their problem. And you want to implement it as efficiently as possible. So you can point to that value. And then when the next project and the next workload and the next, you know, strategic implementation, we want to be there forever, for different reasons, right? Not because we want, we’re going as slow as possible, we want to be there by earning the right to be there over and over again. And that’s kind of how we built our business from day one. I remember like managed services, which is a great endpoint for where we want all of our solutions to end up for the right reasons. But the reason we won in like 2000 to 2003 is like, we had an agreement you can get out of in 30 days. And I think that just creates a different culture. It does. And again, the customer knowing with comfort, at the end of the day, that they’re, you’re gonna wrap your arms around them. And this way, I see

Dee Burger 15:46

Yeah, and we’re not successful unless we can point to business outcomes. So this level of incentive alignment, as a business model just really has not existed. So we’re going to just maximise that and lean on that. And the market will realise, you know, the trades will realise, but most importantly, our customers will just understand that, like, just working with insight is is a different experience.

Vince Menzione 16:11

So what an incredible event you’re hosting here, right? You’ve had some of the leaders in the industry here. I mean, we could talk about some of the names. We we had Kevin Pisgah, on stage, who was co hosting my event been a podcast guest as well, Michael Clark

Tony Safoian 16:25

got some good dance moves.

Vince Menzione 16:26

He is He is a low energy. He’s incredible. And Michael Clark as well. Yeah, from Google, to people that I admire and have worked with over the years. How should each of these tech giants think differently? And what unique value are you ultimately delivering as a solutions integrator to the market, but more importantly, to the customer?

Tony Safoian 16:46

Michael Clark said it best I think Google strategy is clearly a partner attached to every opportunity, every customer, every pursuit, every workload, 100% partner attach, it is paramount in our strategy, because, again, consumption economics, this stuff doesn’t just like light up itself. And I think that’s an important realisation and an important benefit to the channel. An enterprise is different, and I think it took Google maybe a few years to figure it out. But, you know, I don’t care if you have the best technology in the world. Unless you have a channel, you have partners, you have a strategy that includes them. The last mile is where the value is. So I think that multi year transformation, Google’s realise, going from a consumer mindset to an enterprise mindset, again, plays completely to our strengths. And no partner in the world can provide more parts of the value chain of how the best Google technology lands and produces outcomes for customers than this combination. And so I think, again, we’ve created an uneven playing field, it looks really good on paper. Now we get to go execute it post amplify, which is the big Launchpad of, of really sada and Google landing and insight and sort of a TEDx sort of way. So we got to go execute now and and prove it out.

Dee Burger 18:13

And I think that’s very much the case, you know, back to the question of how they should be thinking about us. It is about execution. So the, of course, Microsoft and Google are phenomenal partners. But we got many more partners, and amplify attendees we had, I had a slide on this represent roughly a third of the value of all the businesses in the United States. That’s our that’s our partner crew. They’re making unbelievable technology. Our job is to make it work for customers to be in there to drive value with customers and then to work backwards to what how do you assemble the right the right set of things, that that’s what we’ve got to do.

Vince Menzione 18:50

I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago, athletic greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson that’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson, check them out. No, you had Kevin on stage and I’ve been talking to him about this SMC business that he manages at Microsoft. I mean, the numbers are astounding. People don’t realise that mid market is really, you know, everybody clusters towards the top to the enterprise, but this mid market is really untapped. Up to under Services underserved. And being able to again, I think your model is really effective in that mid market, which, by the way, it’s it’s $100 billion opportunity for even a Microsoft. So I just think that what you’re doing there specifically, it really hits home in terms of the market penetration.

Dee Burger 20:18

No question. So so if you think about the numbers we are, in our calculation, we do work with about 70% of all the businesses in United States that have $100 million in revenue or more, we do at least $1. Right. So it’s kind of a I’ve been in the system integrator world for a very long time before coming here. Those models are heavy. And you can you can land that model and about 500 customers. We can we can land our model at a much broader we have 29 That actually was sought, I haven’t done a recount. First of all, the 70% held Prasad his base, which was interesting about 70% of thought his base, and so it was already working with, but another 1000. So let’s just say we’re at 30,000 customers now, there’s a lot of things you can

Vince Menzione 21:00

do. Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s 11,000, I’m going to use my what I know, I think around 11,000 enterprise, and maybe it’s 38 or 35,000, mid market customers, and just sort of that you see the market pet potential is enormous. I mean, look,

Tony Safoian 21:15

we have a total of what 230 field people Yeah, like, we’d love to use our two to 3000, to be able to get to these customers. And by the way, the E commerce platform, we’ve never been able to be transactional how customers start, especially at scale. So we’re going to work with Rob and everybody else on the Google side with the API integration. We want customers to be able to buy and start however they want. And, you know, I love the ambition of creating also the best commerce experience on the website. And Google has never been able to deliver their products like that through through any channel, right on their own website, you can kind of try and buy in that kind of stuff. But that opportunity to reach 1000s of more customers globally through the commerce platform is something we’re going to definitely worked to integrate starting this year. But again, their reach is phenomenal. And we could never get that URL.

Vince Menzione 22:12

Glad you talked about law call ecommerce, we’ll call that transaction marketplaces, in fact, is the terminology we’ve been using to talk about what’s going on again, the three hyperscalers. Leaning in here, Microsoft just leaned in a big way this year, AWS was sort of in lead role before that Google’s also doing some significant moves into marketplace, huge opportunity. Canalis says, we’ll do $45 billion by the end of this year 80% through the hyperscalers through marketplaces, that the experience the buying experience is happening now the millennial generation not wanting to talk to salespeople, they want to go online, they want to click three times and have a box show up. Right. That’s the way we’ve gotten we’ve gotten indoctrinated this way. What do you think now about marketplaces in their role? And how are you addressing that?

Tony Safoian 23:00

I think all 80% of all enterprise software will be bought this way in about three years. So and it’s not only a you know, millennial procurement, I don’t want to talk to people construct as is even more drivers in that there’s there’s legal, there’s commercial, there’s contracting, there’s the economic benefits that are just too powerful, you know, everybody’s biggest contract is their main hyper scalar, contract, one or two or three, of course, I’m gonna push as much as I can, right and to get those benefits. So we play a critical role to add value to those transactions to package those things a little differently. And, you know, Adobe, Cisco, you know, Teradata, like with like, all these companies, right, like, we are going to be that last mile for them to, and I think onus is on us to create, you know, a value beyond just a transaction there. But Google realises, you know, this the work that dyes is doing to resell enable every part of this value chain. We’re gonna play a bigger role than ever before, in a weird way, but it’s true.

Vince Menzione 24:06

Any anything else you’d like to add?

Dee Burger 24:07

Totally, totally agree. I mean, we are looking at it as sort of a fact of life the way it’s gonna go. And we’re building our business around around that outcome. I

Vince Menzione 24:14

think it’s brilliant. I think it’s a brilliant strategy. You talked about AI a little bit you touched on AI, and we can’t have a conversation today in 2024. Without really diving in here, right? Last year was was in credibly insightful say, right, Microsoft comes in with their partnership. Google responds, right, both organisations, you look at market valuations, pretty significant growth for both companies this year. I think a lot of it was attributed to AI, I would say, What are your thoughts on delivering on the AI promise? I

Dee Burger 24:46

mean, I think the first part is the tools blow you away every time you see him. And even if you look once a week, they’ve moved so far, so we’re so so early. Everybody’s experimenting with it. Not that many people are finding direct value other than in the wild, that stunning sort of thing. You can get great pictures and things. Our job is to ultimately drive that value. Our job is to create the connection between. It’s almost, you know, I started my career, long time ago when I wrote a dinosaur to work and we focused on reengineering. Right? It was a big reengineering as don’t automate, obliterate and whoever the guy is that did reengineering. We’re going to enter a new era of AI driven, reengineering. And it comes down to how do you orient the business differently to use these tools?

Vince Menzione 25:35

You have me thinking the Flintstones there for a second?

Tony Safoian 25:39

pedal power? Battle power? Yeah. I mean, look, we saw Jensen on stage, we saw Pat on stage, Google with Gemini, Microsoft with copilot and, you know, the opening I partnership, etc. I mean, is there is there a more comprehensive destination for your AI execution strategy, whether you’re, you know, building models, you need a bunch of computing power or processing power the chips, or, you know, you’re deploying them through the, you know, the best prebuilt multimodal models on the planet like inside, literally has, has all of it, which is incredible. And that optionality for the base of customers is great. The bet the biggest gift to Google was the launch of Chad GPT. It unleashed the giant that has invented literally invented transformers and a lot of this technology that’s running, you know, the foundational technology for everything that’s going on. So Gemini, you know, one, Gemini 1.5. Microsoft’s not stopping, they’re not stopping. So, you know, I’m actually very, very optimistic that I think that this is going to create way more jobs and it changes. And I believe in humans plus AI, and, you know, listened to, you know, a lot of various podcasts, I think we’re going to enter a decade of the biggest economic growth in history. And I think there’s certain markets that are at an advantage to this, North America is certainly one of them, and there are others. But I think it’s our decade, and thank God for, you know, this huge leap in evolution at a time where we feel like we needed the most, right, like, so. Thank you. Thanks, open AI. Thanks, everybody. And we’re in a tremendous position to help our customers do exactly that.

Vince Menzione 27:35

And as we talked about the importance of the hyper scalars, layering in this AI component makes it even more critical, right? Yeah, it’s incredible. So another topic that’s on everyone’s minds these days is security. Right? We have we’ve all experienced in one form or another, I’m sure you’ve had many clients. It’s a real issue. And it continues to be an issue. And I know insight is focused incredibly well in the security space. Wanted to spend a moment here with you d to explain your position. And what insight is doing uniquely here? Well,

Dee Burger 28:09

we’re doing a few things. Again, American keep it in the same thing. We are really driving it through incident response. How do you help customers prevent it? But then how do you how do you respond to it, one of the very unique things about insight is our technical depth. We’ve been able to help multiple clients, in case studies you can never use when they’re in a very bad position. By being able to bring the level of expertise and programme management to get them out of it. We’ve got all the normal security businesses and sell security software. And we do you know, some of the pentesting there’s different types of things. But our real focus on that is to get really good at helping clients when they’re in hot water. Back to the start with client value. Go help a client be valuable forever. No transact

Dee Burger 28:58

security is one of the fastest growing parts of what we do in services, both professional and soon to be managed services. Google with chronicle with beyond Corp with reCAPTCHA with their general security posture across GCP. Google workspace identity, I think Google has one of the strongest security stories on the planet. Mandiant acquisition obviously put an exclamation point on that. In 2020, for many, it essentially is being rolled into Google proper. So again, by being an insight customer, you have access to all of that. And we’re going to leverage your scale your sock operations to bring that Google layer Google services Google capabilities to to all of our joint customers as well. And it is not it’s one of the areas that has, you know, experienced zero budget cuts in terms of customer investment.

Vince Menzione 29:53

So this is the Ultimate Partner. We talk about partnering and obviously you are a pinnacle partner and both of you are Pinnacle partners in Europe. On right, and now together just this massive power, power force for our industry, but you also work with other organisations, right? We talk about customers, and we talk about other partners. So is hoping for our listeners and viewers, what is your perspective? And what would you say to them now to optimise for success working with your organisation,

Dee Burger 30:21

you know, we are, again, we’re gonna be customer first, right? And we’re gonna be really, really valuable to our customers, sorry, to our partners, because we understand our customers context. And we can help position their solutions and their technologies and wages going to be valuable. Going way past the idea of let’s just tell them everything we can make it useful, make it valuable, make it long term. And so the partnerships that are going to work best for us are people that can work with us to ultimately contextualise their technology to make it useful to make it valuable. And that’ll be our continued focus.

Vince Menzione 30:59

Tony, from your perspective, working with other partners? 

Tony Safoian 31:02

Look, I think, again, you know, two years ago, we were you know, we only sold what Google sold. And now we have 4050 plus marketplace enabled ISVs that really round out the ceiling of the solution set inside has 6000 others that we are figuring out and merging in some strategies and you know, going sort of focused in other strategies to this point, and you know, Sandy coming in as our CRO year and a half ago, really reoriented, again, exactly the way that he talks about a Joyce talks about it. We got to lead in our customers. Sandy has a slide she showed this week to our own team said when I first came in, I was interviewing customers are like, their response was like, What do you think it’s not, you know, how they’re like SAT is extremely accessible and responsive. But not top of mind. You know, and I think that’s a problem, right? So we got to all orient ourselves such that we become indispensable to our customers that they think of insight, insight, SATA, SATA all the time, because we’re in there, and we’re adding value, we’re part of their strategic planning, we’re part of their budget planning, we’re part of their security strategy planning, were part of their, you know, helping them prep for board meetings, like we just got to be in there. And, and the PullThru will come and the customer relationship will grow. We were both challenged with and again, varying degrees of success and different customers. But the likes to say like, you know, we do $1 with, you know, X percent of customers, but many of them is just $1. And for us to it’s like we have some of the biggest customers biggest companies in the world for which we do one thing. And that’s terrible, right? Because that’s how they think of us and the only way they think of us. So we’ve got a lot of work to do jointly to change that. Obviously, this coming together helps. We want we want a significant amount of their love attention, mindshare, wallet share, but in a way that earns it every day. I

Vince Menzione 33:12

know you both work with ISPs, independent software vendors, I think about you both as being superhighways to the customer for those organisations in many respects. For partners that want to lean in with you, what should they do next?

Tony Safoian 33:26

I think new partnerships, to that degree are are hard. Insight has a great platform for onboarding those, I think we’re going to adapt that platform. But I think it’s about solving a unique problem that fits into a solution pillar. And is hopefully if not marketplace enabled today, let us help you do that we do great. We have great services around marketplace enablement for new ISPs that are not on those marketplaces. And then you have to, you know, make the economics work, which isn’t, which isn’t that hard, and then bring customers with you. I mean, that always helps. You know,

Tony Safoian 34:04

it’s simple. You want to do it. Let’s talk about a customer.

Vince Menzione 34:09

Well, I want to thank you both. This has been a real privilege to be in the room with both of you and hear the story about how you came together two amazing individuals and friends. And I want to thank you for spending time with our viewers and listeners. Any closing thoughts going into 2024? Through 2024, that you’d like to share with this group of listeners and viewers?

Tony Safoian 34:29

Well, first and foremost, thank you. So great to be back on talking about, you know, completely different trajectory. I think last time we spoke this is not on the table at all. And and you know, I don’t want to, you know, overstate this at all, but I don’t think I can like, honestly think this combination is it’s the biggest thing to have happened to Google Cloud, probably in the history of Google Cloud as far as partnerships go. Inside. It just made the biggest investment anyone’s ever made in entering the Google Cloud ecosystem that’s a compliment to Google a compliment to sada but also, of course, you know, insights vision, and it’s one of the biggest things have happened in the ecosystem period when you know, when a when a 40 year old company says, you know, I want to start a new practice they don’t say like that I’m typically say, I want to be number one tomorrow. And, you know, that’s what insights done. But thank you for this platform vents, keep doing what you’re doing a really an important part of our community.

Vince Menzione 35:28

You know, I think about executive commitment and closing, and this was extreme executive commitment. On behalf of both organisations coming together. I want to thank our viewers and listeners for joining Ultimate Partner to amazing leaders, D Berger, Tony Sivan, and the insight team. So great to have you both. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Vince. Thank you.

Vince Menzione 35:53

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partner