Insight Enterprises Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
August 6, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Q2 results exceeded expectations: Revenue rose 15% to $2.4 billion, gross profit increased 18%, adjusted EBITDA grew 29%, and adjusted diluted EPS climbed 44% to $3.86. Infrastructure hardware, cloud, and core services were key growth drivers.
  • Positive Sentiment: Insight raised its 2026 outlook, now expecting gross profit growth of 8%–10% and adjusted diluted EPS of $12.20–$12.70, or approximately 16% growth at the midpoint. The company also plans to complete the remaining $149 million share-repurchase authorization this year while pausing M&A.
  • Positive Sentiment: Management reported strong demand for AI-ready infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity, and related services, including servers, storage, networking, Microsoft Copilot, Azure, and Agent 365. Insight is investing in AI infrastructure and services while productizing offerings and expanding AI-enabled sales tools.
  • Neutral Sentiment: The three-year “One Insight” plan will consolidate decentralized operations, integrate acquisitions onto common systems, streamline support functions, and reinvest efficiency savings into growth. Management expects to improve operating leverage while selectively adding sales and technical talent.
  • Negative Sentiment: Management expects slower growth in the second half, with the fourth quarter being the weakest EPS-growth period due to tougher comparisons, Google partner-program changes, memory-price increases, supply-chain disruption, and macroeconomic uncertainty. Hardware gross margin already declined 110 basis points because of pricing and client mix, while debt increased to approximately $1.5 billion.
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Earnings Conference Call
Insight Enterprises Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Insight Enterprises Second Quarter 2026 Operating Results. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Ryan Miyasato with investor relations. Ryan, please go ahead.

Ryan Miyasato
Ryan Miyasato
Director of Investor Relations at Insight Enterprises

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining the Insight Enterprises earnings conference call. Today, we will be discussing the company's operating results for the quarter ended June 30th, 2026. I'm Ryan Miyasato, Investor Relations director of Insight, and joining me is Jack Azagury, President and Chief Executive Officer, and James Morgado, Chief Financial Officer. If you do not have a copy of the earnings release or the accompanying slide presentation that was posted this morning and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Form 8-K, you will find it on our website at insight.com under the investor relations section. Today's call, including the question and answer period, is being webcast live and can also be accessed via the investor relations page of our website at insight.com.

Ryan Miyasato
Ryan Miyasato
Director of Investor Relations at Insight Enterprises

An archived copy of the conference call will be available approximately two hours after completion of the call and will remain on our website for a limited time. This conference call and the associated webcast contain time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, August 6th, 2026. This call is a property of Insight Enterprises. Any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the express written consent of Insight Enterprises is strictly prohibited. In today's conference call, we will be referring to non-GAAP financial measures as we discuss the second quarter financial results. When discussing non-GAAP measures, we will refer to them as adjusted. You will find a reconciliation of these adjusted measures to our actual GAAP results included in both the press release and the accompanying slide presentation issued earlier today.

Ryan Miyasato
Ryan Miyasato
Director of Investor Relations at Insight Enterprises

Please note that all growth comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year, unless otherwise noted. Also, unless highlighted as constant currency, all amounts and growth rates discussed are in U.S. dollar terms. As a reminder, all forward-looking statements that are made during this conference call are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially. These risks are discussed in today's press release and in greater detail in our most recently filed periodic reports and subsequent filings with the SEC. All forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this call, and except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement made on this call, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. With that, I will now turn the call over to Jack. Jack?

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Thank you, Ryan. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I'm pleased to report another strong quarter for Insight. Building on the momentum we established in the first quarter, we delivered broad-based growth across our business and generated strong operating leverage. As a result, total gross profit grew 18%, while adjusted earnings from operations increased 31%, and adjusted diluted earnings per share rose 44%. I'm especially proud of the performance in our key priority areas. Infrastructure hardware revenue rose more than 20%, reflecting strong demand across servers, storage, and networking as clients modernize their environments and invest in AI-ready infrastructure. From a gross profit perspective, cloud grew 39% and core services increased 21%. These offerings are closely aligned with our clients' priorities and represent areas where we see significant opportunity to drive sustained growth. These results reinforce two important points.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

First, our strategy to be a solution integrator for the age of AI is resonating with our clients. Second, we are making early progress against the priorities I outlined last quarter, in particular, the need for focus and execution discipline in everything we do. As James will detail in his remarks, we are raising our outlook for both gross profit growth and adjusted diluted earnings per share for the year as a result of this strong momentum. Over the past several months, I've continued spending time with our clients, our teammates, and our partners around the world while conducting a comprehensive review of our business and building our three-year business plan. Those conversations, combined with a deeper understanding of our operations and market position, have only strengthened my conviction in the opportunity ahead of us.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Our pivot to become the leading solution integrator for the age of AI is working. While there are opportunities to optimize how we operate and continue to build our capabilities, we have a strong foundation to build upon, and we are in a strong position to unlock the value from the investments we have made over the last 10 years. Let me start with what's working well. Our client relationships remain one of our greatest strengths. Many of these relationships have been built over years, and in some cases decades, creating a foundation of trust that enables us to engage at a more strategic level with our clients. This is especially true with our mid-market clients who are turning to Insight to help them deploy and adopt AI in a practical way with a focus on rapid results.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

A measure of the trust we've earned with our clients is our Net Promoter Score, which has consistently exceeded 60 over the past three years. Second, our cloud business continues to perform well. Organizations remain focused on modernizing their environments, optimizing cloud investment and consumption, and driving value from AI. Our strong cloud performance, especially with Microsoft and Google, reflects both the relevance of these priorities and the value our teams bring in helping clients accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Third, we are seeing encouraging strong growth in infrastructure and AI-related hardware. This growth is being driven by stronger sales execution, close alignment with client priorities, and our ability to help clients navigate supply chain constraints while accelerating investment in modernization and AI-ready infrastructure. Fourth, our partner ecosystem remains a significant competitive advantage.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

The strength of our relationships with the world's leading technology providers continues to create opportunities for growth and innovation. As an example, we are a global launch partner for Microsoft 365 E7, Microsoft's Frontier Suite. As an early enterprise adopter, we're gaining first-hand experience that helps clients accelerate their own journey to a human-led, agent-operated enterprise. We bring the full Microsoft AI stack from Copilot to Agent 365 with security and governance built in, which is especially valuable for mid-market clients seeking enterprise-grade AI capabilities. The strength of our partner ecosystem is reflected in recognitions we continue to receive across the industry. Recently, we earned Partner of the Year awards from HPE, Everpure, Adobe, CrowdStrike, Proofpoint, and Rubrik, an endorsement of our technical expertise and leadership in cybersecurity and other strategic growth areas.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

We were named a major contender in the Everest Google Cloud Services PEAK Matrix Assessment, recognizing our expertise in the Google Cloud platform. Finally, our people and culture continue to be a major differentiator, bringing deep technical expertise across our solutions. I have been consistently impressed not only by the depth of our expertise, commitment, and passion across our organization, but also by the strength of our culture, grounded in collaboration, accountability, and shared commitment to our clients. We refer to it as hunger, heart, and harmony. As an example that illustrates many of these strengths is our partnership with a healthcare consulting provider that conducts hundreds of hospital surveys each year. These consultants were spending significant time manually documenting findings and producing accreditation reports. We built an AI-powered solution using OpenAI that transforms survey notes into structured findings and recommendations that fit seamlessly into existing workflows.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

As a result, the client is realizing more than $400,000 in annual productivity savings, reducing report preparation time from several hours to less than an hour. They're also saving more than 20 hours per week in formatting and quality assurance work and improving consistency across hundreds of reports each year. This example demonstrates how we're helping clients move from AI ambition to realized business value. The differentiator is not access to AI technology itself, but the ability to apply it to real-world business challenges, transform processes, and deliver measurable returns. As clients increasingly prioritize outcome-based AI investments, our expertise, delivery capabilities, and talent position us well to capture this growing opportunity. While we have a strong foundation, we have also identified several areas where we need to improve. First, part of our business remains too decentralized.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Some acquisitions and support functions have not yet been fully integrated into a common operating model, creating complexity, sometimes limiting collaboration, and slowing down decision-making. We need a more connected and consistent way of working in order to serve our clients at speed as One Insight all the time, every time. Second, we have not consistently invested in our organic business in several of our most important growth vectors. We believe there is significant opportunity to accelerate investment in AI infrastructure as well as AI services, including engineering, data, cloud, and security. These are areas where client demand is growing and where we believe Insight is well-positioned to win. Furthermore, we need to continue to invest in our frontline sales and equip our account executives with training and AI tools to represent the full capabilities of Insight. Third, we have opportunities to create greater efficiency through AI-enabled processes and automation.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

As a technology leader, we are leading by example in the adoption of AI to improve productivity, decision quality, and speed. Our early adoption of Microsoft Frontier Suite is a great example of this. To address these areas for improvement, we are launching a three-year business plan, which we call the One Insight Plan. The plan is designed to accelerate organic growth, move to One Insight operating model, and improve our operating leverage in order to further fuel our business for growth. Combined with favorable market trends in cloud, data, AI, and cybersecurity, we believe this strategy will position us to create sustainable long-term value. The plan focuses on three pillars, which I'll expand on shortly. First, accelerating investment behind our highest priority growth vectors, AI infrastructure and AI services, including security with a sharpened focus on the mid-market. Second, driving operational excellence. Third, strengthening our talent strategy.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

These represent the building blocks of the three-year plan we are currently developing and will be executed over a phased approach. Importantly, this is not simply a future state vision. Work is already underway globally. At the center of everything we do is a simple principle, focus and execution. Let me give you examples of our plan in each of the three key pillars. As we drive operational efficiencies across the business, we will reinvest a portion of those savings into two strategic growth initiatives that are closely aligned with evolving client demand. AI infrastructure. Organizations are transforming their infrastructure to support AI workloads, data-intensive computing, and modern hybrid environments. AI services. This includes engineering services, data and cloud capabilities, security solutions, and advisory services designed to help clients move from experimentation to enterprise-scale deployments at speed.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

As we strengthen our investment in these two priority areas, we continue to drive operational excellence and execution in other areas, including devices, hardware attached services, and overall resale capabilities. A good example of our priority investments is the recent launch of Insight Managed Exposure Defense, IMED in short. A managed security offering designed to help organizations address the growing wave of AI-driven cyber risks. The solution, which we use ourselves as client zero, enables clients to rapidly move from identifying vulnerabilities to strengthening their security posture. In a threat landscape that continues to evolve at unprecedented pace, organizations need a partner that can deliver integrated protection and rapid time to value. We are making these capabilities available in a consumable way as a managed service, making them more accessible to our mid-market clients, including a simple 24-hour quoting process to get started at speed.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

In just a few weeks since launch, we have seen strong client interest. Within our solutions portfolio, similar to what we've done with IMED, we're improving scalability and repeatability by productizing our top 10 service offerings over the next few months. In addition, in order to drive greater solution selling and cross-selling globally, we are also expanding our AI sales coach capabilities, equipping our account executives with client-specific insights, recommended discussion topics, and actionable guidance that improves productivity, selling consistency, and client engagement at scale. We are also selectively adding account executive capacity in key segments. Our second pillar is driving operating leverage and implementing a One Insight operating model, bringing acquisitions onto common platforms and processes, standardizing how we operate across regions, and breaking down organizational silos.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

By operating as one global team, we can deliver the full breadth of Insight's capabilities to clients, deploying AI at scale internally, improve execution, accelerate decision-making, and create greater operating leverage across the business to further fuel our growth. This effort includes globalizing corporate functions, streamlining support operations, reviewing our direct and indirect spend, and embedding AI more deeply into our day-to-day operations. We are also reducing organizational layers and empowering teams to make decisions closer to the customer, improving speed, agility, and accountability. During the quarter, we paused back and mid-office hiring to prioritize client-facing hiring to drive growth and improve organizational efficiency. We are also strengthening collaboration across our global delivery centers with deeper integration and shared accountability across India, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe. Our goal is to build a mature global delivery organization with a clear emphasis on AI-led transformation, process simplification, and consistent execution.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

We continue to accelerate our own AI transformation in areas like sales and sales support, finance, HR, marketing, and more. Our objective is simple, use AI to make Insight more productive, more scalable, and more effective, demonstrating our client zero approach while helping our clients do the same. Our third pillar is our talent plan. We are aligning incentives and rewards to compete for AI talent while continuing to expand our deep expertise in data, cloud, and cybersecurity through ongoing investments in advanced training and certifications across Azure, Google Cloud, leading frontier models, and other strategic technology partners. We have launched focused incentives in the second half to further drive and sustain our growth priorities. We are reviewing our performance management process to continually raise the bar on our own performance. This all comes back to focus and execution.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Our goal is to create a way of working that better supports our business, our partners, and our clients. As we implement One Insight, we will measure success through a combination of growth and execution metrics. Specifically, our ability to accelerate organic growth in our key priority areas, deliver strong operational performance, and increase our OpEx leverage over time while continuing to focus on our client and teammate NPS scores. As we look at the remainder of the year, we currently believe our highest return opportunity today is investing in Insight itself. As a result, our priority is to complete the remaining $149 million of our current share repurchase authorization this year and continue to pause M&A activity. The first half of 2026 demonstrates the strength and resilience of our business model. Demand remains healthy across our key markets. Execution continues to improve.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Our focus on driving organic growth is gaining traction. Our backlog continues to grow. Demand remains strong, we remain mindful of the mix and evolving macroeconomic environment and are managing the business accordingly. Against this backdrop, supported by a strong financial first half performance and confidence in our ability to execute, we are raising our outlook for both gross profit growth and adjusted diluted earnings per share for 2026. James will provide additional details on our updated guidance in a moment. I'll turn the call over to James. James?

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Thank you, Jack, and good morning, everyone. Our Q2 results displayed broad-based strength across our business and exceeded our expectations for the quarter. Net revenue was $2.4 billion, an increase of 15% in US dollar terms and 14% in constant currency. The increase was driven by hardware and services, partially offset by a decrease in on-prem software as clients shift to cloud-delivered software. As a reminder, cloud-delivered software is presented net in agent services revenue. Hardware revenue increased 21%, with double-digit growth in both devices and infrastructure. Core services revenue was up 14%, reflecting contributions from both acquisitions and the organic business, with stronger growth from the acquired businesses. Organic growth accelerated slightly from Q1, though we recognize there is still work to do to reach our full potential. Gross profit increased 18%.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Cloud gross profit was $171 million, an increase of 39%, driven by both growth in SaaS and Infrastructure as a Service, as well as security software from our Sekuro acquisition. Insight Core Services gross profit was $95 million, an increase of 21%, driven by contribution from acquisitions, as well as modest organic growth boosted by gross margin expansion. Hardware gross profit was up 10%, while gross margin declined 110 basis points due to pricing and client mix. From a geographic perspective, all regions delivered double-digit gross profit growth. North America grew 16%, driven by cloud and core services. EMEA increased 13%, driven by ongoing transactions in UAE and Saudi Arabia, where we act as the agent. APAC grew 67%, fueled by acquisition contributions attributable to our cybersecurity-related offerings. As a result, total gross margin was 21.7%, an increase of 60 basis points.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Adjusted SG&A increased 12%, primarily due to an increase in variable compensation and acquisitions. During the quarter, we implemented disciplined cost controls, including a pause in back and mid-office hiring, excluding sales and technical talent, as prioritized investments in our key growth areas. This resulted in adjusted EBITDA of $190 million, up 29%, while margin expanded 90 basis points to 7.9%. Our adjusted diluted earnings per share were $3.86, up 44% in US dollar terms and 43% in constant currency. For the quarter, we used $12 million of cash flow from operations, and year to date, we generated $20 million, which was in line with our expectations and our typical seasonality. We continue to anticipate cash flow from operations in the range of $300 million-$400 million.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

In Q2, we repurchased $75 million in shares and have $149 million in remaining authorization, which we intend to exhaust before the end of the year. The projected $299 million of share repurchases for the year would represent over 90% of our projected free cash flow. We exited Q2 with total debt of approximately $1.5 billion, compared to $1.3 billion a year ago, with a net leverage ratio of 1.7. The year-over-year increase in debt was primarily related to acquisitions and share repurchases. We have ample liquidity to meet our needs, and as of the end of Q2, we had access to the $2 billion capacity under our ABL facility, of which approximately $1 billion was available. Our adjusted return on invested capital for the trailing twelve months at the end of Q2 was 17.3% compared to 15.5% a year ago. Now turning to guidance.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

As we consider our first half performance and the evolving operating environment, our guidance incorporates the following assumptions and considerations. For the year, we expect our corporate and large enterprise client spending to improve from last year. Hardware gross profit will be up low single digits as component costs are impacting demand, particularly for devices. We expect core services gross profit will grow in the low double digits with contribution from our recent acquisitions, as well as improvement in our organic business. We anticipate cloud gross profit to grow in the high teens to low 20% range as we move past the majority of the partner program changes we have previously discussed. We will continue to prudently manage SG&A and expect growth slightly slower than gross profit.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

We intend to continue to pause M&A and exhaust the remaining $149 million share repurchase authorization in 2026. Finally, as we look ahead to the fourth quarter, we'll lap the acquisitions completed last year and work through the remaining impact of the Google Partner program changes. We're also remaining prudent on our Q4 outlook, given uncertainty associated with memory price increases, supply chain disruption, and macroeconomic factors. While these factors moderate the year-over-year growth profile, we continue to expect solid execution across the portfolio, with the fourth quarter representing our lowest adjusted diluted earnings per share growth of the year. Considering these factors for the year of 2026, our guidance is as follows. We are raising our gross profit growth expectations to 8%-10%, and our gross margin will be approximately 21.5%-22%.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Excluding stock-based compensation, our adjusted diluted earnings per share will now be between $12.20-$12.70. This represents approximately 16% growth at $12.45 midpoint compared to the 2025 adjusted diluted earnings per share of $10.75. Finally, we expect cash flow from operations in the $300 million-$400 million range. Our guidance includes interest and other expenses to be approximately $95 million, an effective tax rate of 25.5%-26.5% for the full year, capital expenditures of $20 million-$30 million, and an average share count for the full year of approximately 30 million shares. This outlook excludes stock-based compensation, excludes acquisition-related intangible amortization expense of approximately $83 million, assumes no acquisition-related costs, severance and restructuring or transformation expenses, and assumes no change in our debt instruments and no meaningful change in the macroeconomic outlook. I will now turn the call back to Jack. Jack?

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Thank you, James. Before we conclude, I want to take a moment to thank our teammates, our clients, and our partners. Our strong performance this quarter reflects the dedication, expertise, and commitment of our people, the trust our clients place in us every day, and the strength of the partnerships that help us deliver exceptional outcomes. At its core, the One Insight plan is around aligning the company around our greatest opportunities. We are investing in high-growth priority growth markets, building a more scalable and efficient operating model, and strengthening our talent and technical capabilities. Taken together, these actions will improve agility, enhance execution, and position us to deliver stronger long-term growth and profitability. I'm proud of what we've accomplished so far, but I believe the greatest opportunity still lies ahead.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

While we have a lot of work to do, we are building from a position of strength with differentiated market position, a clear strategy, outstanding talent, and a culture committed to winning for our clients. These strengths give me confidence in our ability to execute and deliver our next phase of growth. Now it's all about focus and execution. Thank you for your continued support of Insight. We look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter. This concludes my prepared remarks, and I will now open the line for your questions.

Operator

We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question is from Joseph Cardoso with JPMorgan. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Joseph Cardoso
Joseph Cardoso
Analyst at JPMorgan

Hey, good morning, everyone, and congrats on the solid results this morning. For my first one, Jack, you obviously laid out the number of strategic initiatives that you hinted at last quarter. You also laid out last quarter encompassing investments, restructuring, and reorganization across the business, while also emphasizing a North Star commitment to operating leverage. How are you thinking about balancing those two, especially near-term, just given potential risks related to elevated investments or transitory disruptions, potentially pressuring the leverage in the interim? Do you even see that as a fair concern? I have a follow-up.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

No, obviously, it is a balance, as you point out, and we have opportunities to improve operating leverage. We've identified many of them already, and our intent is to balancing the areas where we find efficiencies and reinvesting part of those efficiencies to fuel growth. That balance, which we monitor every week, every month, every quarter, is what we've already started to do. We're going to invest within our guidance, and we will invest with a focus of always improving operating leverage. We've identified a number of areas for operational efficiency that give us opportunity to invest in fuel for growth. That's the balancing out the leadership team is focused on every day.

Joseph Cardoso
Joseph Cardoso
Analyst at JPMorgan

Got it. Maybe as my second one, maybe this is a Jack James combo question here, but just relative to the full-year guidance, when I take a look at it implies a deceleration of revenue and gross profit growth into the second half, and maybe what even appears to be a decline in operating profit and earnings, if I'm kind of doing my math right, into the second half. Maybe can you flesh out the drivers behind that dynamic into the back half and how we should think about maybe the upside and downside risk around it? Thank you.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Let me start, I'll hand over to James. As we've said for some time, we always expected a stronger first half than second half, Q2 was always going to be a high watermark for us. We've also talked last quarter about the fact that we still have some compare on the Google side in Q4. Some of the remaining M&A will come off in Q4 as well, a tough compare in Q4. That is really the reasons why we always expected a stronger first half than second half. Also, I will say we are being prudent in our guidance, just as we were last quarter. There's still a lot of uncertainty of memory prices, macroeconomics, we believe some prudence here is warranted. James?

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Yeah. I think the only thing I would add to that is, Joe, as we look at this, as we exited the first half, I think the underlying demand dynamics are strong as we head into the second half. Given the factors that Jack just outlined, I think it's really important for us to maintain that prudent stance, particularly in Q4. As we think about Q4, we do expect both quarters will post growth. The compares for us as we think about this, as we progress through the year, they do get more challenging from a year-over-year perspective. Just as we look at the overall second half, I think the underlying demand dynamics remain strong, but there's some things that we have to navigate in the second half, I think prudence in our guidance is still important.

Joseph Cardoso
Joseph Cardoso
Analyst at JPMorgan

Okay, guys. Thanks for the color. Appreciate the questions this morning, congrats again. Bye.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Adam Tindle with Raymond James. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Analyst at Raymond James

Okay, thanks. Good morning. I want to start with a congrats, especially in light of peer reports. These results are really impressive. Jack, I want to ask on sort of your three different things to improve. A multi-part question, bear with me. The first one you talked about was that you're too decentralized, you want to be more connected. The question there would be what that would entail, especially from a systems standpoint. Are we talking about ERP systems, stuff like that, and the timing to that? The second, and I'll kind of combine these two, but you talked about investing in organic and then creating greater efficiency through AI. The question on those two would be sort of the timing and size of that investment and the net implication on margin. I imagine that there's some investment, but some offset.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Analyst at Raymond James

Are we entering into a period where margins might take a pause or just kind of set expectations on profitability going forward? Thanks.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

On the One Insight operating model, there are multiple levers. We already, just in the first three, four months of being here, are operating as a much more globally integrated leadership team across the globe, bringing the strength of our EMEA, APAC, and North America teams together. Leveraging best practices, looking at things that have been done multiple times and doing them one way with best practices. There have been many opportunities, including, for example, our AI sales coach. We had multiple efforts underway. We have now one, leveraging the best AI engineering and capabilities and developing one. Just like that example, there are many that our team is already focused on. We are looking at global processes and transforming a number of our systems over the next few years to harmonize our data, and harmonize our processes in a number of areas.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

We've improved the use of our CRM system globally already just in the first three months. It's a combination of the culture of the team coming together, the operating model, which we've got more work to do, and our systems and processes. We're looking at all levers to make sure we operate as an integrated team, but first it starts with culture. Frankly, I've been very, very pleased with how our team has come together in the first three or four months globally, to really collaborate and work to drive the best results for our clients, our shareholders, and our partners. The second part, Adam, was on margins, is that right?

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Analyst at Raymond James

Yeah.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Go ahead.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Analyst at Raymond James

Go ahead. Just combining the investment piece versus the cost savings piece. Are we entering into a period of more investment where margins might take a pause, or do you have AI offsets? Just to kind of set expectations on margins for investors.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Yeah. Our focus is on improving our operating leverage continuously every year. Any investments we make will be in the context of improving our margins and our operating leverage. We believe there is ample opportunity for us to do both at the same time, and we are not going to compromise operating leverage to fuel investments. We believe, and we have now proof points and initiatives to execute against that and drive the operating leverage that I've mentioned on the call, while at the same time finding investments in areas like cloud and data and security and building our technical and engineering talents, and adding account executives where we need more coverage and so on.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Adam, I would just add a little bit to that on the operating expense leverage side. Certainly Q2 marked a very strong OpEx leverage. As a percentage of gross profit, our operating expenses were just a little north of 65%. That's a good number based on Insight's historical performance. If I look overall at the first half, we are just a little north of 67%. My view is that there's plenty of room in the operating expenses as we drive efficiency to not only reinvest some of those dollars back into the priority areas that Jack has mentioned, but also be able to pass that directly and continue to expand EFO margins. I think that footprint certainly gives us the ability to do both, especially as I look out over the shorter term period of time.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Analyst at Raymond James

That's great color. Thanks, James. Maybe just a follow-up, Jack. The decision to continue to pause M&A and focus on share repurchase, I think I can't hold my cards too close to the vest. You probably know how I feel about that. Maybe just take us through that decision. I am kind of interested. It obviously makes sense now, but as you evaluated the M&A portion, there was probably things that down the road could make sense. I just wonder if you kind of squint your eyes and give us a little bit of preview on where in M&A over time, obviously not right now, but over time, it could make sense to focus on M&A. James, if you could just dovetail in the free cash flow inflection in the back half to this, what's driving that? It's just a big improvement.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Analyst at Raymond James

Just give us confidence on that. Thank you, guys.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

My first four months, Adam, have been solely focused on our organic business, and building our three-year plan. Our three-year plan, I believe in building plans that are organic plans. M&A comes on top if and when you find it. Fundamentally, as a company, we're going to have a three-year plan that is organic. Then if and when in the future we find M&A opportunities, that will be an addition that will support the plan and drive it. We're building it, and first and foremost, you have to have an organic business that is working well, and that's been my sole focus. I have spent no brain cycles on M&A in my first four months. At some point in the next years, do we embark on M&A? We will see. We will look at opportunities.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

When we look at opportunities that will be aligned to our strategic priorities, which I outlined on the call. Right now, I haven't put any brain cycles on M&A. We've got plenty of work to do on our three-year plan, and that's what I'm focused on right now.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

On the operating cash flow, Adam, it's in line to my expectations. If we look at the overall first half, it was +$20 million. Last year, at the same time, we were pretty close to $100 million negative. We generated just a little over $400 million in the second half last year. When I think about our first half performance and what we have in front of us, I think my overall guidance of $300 million-$400 million makes sense. It's more of our typical linearity. The reason for that is particularly around Q2 and the timing of large partner payments that impact the cash flow in Q2 that we then generate a significantly more amount of cash in the second half. Everything I see on cash flow I think makes sense in terms of what we would generate in the second half.

Adam Tindle
Adam Tindle
Analyst at Raymond James

That's great color. Thanks, gentlemen.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Thank you.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Thanks, Adam.

Operator

Your next question is from Luke Morison with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Luke Morison
Luke Morison
Analyst at Canaccord Genuity

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question here. Maybe just starting on hardware. Obviously, it's been a bright spot, driving a lot of the momentum here. A lot of that is presumably ASP driven. Can you help us just decompose what you saw in the quarter between price and unit volume, and how that compares to the low single-digit unit decline you framed coming into the year?

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Yeah. Luke, let me start. Let's break down devices from infrastructure. On the devices side, we had very strong growth. We do see a slight decline in units. Still, we see average selling prices up. The strength was especially in laptops, much more than desktops or peripherals. The strength for us really was in the laptop business. We continue to see revenue growth going forward. The number of units I think will continue to decline for the next few quarters, but supported by great year strength in average selling price. We still see momentum in Windows 11 refresh, but also clients moving to AI PCs that are now a meaningful portion of the purchases. On the infrastructure business, that we see both strength in units as well as very strong strength in the selling price.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

We see that as a stronger momentum for a longer period of time. I think what I see, especially in servers and storage and networking strength for some time here and our clients modernizing their on-prem capabilities and balancing out with their cloud platform. We see strong growth in cloud and on-prem cloud outpacing, the clients are definitely investing in their data center, we don't currently see a pause in that investment. James?

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

The only thing I would add to that is, Jack mentioned this, we do expect unit decline as it pertains to devices offset by higher ASPs in the second half. We do expect devices will still grow. It'll just moderate from the strong levels we're seeing in Q2 when we look at the overall second half. Jack mentioned this, just to be clear, in Q2, we saw in the device side, units were down very low single digits, but specifically around notebooks, we actually saw an increase in units in notebooks. The overall devices were driven more by declines in units in handhelds and desktops.

Luke Morison
Luke Morison
Analyst at Canaccord Genuity

Got it. Super helpful. Then maybe just to follow up here, this tries to get at sort of how durable this cycle might be. There's a view in the market that enterprises are pulling AI workloads back on-premise for security, latency, cost reasons surrounding AI, that this is driving a structurally stronger, longer-term server cycle. I'm curious, are you seeing that discussion in your own pipeline as sort of a genuine workload shift there, or does it look more like simply supply-driven pull-forward to you?

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

No, we see strength. The server business is very strong, we see continued momentum in the server business. I would agree with your first hypothesis there. That's what we're seeing as well.

James Morgado
James Morgado
CFO at Insight Enterprises

Yeah. Luke, I would just add that, this is a great position that we currently have. If workloads do start significantly repatriating, we have the ability to architect, deploy, and manage those with our customers. Then, we fully expect cloud to remain strong for quite some time. What I would say is the underlying demand metrics there are healthy. We can obviously demonstrate our strength there as well. Insight is, I think, positioned to take advantage regardless of where the trend goes.

Luke Morison
Luke Morison
Analyst at Canaccord Genuity

Got it. That's great. Maybe if I can just slip one more in, just on the E7 launch partner agreement, can you just help us understand sort of the monetization opportunity there? Is the near-term opportunity mostly resale economics? Is it services attached and deployment attached on that? What's a timeframe for that becoming material? Just thinking through that partnership.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Yeah. We've had a very strong quarter with Microsoft on the back of a strong quarter in Q1. We see strong strength in Azure, in Copilot, E7 with Agent 365, which is a very strong tool and capability to discover and manage your agent's landscape. I think most companies deploy it and find out they have a lot more agents in their environment that they now need to manage and manage the consumption associated with the agents and the security associated with it. Our clients are embracing the solution. Copilot is now a very strong product. We've deployed it, obviously, internally and have almost all of our employees trained and using it. We see strong demand there, and certainly Q2 with Microsoft was very strong. For us, a strength in resale, but also all the associated services.

Jack Azagury
Jack Azagury
President and CEO at Insight Enterprises

Deploying Copilot, migrating workloads to Azure, migrating data to Fabric, deploying Agent 365, the security associated with it. We see strength for us both in the resale, but also in the services to help our clients get to value with the solution.

Luke Morison
Luke Morison
Analyst at Canaccord Genuity

Understood. Thank you.

Operator

This brings us to the end of the question and answer session, which concludes today's call. Thank you so much for attending. You may now disconnect.

Executives
    • Ryan Miyasato
      Ryan Miyasato
      Director of Investor Relations
    • Jack Azagury
      Jack Azagury
      President and CEO
    • James Morgado
      James Morgado
      CFO
Analysts
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