Eleven years ago, Reagan Dixon and three others founded Dallas-based Lumenate as a technology consulting firm, focusing mostly on storage and business continuity. Dixon, now CEO of the company, said that Lumenate was able to establish itself over the years as a strong player in the Dallas area where  it was based, especially in storage.

In 2011, that all changed.

"We saw that there were vectors of change going on in the industry that were going to force us to adapt or become irrelevant," Dixon said.

The changes that followed turned Lumenate into one of the fastest-growing solution providers in the country, landing at No. 2 on CRN's Fast Growth 150 list in 2013, with a two-year growth rate of 362 percent. It climbed from No. 298 on CRN's Solution Provider 500 list in 2012 to No. 122 in 2013.

Now, the solution provider has 210 employees with a geographic coverage branching out from Texas, up into Illinois and east over to Boston. Last year, Lumenate pulled in $150 million in revenue, and Dixon said the company is fast approaching $200 million in revenue.

To achieve that level of success, Dixon said that Lumenate had to evolve so it wouldn't become "just a partner of the last decade." That could be done through innovation and allowing the opportunity to create unique conversations with customers, Dixon said.

The first of those vectors that needed to be addressed was converged infrastructure. Because Lumenate was well-known for its storage expertise, customers began turning to the company, asking them more and more for help with converged infrastructure, Dixon said. That involved making the data center more flexible and highly available and bolstering then networking to connect back to the data center.

The second vector was consumption economics. Cloud concepts weren't anything new, Dixon said, but the technology was really starting to take hold with customers, changing procurement and management processes.

"We knew that we had to increase our scope beyond what we were doing," Dixon said.

The company used a series of acquisitions to create the scope and gather the skills it needed to compete its transformation. The acquisitions included end-point security company ANI Direct, Cisco networking and security partner  Troubadour, virtualization company International Computerware, Augmentity and DPSciences.