About InsightaaS
InsightaaS is known throughout the IT industry as a source of highest-quality insight. Clients turn to us for research, content, education and community and event organization. We are best known for our work in cloud and hybrid IT, analytics, sustainability and channel and alliance strategy, but have also published extensively on IoT, edge, security, software and a wide range of data centre topics.
InsightaaS Research
InsightaaS is a supplier of high-quality, high-impact research. We offer clients a choice of three different approaches, each suited to different requirements:
Working with our partners at Techaisle, InsightaaS is able to offer clients custom research options for buy-side or channel surveys – sampling small businesses, midmarket organizations or enterprise accounts, or channel members with any combination of focus and business models, in Canada and/or anywhere in the world. Techaisle’s global telephone-recruited sample population – nearly 1 million IT-responsible buy-side contacts and 240,000 channel members – allows you to have confidence that your responses will accurately reflect any target audience, and InsightaaS’s analytical expertise ensures that survey results will translate directly into best quality strategic recommendations or data-rich reports.
Alternatively – and in many cases, cost-effectively – InsightaaS can source existing data to meet your information input needs. We are connected with several firms that have standing data repositories that can be accessed at a fraction of the cost associated with bespoke surveys. We have worked with Techaisle, The NPD Group and other organizations to apply existing data to new questions.
Uniquely, InsightaaS has a well-deserved reputation as an innovator in the field of community-based research. We are known for integrating perspectives from professionals with diverse viewpoints, creating reports and presentations that are deeper and more directly applicable to user operations than traditional analyst reports.
Content
Since its launch in 2013, InsightaaS has been a very active publisher of different types of content. Our website is a source of news and insight, with a rich reservoir of links and information. We have published dozens of reports on a very wide range of topics – a review of our most recent works include reports on sustainability, networking, IT infrastructure, enterprise software and data centre design and operations.
Our InsightaaS Press marque has issued four important management books on IT topics: The Death of Core Competency (2014), Building Cloud Value (2016), Analytics in a Business Context (2018) and Data Centre Management in the 2020s (2020).
Current reports in development include Best Practices in Outcome-Focused IT Model Consumption in the Public Sector (based on community research), reports on SMB innovation in edge computing (for a US-based IT supplier) and multiple reports on IT issues like Digital Transformation (US-based IT supplier).
Education
Many of our current and past clients have attended InsightaaS training sessions. InsightaaS Principal Analyst Michael O’Neil has delivered training on channel and alliance management for many years; while the sessions have varied in location (spanning four continents) and topics (with more recent sessions focusing on the unique requirements associated with ecosystems and cloud), each workshop has focused on enabling suppliers to expand their market reach through effective relationships with third-party partners. Building on their work as Sustainable IT columnists with Bloomberg BNA, InsightaaS Chief Content Officer Mary Allen has worked with Michael O’Neil to deliver sustainability workshops, including through the CMA Association of Ontario and University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.
Our most recent breakthrough in education, though, has been development of Roadmapping the Transition. Developed to university standards and centred on a comprehensive cloud/hybrid adoption, deployment and integration model that is relevant to organizations of all sizes, in all industries and at all levels of maturity, Roadmapping the Transition is designed from ground-up for online delivery. It builds a perspective on current state status and remedial needs, next-step (24 month) priorities and longer-term vision through consideration of 40+ “Strategic Impact Questions” that allow for management team professionals to shape organizational responses to key issues. Roadmapping the Transition can be delivered in workshop-style strategy session or as online education; in both modes, the process outputs a PowerPoint-format document that consolidates the ‘why?’, ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ of the path towards the hybrid IT future.
Community and Events
InsightaaS is recognized as a leader in community development, and as the organizers of the celebrated GCDCS annual event series.
Starting with the Toronto Cloud Business Coalition in 2016 and expanding to the Vision to Value (V2V: The Economics of Data) analytics-focused community and subsequent groups focused on transformative technologies and data centre management, InsightaaS has prided itself on attracting and engaging leading professionals in some of IT’s most important areas. Our Meetup groups now include more than 4,000 professionals, and we have regular meetings that gather input, socialize best practice guidance and connect community members in a peer network.
Working with McMaster University’s Computing Infrastructure Research Centre, InsightaaS launched the GCDCS event (formerly known as “The Great Canadian Data Centre Symposium,” but now referred to only by its acronym, as our audience has expanded to the US and overseas) in 2018. Due to the pandemic, GCDCS20 – ‘better than live!’ – is an all-virtual event…and with more than 50 speakers and well over 500 registrants, GCDCS20 is living up to its billing as a premier global event for data centre and IT service delivery professionals and executives.
