Nuvias has appointed 15 former ScanSource employees in a push to improve its AV business, according to CEO, Jeremy Keefe.
The stream of appointments in sales, IT and customer support follow rumours of a potential acquisition of the European arm of the ScanSource business at the start of the year, after its new owner kicked off plans to wind down the business.
Although Keefe couldn’t be drawn on the rumours, the Nuvias CEO was able to say that partners influenced the decision to appoint the competitor’s employees, with the added bonus of bringing expertise in AV collaboration solutions.
As a result, Nuvias is aspiring to take a 40 per cent chunk of the UK AV communications market this quarter, on the way to doubling group revenue figures in 2021 from £65m to £130m. Speaking to UC Today, Keefe said that the distributor is hoping to shift the perception in the market that Nuvias is exclusively a UC distributor.
“I think we’ve done a really good job of being a UC specialist distributor, but our market share is low around AV. ScanSource on the other hand account for a huge percentage in that space within UC.
“We believe we’ve now got the core skill sets that will put us up to 40 per cent market share in the AV space to become a distributor of cloud, video and voice.”
The appointments follow the $30m acquisition of ScanSource Europe by Ten Oaks Group, a private equity firm in November last year, just over a year after announcing plans to sell its European arm.
Since the turn of the year, plans to wind the business down have been enacted, affecting around 300 employees across Belgium, France, Germany and the UK.
Keefe said that the speed at which ScanSource Europe has been wound up was surprising.
“ScanSource made no secret of their ambition to sell a European operation for a long period of time, but I don’t think anybody expected them to sell it and then it to be closed down within three to four months of the sale going through”
“There were a lot of the people that we’ve employed who have been recommended to us by our partners after the news spread about ScanSource’s future. What we’ve tried to do is bring the people that know how to build relationships in the AV market and, hopefully, extend relationships from a Nuvias UC point of view.
“For Nuvias, we felt the time was right for us to get more qualified feet on the street to improve our own sales capabilities. When I came in last year, we had a plan to double the business in three years but, with these appointments and our relationship with Zoom, we have an opportunity to double our business in half the time.”
