New Insight Canada SVP and GM Reem Gedeon on Why Culture Works
Written by Ryan SzporerWriter
Ryan is proud to call Insight home, as a career-long content writer, specifically for IT. Initially having aspired to become a journalist, he pivoted to earn a business degree. He ultimately combined both passions into his chosen craft, at which he’s been honing his skills for the past 10+ years.
Corporate culture is a huge factor at Insight. So, with any new hire, especially one destined to head up Insight’s operations in Canada, it’s going to come up a great deal during the comprehensive interview process. But what sometimes gets lost in conversation is how it’s meant to ensure a mutually good fit.
When I meet with Reem Gedeon for this article, she makes it clear during our interview how much of a culture fit it was on her end. Our meeting is timely: Insight Canada recently made Forbes’ list of Canada’s Best Employers 2024. Having joined just a few months ago, she’s quick to give credit to the entire team.
She relays how clear it’s become that Insight teammates don’t just celebrate the company’s hunger, heart and harmony values — they live by them every day and use them to guide every decision. Reem believes this starts at the very top.
“What attracted me to Insight was the culture and diversity on the leadership team,” she says. “Our CEO, Joyce Mullen, is a woman. Our CFO, Glynis Bryan, is a woman. It’s the first organization I’ve seen with that representation of women in senior leadership positions. It’s clear we really do live the culture I had heard so much about heading in. What stands out as our biggest strength is the talent we have, with the right level of ambition. It’s a huge winning formula.”
Reem personifies that ambition, having proudly made good on her own drive for success. She started her IT career 28 years ago in Montreal, working for a small, local reseller. She recalls the CEO taking her under his wing, giving her the opportunity to learn from him. Thanks to his mentorship, Reem confidently volunteered to expand the company’s operations into Ontario.
“Getting that exposure and somebody to mentor you and take the time to explain things, I think it’s a two-way street,” she says. “You need to advocate for yourself. Raise your hand and ask for what you want even if it is scaring you and you've never done it before. It is truly about taking those opportunities and making them yours. That's really how my whole IT career came to be and why I moved to Toronto."
Reem’s been based in Toronto ever since but is excited to split her time back in Montreal, where Insight Canada is headquartered. After all, she sees the latter epitomizing a certain “joie de vivre,” based on the near decade she spent in town. Nevertheless, Toronto is home and where Reem started her family. She and her husband have two daughters, aged 21 and 14. For Reem, her daughters are a strong source of inspiration, further hinting at Insight being a great fit on both sides.
It’s important to me to be that role model, so that they know their potential has no limits and there are opportunities for them to seize
Beyond her current role, Reem sees Insight’s great competitive position in general as one of those opportunities. As she tells it, “There’s a great gap in the market for a provider to deliver end-to-end solutions and enable the digital transformation our clients need.”
“What differentiates us as a Solutions Integrator is our holistic portfolio of capabilities as well as our partners,” she says. “We can accelerate the whole transformation journey, making sure we’re solving clients’ business challenges and delivering business outcomes.”
A 2023 Foundry survey commissioned by Insight, The Path to Digital Transformation, showed that 84% of responding organizations were looking for a third party to plan/execute their digitization. That’s where Insight as a Solutions Integrator enters the picture.
“We have an opportunity to help organizations with the challenges and opportunities they face in their complex IT ecosystems,” she explains.
“At Insight, we help clients achieve their business outcomes by leveraging existing assets, partner platforms, our experts and innovation capabilities. We do that by creating the best experience for customers, employees and partners through data and analytics. It all lets us demonstrate proof of value faster.”
Reem has seen firsthand what a difference for the better Insight’s competitive advantage can mean, compared to a company that “just” has a wide variety of solutions/services complemented by similar expertise. The vast number of partnerships with top technology brands empowers Insight to tailor solutions to meet specific client requirements. It becomes a perfect combination of technical know-how, technology and innovation.
These are exciting times for Insight. Our Microsoft partnership has never been stronger. Insight also acquired SADA in late 2023, significantly expanding our expertise and capabilities for Google Cloud.
Meanwhile, Insight Canada recently partnered with AWS.
Altogether, clients now have access to the top three cloud providers through Insight to meet specific use cases and hit their business objectives.
“That’s huge,” says Reem. “In Canada, I can count on one hand the number of organizations that have our deep expertise, capabilities, and partnerships coupled with our reach at a local and global level. We have the coverage model to create client engagements and value touchpoints at every market segment.”
84% of organizations plan to use a third party to enable digital transformation.
“These moves truly support our ambition to be the leading Solutions Integrator in 2024 and beyond,” Reem says. “Look at where the market is going. As a leading Solutions Integrator, we will help our clients improve productivity by adopting AI digital transformation initiatives and ensuring those initiatives achieve the return on investment and the business outcomes they need.”
In 2023 Insight became one of the first organizations across the globe to test and implement Azure OpenAI at the enterprise level. Named InsightGPT, the private (and secure) instance of ChatGPT that Insight deployed, has given employees hands-on experience with generative AI, without data getting fed back into the public generative AI model.
“The use cases, the impact of how we’ve leveraged it internally to get answers faster — it’s incredible,” Reem says.
“We have a great external use case in which we’ve helped a legal client look at their contracts with generative AI so that their employees can become more efficient and dedicate their time to other tasks. We’re looking for and getting new use cases all the time.”
From an organizational perspective, multicloud and AI will inform Insight Canada’s decision-making in the future. According to Reem, focusing on multicloud will help clients move, scale and go to market faster. Automating via generative AI meanwhile has the power to augment everything businesses do — from the efficiency of their processes and the productivity of their employees to the bottom line.
With every emerging technology, there will be growing pains. In 2024, Insight will take great strides to explore AI’s governance and framework to help remove bias, according to Reem. Insight Canada will leverage its expertise in that regard to help clients create value by automating and optimizing wherever possible. It all plays into Reem’s vision for Insight Canada: to add services, solutions and capabilities and continue to grow as a Solutions Integrator.
I asked Reem what her personal goals are for 2024? In line with the corporate culture and the interview to this point, her answer has a lot to do with the well-being of others.
“What’s critical for me is to have a net-positive impact — on the organization, teammates, partners, clients and ultimately the community. What I mean is, you want to join an organization and leave it [eventually] better than it was,” she says. “That only happens through Insight teammates, by empowering them to be their best selves, helping them to use their strengths and giving them growth opportunities. If that happens, the organizational growth will follow.”
What’s critical for me is to have a net-positive impact, on the organization, the teammates, partners, clients and ultimately the community.
Reem’s answer comes full circle to where her career began: someone recognizing her ambition and giving her the opportunity to grow. It’s also indicative that she’s where she needs to be, both at Insight and in tech.
“I’ve tried a couple of times to move away from IT,” she says. “I’ve worked for human-capital organizations. I’m passionate about what makes people, teams and organizations great, as well as focused on the well-being of teammates and workplaces, but I always come back to IT. It’s addictive — the pace of change and the huge opportunity to learn, innovate and evolve. It’s all something I can’t live without.”
By Reem’s own admission, the evolution still isn’t complete. “What got me here, won’t get me there. It took a lot of self-reflection and experience to make sure I know how to manage, coach, build teams and be a good leader,” Reem says.
As Insight Canada continues to evolve as a Solutions Integrator, change is inevitable. That’s by the very definition of “evolution.” In that way, change also must be embraced, as the organization tweaks its charted course forward, a new leader at its helm.
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