ScanSource Acquires Canpango To Bring Salesforce Services To Partners

Distributor ScanSource has acquired one of its professional services provider partners as a way to expand its ability to help partners bring customer relationship management, especially technology from Salesforce.com, to clients.

ScanSource Tuesday unveiled the acquisition of Canpango, a consultant with a strong Salesforce practice, to help its channel partners with consulting and implementation of Salesforce for their customers.

Canpango will become part of ScanSource's Intelisys business unit, said Andrew Pryfogle, senior vice president of cloud transformation for the Greenville, S.C.-based distributor.

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Intelisys, which prior to its 2016 acquisition by ScanSource was a telecom and cloud services master agent, acts as a software and services distributor to bring technology from an array of suppliers to its 3,500 partners, Pryfogle told CRN.

"We deal mainly in recurring revenue for cloud and carrier services," he said. "We partner with a lot of MSPs, but the majority of our partners are independent sales agents ranging from two-person companies to the Presidios of the world. We get commissions from our suppliers and pass them to our partners."

ScanSource's acquisition of Canpango will help Intelisys bring new opportunities to solution providers looking to expand their business, Pryfogle said.

"Partners are looking to get into larger, more complex deals," he said. "They are finding their deal sizes growing. As that happens, partners see a greater need for things like CRM, especially Salesforce. Canpango provides global organizations with services related to CRM and Salesforce integration."

Smaller partners find they have a gap in their offerings as they get pulled into conversations around CRM, Pryfogle said.

"Now, with Canpango, our partners don't need to build out their own CRM practice," he said. "They can get our professional services to help their customers deploy CRM while getting part of the recurring revenue. This fills a gap in their services, and helps them move to larger deals."

While Canpango has had its own customer base in the past, that will no longer be true in the future, Pryfogle said.

"Moving forward, Canpango engagements will be through partners, either partners of Intelisys or ScanSource," he said.

Bringing Canpango into Intelisys will lead channel partners to more CRM opportunities, said Colombo De Salvatore, owner and solutions consultant at C4 Communications, a Hartford, Conn.-based boutique connectivity and cloud solutions technical consultant and 17-year partner of Intelisys.

De Salvatore told CRN that he worked with Canpango earlier this year on an ongoing Salesforce.com project after being introduced to the professional services firm by Intelisys.

"I have two words to describe Canpango: ‘smart’ and ‘responsive,’" he said. "Canpango is very responsive in engaging with customers to understand their business needs before deploying Salesforce. They understand the Salesforce business and make good recommendations. I intend to work with them again."

De Salvatore said he is 100percent confident that Intelisys will bring its Canpango business to channel partners.

"Intelisys is 100 percent channel," he said. "They never did anything in the 17 years I worked with them to suggest they would go around channel partners. I see Intelisys will go to its community of channel partners in any deployment."