Managed services News
CompuCom CEO Kevin Shank: ‘I Have Unfinished Business Here’
Joseph F. Kovar
‘I have a lot of people that know me here, that remember the CompuCom that was focused on those enterprise-class customers and delivering world-class service and growing fast. And I firmly believe we can do that again,’ new CompuCom CEO Kevin Shank tells CRN.
Rebuilding CompuCom
When Kevin Shank took the reins last month as the new CEO of global IT solution provider CompuCom, it was in a way a homecoming for him. Shank had spent nine years at CompuCom, leaving the company in early 2014 as executive vice president, to join Pivot Technology Solutions as CEO until Pivot was acquired by Computacenter in late 2020 to become that company’s CEO.
While CompuCom has a long history as an IT solution provider and MSP, its time as an independent company was considerably shorter. CompuCom in 2017 was acquired by ODP, the parent company of Office Depot, in a billion-dollar deal, only to be sold in December 2021 for just over $300 million to an affiliate of Variant Equity Advisors, a Los Angeles-based equity firm specializing in corporate divestitures.
Shank, in a recent exclusive interview with CRN, said that while CompuCom was a part of ODP it lost its enterprise focus. CompuCom previously had carved a strong business catering to the Fortune 1000-type enterprise customers, but the siren call of end-user computing was too strong to resist, especially as CompuCom became part of ODP, which had a strong SMB to midmarket focus.
[Related: CompuCom Rehires Channel Vet Kevin Shank As New CEO]
“A lot of people saw opportunity there,” he said. “Office Depot obviously saw an opportunity there. This happened after I left. But I think that took a lot of the focus of the company away from large enterprise customers, where the company really thrived and was well respected. And it changed the focus of the company a bit.”
While selling products remains an important part of CompuCom’s business, it is only one part of the solution provider’s strategy for growing its enterprise business, Shank said.
“I see us putting some emphasis on growing [the product] part of our business because I think it leads to transformation, it leads to professional services and advisory services,” he said. “And ultimately, we want to manage that technology when it’s in place, to help deploy it and manage it for our customers. And that is our space. That’s who CompuCom is.”
Here is more about who CompuCom is and what it hopes to become going forward.
