Ken Mills and the Work Between the Wires

Ken Mills has a management practice that rarely makes it into a technology pitch: he takes out the trash. In 2021, while leading the businesses that became EPIC iO, he offered that ordinary chore as an explanation of how he wanted a company to feel. Rank should leave room for shared work. An executive can have a strategy meeting and still know where the bins are.

“I take out the trash in our building,” he said. He also wanted employees to have room for family obligations and the occasional dog disrupting a video call. There is a certain economy to this philosophy. A workplace already contains enough complicated machinery without making its people pretend to be machines.

His résumé provides plenty of machinery: naval nuclear engineering, Cisco, EMC, Dell, artificial intelligence, connected devices. His career also contains a recurring human question. How do you get different people, with different responsibilities, to produce something useful together?

A billion dollars, then a smaller door

Before he ran EPIC iO, Mills built businesses inside much larger organizations. At Cisco, his work included safety and security. At Dell Technologies, he became general manager and chief technology officer for a business spanning safety and security, the Internet of Things and computer vision. He had also served as a fellow with the U.S. Department of State.

The Dell chapter gave him a substantial operating record. DFW Capital Partners put the unit’s growth during his seven-year tenure at less than $100 million to more than $1 billion in global revenues. Those are business-unit figures, a measure of work done within Dell’s considerable organization.

Yet he had another ambition. For three years, he had kept a line on his LinkedIn profile about wanting to lead a company as it entered a new industry or introduced a product. On May 5, 2020, he announced the decision that gave that ambition a company name: he was leaving Dell to become CEO of IntelliSite.

His account of the move was affectionate toward the businesses he was leaving. He remembered building new ventures, learning unfamiliar markets and making friends. The attraction of the next job lay in taking those experiences somewhere he could lead the whole organization. A smaller company offered a different circumference of responsibility.

The founders were already there

IntelliSite had a history before Mills arrived. Mario and Jorge Campos founded it in 2001. DFW Capital invested in May 2020, and Mills joined as CEO alongside that investment. The distinction matters: his founding-CEO title belongs to EPIC iO, the holding company created later that year. The Campos brothers had already done the work of establishing IntelliSite.

December brought the acquisition of Broad Sky Networks. IntelliSite’s surveillance and connected-device expertise now sat alongside a business devoted to wireless connectivity. The new EPIC IO holding company housed both operations, initially as independent subsidiaries, with offices across the United States and Latin America.

For Mills, the combination also involved compatibility between teams. He described shared values around responsibility, problem-solving, integrity and customer success. Bringing the two businesses together required a commercial case and a working culture. An acquisition agreement can settle ownership; it leaves plenty of everyday cooperation still to arrange.

This was a business assembled around complementary capabilities. A connected device generates information. A wireless service carries it. Software makes it intelligible. Putting those jobs under one organization gave Mills a way to approach the customer’s entire problem, including the awkward spaces between the products.

The camera has to call home

Ask what that approach means on the ground, and a useful example emerges from Mills’s 2021 discussion of cellular solar cameras. These were intended for remote places where installation, power consumption and communications all demanded attention. A built-in SIM card connected the camera to DeepInsights through the cloud. Local storage provided backup.

The product could use snapshots rather than continuous, bandwidth-heavy streaming. The solar accessory was designed to keep the low-power device charged. Each choice addressed a practical constraint that could otherwise turn a surveillance project into a trip back to the site.

Mills discussed applications including vehicle logs, incident review and license-plate recognition. His explanation stayed close to the jobs customers needed done. A property manager might need a record of vehicles. A remote site might need an alert when somebody appears. The usefulness of the system depended on getting the relevant information to the person responsible.

That same year, EPIC iO announced DeepInsights as an open platform for processing sensor data and video analytics at the edge, in the cloud, or across both. Its description followed the data through connectivity, ingestion, enrichment and insights. The sequence gave the product an operational grammar: collect information, give it context, then make it usable.

Dinner, with assembly required

Mills had a culinary way of explaining integration. Customers wanted something ready to consume, like a pizza; technology vendors often supplied the equivalent of building blocks. The metaphor is amusing because the customer’s predicament is familiar. Nobody orders dinner hoping to receive a qualification in oven maintenance.

His practical answer involved validated templates that could be reused, giving customers a quicker route to working applications. Connectivity, data integration and visualization needed to arrive as a coherent package. The difficult technical work would still exist, but the buyer would have less of it to coordinate personally.

The approach made room for other specialists. In describing EPIC iO’s relationship with SAS, Mills explained how data gathered and processed at the edge could move into deeper analysis. Each organization could contribute its part without requiring the customer to invent the entire arrangement.

He also recognized a consequence of a successful first project: other departments become interested. Requirements grow. In his IntelliSite interview, he warned that handling each new request in isolation could leave customers managing several systems that shared little. His preferred answer was a platform that could accommodate the next application. Success, in this view, ought to leave the next team a usable door.

“Customers aren’t at the technology adoption curve to just figure out AI solutions on their own; they need help.”

Four years, and a handover

EPIC iO continued expanding during Mills’s tenure. In March 2024, it announced the acquisition of Twenty20 Solutions, adding to its AI, IoT and connectivity offering. The deal extended the company’s strategy of combining capabilities rather than asking every customer to assemble them independently.

Three months later came a different announcement. On June 21, EPIC iO named chief operating officer Duncan Riley as its next CEO. Mills would leave the role at the end of the month and help with the transition. DFW Capital’s Keith Pennell credited him with developing the operating team and advancing the company’s software and connectivity work.

That handover gives his EPIC iO chapter a clear boundary. The founding CEO helped shape the combination and led its first years. The business then continued under a successor. His own next move placed him in another part of the same commercial landscape, among the partners who help technology reach customers.

A new chair, familiar people

Intelisys announced Mills as president on July 2, 2024. The ScanSource company distributes connectivity and cloud services through a network of independent technology partners. His responsibilities now included strategic direction and growth for the company, its partners and suppliers.

He brought earlier relationships with him. As a manufacturer’s representative, he had pitched ScanSource when it entered the security business. He later worked with it around Cisco offerings, then encountered Intelisys through EPIC iO. By his account, the route to the new job stretched back roughly two decades.

Mills also spoke about the appeal of ScanSource’s culture and employees who had stayed for many years. The choice echoed his earlier interest in how a company feels to the people doing its work. Technical opportunity mattered alongside the people with whom he would spend his days.

At Intelisys, an entrepreneurial advisor’s business becomes part of the operating equation. The supplier wants access to customers; the advisor wants useful services and dependable support. Mills had moved from running one of the suppliers to leading a business that helps organize those relationships. His familiarity with both sides gave the transition a practical continuity.

The next order

The new role came with commercial work to do. By January 2025, ScanSource was discussing competitive pressure at Intelisys and Mills’s fresh examination of its challenges. Channel Exchange, previously intY CASCADE, provided a route for recruiting suppliers whose products required a different distribution arrangement.

In February 2026, ScanSource CEO Mike Baur described additional sales capabilities and a stronger emphasis on acquiring customers and winning new orders. His account connected that work to changes introduced after Mills arrived. The measures were concrete: opportunities, bookings and the business that eventually follows them.

Intelisys continues to list Mills as president. His public work also includes industry conversations about the future of distribution, including the April 2026 Channel Partners conference. The subjects have broadened from cameras and sensors to the businesses advising customers on what to buy.

There is room for a less corporate detail, too. In a 2025 LinkedIn post, Mills thanked Reggie Hilliard for making him a new jacket. Even a career spent explaining complex systems can accommodate a little tailoring. The fit matters.