According to Insight executives, supply chain constraints and a shortage of qualified talent will continue to impact the IT environment in 2022.
Insight CFO Glynis Bryan said that a big focus for the company has been on ensuring customers get the products they need.
“In the second year of the pandemic, we continued to focus on helping our clients forecast their needs and ensure that they received supply as it became available,” Bryan said.
“This led to rapid bookings and backlog levels exiting 2021. For 2022, industry analysts expect low-single-digit growth in hardware. However, in our first quarter, we’re seeing hardware bookings in North America improve double digits year over year, compared to the first quarter of 2021.”
Insight President and CEO Joyce Mullen said the company did see some price increases coming in the fourth fiscal quarter.
“We were able generally to pass those along to our clients”, Mullen said. “And I think there’s enough clarity around the supply chain constraints that customers are pretty accepting of those price increases.”
However, Mullen said that supply chain issues don’t mean reducing product shipments.
“I should note, though, when we talk about supply chain constraints, we are shipping more product than we’ve ever shipped before”, she said. “While the demand is higher than supply, we continue to ship more product than ever before. The market is responding. It’s just trying to keep up with the increased demand.”
When asked which product categories on the hardware side offer the most opportunity for Insight to gain share in the first half of 2022, Mullen said the biggest category is devices.
“We continue to focus on that sort of hybrid work environment and making sure that the productivity solutions that we offer to our clients are effective. We have a significant backlog there.”
