VeriSource Buys ANB’s IS Division
by July 23, 2001 12:00 am 281 views
Millennia LLC, once an information systems division of Arkansas National Bancshares in Bentonville, has been acquired and spun off by a group of four investors including three former employees.
The new technology services company, VeriSource LLC, does application development, software programming and development, data center hosting, network engineering and PC support. Verisource recently moved into a 6,500-SF office suite at Pinnacle Point in Rogers.
Chris Maddox, CEO of VeriSource, Don Goff, chief operating officer, and Chad Hinton, chief technical officer, all worked for Millennia. Chief Financial Officer Terry Johnson is a partner in the Pinnacle Point mixed-use development and has spent the last few years dabbling in real estate.
But Johnson is also an old hand at technology. He owned and operated Micro Computer Center in Little Rock from 1981-91 and established and operated CustomMicro in Little Rock and Fayetteville through 1999.
Maddox said he couldn’t disclose any terms of the buyout, but said he expects VeriSource to gross $2.5 million this year. The firm employs 28 people and boasts more than 100 clients.
Verisource, available online at www.veri-source.com, has written its own Internet banking package that’s still used by all of Arkansas National Bank’s facilities. It has also set up a gift card processing program for Valutec Inc. of Nashville, Tenn., that can process point-of-sale transactions worldwide.
From 1994-97, Maddox was director of store systems at Papa John’s International Inc. in Lexington, Ky., and responsible for all of that company’s point-of-sale transactions. He said community banks and small- to mid-sized businesses are a major portion of VeriSource’s target market.
The appeal of VeriSource, he said, is that smaller companies can access its technicians who have large-scale, large-company experience. For clients, its like having a virtual CIO.
Goff was director of technology operations at Papa Johns from 1994-97. Hinton was a senior consultant for Sable Technology in Rogers, which in recent years morphed through a series of acquisitions into Intellimark. A number of other VeriSource programmers were high-level tech managers at locally based Fortune 500 firms like J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
“If the mainframe is down at J.B. Hunt, the answer is not to reboot the computer,” Maddox said. “We work on writing code and achieving things that will make a system work, period.