ScanSource Pursues ‘Intelisys 2.0’ with Leadership Changes

When ScanSource last week announced it had made some significant changes in the executive ranks at  ScanSource and Intelisys, and also reported disappointing second-quarter financial results, it called attention to the big undertaking to fulfill the company’s vision of its One ScanSource strategy.

The One ScanSource strategy is to increase customer value by cross-selling and growing recurring revenue.

So, Channel Partners caught up with Mike Baur, chairman and CEO, ScanSource, and Mark Morgan, the newly appointed president of Intelisys, to get the latest update on the ScanSource-Intelisys alignment.

Channel Partners: It’s a good time to give ScanSource/Intelisys partners and agents feedback about where you are on aligning the business.

ScanSource’s Mike Baur

Mike Baur: For me, where we are today is where we’d thought we’d be back in 2016, actually the end of 2015, when the idea of acquiring a master agent came about. Now, with Mark [Morgan] in his new role, Paul Constantine in his new role, it gives me the opportunity to spend more time with [former president] Jay [Bradley] and [former VP] Carol [Beering, now advisers] – and I still meet regularly with Rick, Rick and Dana (Rick Sheldon, Rick Dellar, and Dana Topping, who co-founded Intelisys in 1994) – working on what is Intelisys 2.0, now that ScanSource has owned this business for almost four years.

CP: Describe Intelisys 2.0 and the road map to getting there.

Mark Morgan: I was involved early on with Mike and the team on the decision to acquire a master agent. One of the key things that we were focused on back then was, how do we leverage our ability to scale to expand our partner base in our core VAR channel? But also, as we learn more about the agent channel, how can we help do that?

Since the acquisition, we made other investments, a little over $100 million — we acquired RPM Software, which we did for a couple of reasons: to further support the agent community and to expand our ability to support the IT channel; we acquired Canpango, a Salesforce consulting and implementation company, to drive cloud contact speed to market; and most recently, we acquired intY, a cloud provisioning and billing platform that gives us Microsoft CSP status in North America, the U.K, and EU. That acquisition extends the partners’ ability to visualize data.

So, after we acquired Intelisys, we didn’t stop, and the next phase of that is that we’ll continue to invest in headcount and tools.

CP: Can you be more specific about upcoming investments

Intelisys’ Mark Morgan

MM: From a directions perspective, it’s taking the tools that Intelisys already has in place – back-office tools, for example, which helps us instill trust in the partner base – bringing partners on, getting them trained, helping them stay on top of the latest technologies and trends – but also ensuring them that they’ll be able to manage their commissions, get paid on time and get paid accurately. We continue to invest in these types of tools.

We also invest in headcount, such as software developers, expanding to support the rapid growth that we continue to have at Intelisys, and investing further in our core VAR channel.

MB: I can add to what Mark is saying — when we bought Intelisys there were 105 employees and now we’re up to 250, a massive increase.

CP: Where there challenges you encountered along the way? 

MB: No, not really. The biggest successes we’ve had were around bringing VARs and agents together and figuring out when and how they want to work together, or not. What we learned …