WWT’s Hiring Blitz: 1,500 New Employees In 2020 To Drive Services

Channel powerhouse World Wide Technology is going on a hiring spree in 2020 to ‘aggressively’ become services-led organization. Here are the new positions and market segments WWT is attacking.

Global solution provider superstar World Wide Technology is on a mission to drive services sales through the roof this year by hiring an astonishing 1,500 net new employees in 2020.

“We set a pretty aggressive goal around our services and that is to triple our services sales number and the amount of people that we have in services over the next five years,” said World Wide Technology CEO and co-founder Jim Kavanaugh (pictured) in an interview with CRN. “This month alone it looks like we’ll hire – just in our application development services group – a minimum of 30 net new developers. We feel pretty good about our overall services-led strategy.”

World Wide Technology (WWT) is one of the largest channel partners in the world, generating $11.2 billion in revenue in 2018 along with an estimated profit of $700 million. The St. Louis-based company has budgeted enough funding this year to hire an additional 1,500 employees, topping last year’s 700 new employee headcount.

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Kavanaugh, whose company ranks No. 8 on CRN’s 2019 Solution Provider 500 list, plans to hire new positions this year targeting four key and fast-growing areas for WWT.

“The largest growth area is application development for us. Then cloud -- which would be cloud developers, cloud architects, cloud strategist – that’s incredibly in-demand and a fast-growing area of business for us,” said Kavanaugh, who co-founded WWT in 1990.

“We’re also looking at hiring full-time data scientists domestically and looking at some partnerships globally because there’s just a demand, and I would say a lack of supply, in some of these categories,” he said. “The other fourth area that is a big growth opportunity is security.”

Additionally, WWT is thinking outside the box when it comes to developing new talent. “We’re trying to put some development programs in place to bring up to speed and develop some of the younger, entry level talent that have the capacity to play in some of these different places,” he said.

Kavanaugh said WWT is going on a services-led tear right now as the company is helping customers more than ever succeed in their digital transformation strategies.

A big success has been WWT’s innovative and hands-on Advanced Technology Center testing and research facility. The center brings together WWT, vendor partners and customers to design, build, educate, demonstrate and deploy technology solutions in a facility full of thousands of hardware and software offerings from the likes of Dell Technologies, Cisco and Microsoft, to name a few.

Kavanaugh said WWT’s largest initiative in 2020 is driving digital transformation for customers of all sizes by doubling down on services.

“For 2020, it’s about aggressively moving towards a services-led organization that is highly focused on driving digital transformation for our customers,” said Kavanaugh. “The fastest growth we’re seeing in services would be around application development, cloud and security. But also traditional infrastructure like core networking, compute, storage, architecture, voice, video, collaboration -- those areas are also growing.”

Although the majority of the company’s $11.2 billion revenue still comes from traditional hardware and software sales, WWT’s services business is growing faster with the goal of tripling service revenue over the next five years.

“We have a more aggressive target around services than we have in our traditional top line and bottom-line growth which is somewhat daunting. We feel pretty good about it though based off the growth we experienced last year,” said Kavanaugh. “Services are growing faster than our traditional businesses. Going into 2020, we feel pretty good about that. The activity is very strong across the board.”