World Wide Technology (WWT) is Cisco's largest partner globally. Its regional director for Europe discusses the firm's expansion plans for the UK and Europe
As part of our Top VARs 2016 report, we caught up with Ben Boswell, regional director of World Wide Technology, which ranked 21st in the list with revenue of £139m
WWT is a big player in the US, but a new face for Top VARs. Can you tell us about your business model for the UK and European market?
We focus on Fortune 100 and FTSE 100 organisations and build our teams to support those accounts globally. Our customer base continues to grow within Europe, and our go-to-market is focused on servicing large regional and global customers.
From a global perspective, we have offices in London, Amsterdam and a couple of remote satellite offices depending on where our customers are across Europe, and across Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, São Palo and India.
How large is your UK business?
The UK office launched at the start of 2012. We currently have a headcount of about 42 there and 65 in Amsterdam, so in all about 100 full-time employees for Europe. But we have a fairly sizeable contingency workforce for delivering services. We first started off with large US nationals [customers], but we are beginning to win sizable European accounts because our size and scale here locally has grown.
What is WWT's core business?
Our business is centred firmly upon assisting our clients with both software and technology integration programmes, encompassing agile software development, data analytics, cybersecurity, IoT and core infrastructure consulting underpinned by our lab services, advanced technology centre and global integration technology centres.
What are your growth plans?
We have grown our European business by over 50 per cent this year.
We plan to launch WWT Asynchrony Labs [in the UK] on 1 January 2017, enhancing our regional capability to deliver IoT and data analytics solutions.
I would expect from a top-line perspective to grow the European business by 25 to 30 per cent as a minimum next year. Our aspirational goal is to grow by 50 to 60 per cent again.