Business Breakthrough

Last month, 30 ScanSource vendors pitched up at the distributor’s Business Breakthrough event at the Brewery London to show partners the very latest in innovation and announce some exciting news.

Editor, David Dungay went along to find out more.

The exhibition hall was buzzing with partners, some 400 had attended, all wanting to find out the latest and greatest products available to them. The key themes of the day were UC, Cloud and Conferencing and ScanSource were looking to show partners what they can offer as a single company now that ScanSource has integrated Imago into their ranks.

James Vickerage, CEO of ScanSource, told Comms Business “Today is about, among other things, formalising things to partners, most of the integration has been done in the background previously but we wanted to clarify things for partners.”

For partners dealing with ScanSource Imago over the last few years they will have come up against a few inefficiencies during the process. Historically partners would have had two account managers, one for the ScanSource portfolio and one

for Imago.

Vickerage stated, “We have consolidated things so partners have one account manager now, we have done all the integration in the background to make that happen. It was working as it was but we felt there was the potential for confusion in the future having multiple account managers.”

Increased support, both pre-sales, technical and sales are available immediately as well.

“Today is about giving our partners a bit of certainty around the company, in an otherwise uncertain time with Brexit etc going on.”

He said, “Resellers will have access to a greater line card of communications solutions – voice, video and data products – from a single source. ScanSource Imago will also deliver a greater range of value-added expertise, including services to assist resellers in delivering a broader range of communications solutions and services.”

To support the integrated company moving forwards there is also a new management structure in place.

Management Structure

Paul Emery, Vice President, UK and Ireland, will be responsible for ScanSource Imago’s sales operations in the UK and Ireland.

John Vickerage, Area Vice President of Northern Europe, with overall responsibility for sales in DACH, Benelux, Nordics, Baltics and Eastern Europe, Nicolas Jouan, Area Vice President of Southern Europe, has responsibility for sales in France.

Phil Boyd, Vice President of Merchandising, will lead the teams responsible for managing the vendor relationships.

MyWorld

During the day James Vickerage made the announcement that their new product MyWorld would “revolutionise” Skype for Business deployments which would enable partners to increase revenues from selling the service. MyWorld is an ecosystem of vendors and services which support Skype for Business which enables partners to sell a comprehensive, and complete, offering. However, ScanSource is not able to offer the licensing element yet.

Currently, Microsoft has more than 100 million commercial monthly subscriptions globally. Richard Bowes, Partner Development Professional at Microsoft told the audience that 43% of Enterprises are considering implementing Cloud PBX and that Skype for Business was, as he would, an excellent way to boost 365 license revenues.

Vickerage stated that there was “more support coming” for the MyWorld programme in the near future.

Phil Boyd, Vice President of Merchandising, will lead the teams responsible for managing the vendor relationships in the new management structure. He said, “We are looking to optimise our Microsoft position from pre-configuration right through to installation for partners. We’ll be offering training for customers on the sales front and of course technical training too.”

Gary Bennett, Channel Sales Director, Enghouse Interactive commented, “We were delighted to be part of such a well-attended event, and it was a great way for us to kick off our new and exciting relationship with Scansource. The market for SfB for business contact centres continues to offer fantastic opportunities and we look forward to working closely with Scansource to address this. The partnership of Enghouse and Scansource offers a compelling proposition for UK resellers.”

 

Takeaways

• Huge Cloud PBX opportunity

• MyWorld Launch could address partners struggling with SfB

• An integrated Scansource Imago is now efficient to deal with