Meeting Customer Needs

Kinka said the acquisition fits well with what’s happening in the customer environment.

First, a recession is looming. Kinka said that won’t impact the advisory channel negatively.

“On the strength of how the IT person has become strategic in the business, IT budgets are not one of the areas that are expected to shrink as businesses are cutting expenses back,” he said.

However, he said IT leaders are increasingly looking for ways to save money.

“We do think that more of the spend will move over to things like cost containment, efficiency, inventory management [and] spend management. For those people who are in cloud management, it’s license and usage management. We’re going to get smarter about our expenditures, and you have to spend money first to do that,” he said.

Moreover, IT leaders are pressed for time. They’re engaging more and more in the big boardrooms with the chief financial officer and chief revenue officer to talk about the strategic direction of the business.

“They already didn’t have time to command and control spend and make optimal decisions and to really evaluate vendors. If they did, we wouldn’t have an industry. But now it’s even worse, because they’ve got 20% of their time or more in boardrooms, which is great, because the board now cares about technology. But that’s time that the tech leader doesn’t have,” he said.