WWT CEO On WWT 'Tripling' AI Initiatives

WWT CEO On 'Unhappy' Broadcom VMware Customers Seeking Alternatives And WWT 'Tripling' AI Initiatives

'[Broadcom's] been an incredibly successful company. They have a strategy and approach that they take. But I can tell you, it's not sitting well with the majority of the customers—a very large majority. Customers are looking for alternatives,' says WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh.

Jim Kavanaugh, CEO of the $20 billion tech powerhouse World Wide Technology, is "tripling down" on AI initiatives, expanding partnerships with AI leaders likes of NVIDIA and HPE, and helping "unhappy" VMware by Broadcom customers find alternative solutions.

"There's a lot of unhappy customers out there just in regards to the approach that VMware-Broadcom has taken," said Kavanaugh, WWT's CEO and channel stalwart in an interview with CRN.

"[Broadcom's] been an incredibly successful company. They have a strategy and approach that they take. But I can tell you, it's not sitting well with the majority of the customers—a very large majority," said WWT's CEO. "Customers are looking for alternatives."

St. Louis-based WWT is one of the largest solution providers on the planet, ranking No. 7 on CRN's 2024 Solution Provider 500 list, and is a longtime VMware partner. However, after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware for $61 billion last year, Broadcom implemented significant channel and go-to-market changes including eliminating VMware's partner program, increasing prices and taking thousands of VMware's biggest customers direct, to name just a few changes.

WWT is now helping customers who want to work with the new VMware by Broadcom, but also moving many clients off VMware into either the public cloud or VMware alternatives such as Nutanix. Broadcom declined to comment on the matter.

"I will tell you that, I've got a couple of executive briefings this week and one of the topics is just this, 'How do we help our [VMware customers]?' We have a plan, a methodology and approach to help them think through these things," Kavanaugh said.

Another major strategy underway at WWT, which has nearly 10,000 employees and more than 55 offices across the globe, is investing significantly in AI initiatives and doubling down on partnerships with the likes of NVIDIA. In fact, WWT recently won NVIDIA's 2024 Americas AI Enterprise Partner of the Year award.

"We believe that AI is this massive accelerator of infrastructure and building out these enterprise capabilities," he said. "I personally think that the generative AI side, the technology side of AI, is going to be the most transformational technology we've ever seen in history."

In a recent interview with CRN, Kavanaugh talked about why WWT is putting a "really unbalanced amount of investment into AI" to succeed in the future as well as what it's like to do business today with VMware by Broadcom.

Where is WWT placing its investing bets in 2024 and beyond to continue your growth and success?

It's really tripling down on our AI initiatives.

We're not abandoning any of the things that we've been doing. Because we think, the infrastructure side of helping organizations build out their enterprise architecture— from voice to video, data centers, networking, cybersecurity, compute, storage—all of those things are critical to driving customers' infrastructure to enable AI and do it in a very secure, scalable way.

So we believe that AI is this massive accelerator of infrastructure and building out these enterprise capabilities. The opportunity out there is massive.

We're putting just a really unbalanced amount of investment into AI around the infrastructure in our labs, in our partnerships, and our advisory, consulting, software development, and data science teams.

Because this is going to play out over the next five to 10 years. This is a long-term play. We're just scratching the surface in regards to where this is going to go.