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CDI’s New CEO Rich Falcone Talks ‘Change Or Die’ Motto, M&A
Mark Haranas
“We’re adapting to what the market’s doing. We’re pushing our competition out. Quite frankly, we’re share shifting, we’re growing and that’s exciting to people. Change or die is real,” says CDI’s new CEO, Rich Falcone, in an interview with CRN.
Talk about your ‘change or die’ motto and how important it is for CDI’s future.
I strongly believe in this phrase “change or die.” If you look at CDI when I started, we were maybe 30 people on $30 million and 99 percent of our revenue came from HP Unix systems. You look at all the change over those 20 years that CDI has made -- partnering with different solution providers, expanding through acquisition, picking up new capabilities, etc. We’ve always had that sort of culture in being good at adopting to what the markets doing, but if you look at what’s happening now and the pace of the change to the customers in this multi-cloud operating model, while simultaneously going through a digital transformation, I feel a lot of our competition has not changed.
I think they’re still going to market the way they went to market five years ago. It’s different now than it used to be. We used to spend a lot of time talking about features of technology -- this product versus that product -- and customers would rightfully use us to help pick the best product from whichever vendor made sense for that particular project. We don’t really spend a lot of time doing that anymore. A lot of these products work very well, but a lot of times now the outcome the customer is going for is a lot different than it used to be and the product conversation will come, but it will come later.
