WWT and Intel Accelerate Business Outcomes in 2020

According to industry predictions, global IT spending in 2020 is expected to approach $4 trillion. As the pace of technology accelerates, the complexity facing IT professionals today is staggering – and so is the pressure to make the right choices.

But despite that incredible spend, IT endeavors still often fall short of expectations. Sky-high stakes notwithstanding, CIOs recognize that digital transformation will help them fend off competition, grow their business and provide a better customer experience.

What IT professionals need are experienced allies who can help "de-risk" their decision-making process of evaluating technology choices, learning what's available, identifying what fulfills their requirements and even getting to touch and experience actual solutions. That's why World Wide Technology and our longtime technology partner Intel are redoubling their efforts to accelerate customers' business outcomes in 2020. We're working to speed the decision-making process by providing the latest technologies that can solve IT's greatest challenges – and we're doing it through a unique platform that accelerates and simplifies the testing environment.

Sharpening our combined focus to drive customer outcomes in the ATC

As WWT celebrates our 30th anniversary in 2020, we've cultivated a global network of alliances with industry leaders – most notably Intel, whose architecture forms the foundation for more than 95 percent of customer solutions in our Advanced Technology Center. Our longstanding partnership with Intel is based on a shared dedication not just to the latest and greatest technology, but rather to impacting the business and IT outcomes that result from the proper deployment of that technology. And now, WWT and Intel are expanding their shared endeavors in 2020, taking our partnership to the next level.

Nowhere is the power of the WWT/Intel alliance more evident than in the ATC. Known as Silicon Valley in St. Louis, this unique facility brings today's leading-edge technologies into a single, collaborative ecosystem that benefits companies globally as they focus on solving today's most challenging IT problems.

In the last 12 months, we have built more than 20 Intel solutions in our ATC, showcasing the latest Intel® processors, network interface cards, SSDs, software and other technologies. Some examples include:

• Intel® Select Solutions for vSAN;
• Intel® FPGA solutions for Swarm64, rENIAC, Levyx Risk Analytics, Napatech, CTAccel and Megh Computing;
• telecom solutions from Red Hat OpenStack VNF  as well as virtual broadband network gateway (vBNG); and
• cloud solutions, including Google Cloud's Anthos Lab  and Azure Stack Edge.

WWT has integrated the latest Intel technologies into the ATC, including the 2nd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory, Intel® Optane™ SSDs, and new Intel® FPGA  programmable acceleration cards (PACs) preconfigured with real workloads and apps.

A unique platform to accelerate business outcomes

In late 2019, WWT launched our new platform, bringing the ATC to users anywhere in the world at any time to serve IT practitioners and decision-makers with digital experiences that can't be found anywhere else. WWT's new platform enables participating customers and partners to evaluate, test and deploy technology at an accelerated pace. Qualified users simply create an account to gain access to the platform. They can quickly launch a lab to enjoy instant hands-on learning — an experience that could take months to achieve if they were to create a similar lab on their own.

WWT and Intel provision these innovative labs with the appropriate engineering resources from both companies to help customers find their ideal problem-solving technology. Although the application is self-serve, human assistance is always available at the click of a button to request expert assistance, or to schedule a workshop or demo with a live expert. The result is a fast, powerful resource that enables users to quickly educate themselves, evaluate their options and leverage the power of community on a platform where innovation can go viral.

Solutions to solve the most challenging IT problems

Crucially, WWT has set up our ATC resource to be a multi-vendor solution provider, working with best-of-breed Intel-based technology companies. Rather than being locked into a single proprietary system, WWT and our partners can pull together the best server, storage and software technologies for each unique requirement, solving the most challenging IT problems in:

• artificial intelligence and machine learning, optimizing assets with the compute power of Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers, FPGAs for acceleration, high-end databases, Swarm64, rENIAC and others;
• the Internet of Things, gleaning greater insights from collected sensor data in industrial, retail and federal use cases; and
• multicloud solutions that mix on-prem, public cloud, hybrid cloud and others, working with partners like VMware and Microsoft Azure for the optimum workload placement determinations.

Envisioning what's to come in WWT's next 30 years

Innovations in the trillion-dollar tech industry continue to accelerate, complexity grows beyond understanding, and IT professionals are under the gun to deliver on "the best solution" – whatever that may be.

We might never get there alone, which is why we all need reliable partners – to collaborate, innovate and accelerate new solutions to derive positive business outcomes. WWT's new, community-based ATC platform, powered by Intel® technology, is designed to serve as that acceleration engine, with hundreds of labs and demos, engineering resources and a more flexible multivendor approach.