World Wide Technology: No one can do it all on IoT

Global Cisco and Dell EMC partner claims the IoT market is on the verge of explosive channel growth

Cisco and Dell EMC partner World Wide Technology (WWT) has said the Internet of Things (IoT) market is on the "verge of sizeable growth", but claims linking up with other partners is essential for resellers in order to take full advantage of the trend.

WWT is a US-headquartered reseller which works with most of the large global vendors, but has closer relationships with Cisco and Dell EMC. The firm is privately owned, has 4,000 staff and sells mainly to FTSE 100 and Fortune 100 global customers. Revenue last year hot $9.4bn, of which $170m came from the UK. In the coming years, it hopes to grow in Europe between 30 per cent and 50 per cent.

Ben Boswell, WWT's EMEA director, told CRN that his firm stands out from the likes of Computacenter, BT and Dimension Data due to its sheer breadth.

"If you look at the profile of the customers we are working with - they are global organisations, who have decision-making groups across the world," he said. "Many of them have challenges associated with their speed of execution in rolling out new IT solutions. Where I feel we are different is that we can help a customer to be able to take a concept or idea with which they need help, we hire subject matter experts, and we build cross-functional teams to help them quickly. We rarely get into a situation where a customer, once they started to engage with us, [leaves]. If we are doing our job properly, we are very different to a Computacenter, a Di Data, a BT. And we're very different to an Accenture and a KPMG, and we are very different to Wipro. We are holding that centre ground where they are trying to operate with various degrees of success."

Boswell said the IoT is high on his company's agenda, claiming its goal is to become one of Cisco's IoT partners of choice. He cited one customer, a global manufacturer, which over 18 months made $1bn of savings thanks to the IoT technology it deployed.

Some partners in the IoT space have said although the technology is something they want to get on board with, the complexity and the fact each solution is hard to replicate, makes it more difficult for them - especially if they are a relatively small company.

Boswell said that he doesn't believe that WWT's large size gives it too much of an advantage but said speed when delivering IoT is essential.

"Cisco has an incredibly strong message [on IoT] and they need partners like us, who have people and the underlying capability, to be able to bring all of that toghether and deliver bespoke solutions very, very quickly.

"For those FTSE 100 companies who are operating in a significantly competitive marketplace, where it is a race against of time to be able to innovate. Innovation can be a competitive differentiator. We see sizable opportunities to work with them to deliver customer IoT solutions is for them."

Iot "a team sport"

Boswell added that he sees the IoT as being "on the verge of sizeable growth". The nature of IoT, which can involve adding sensors to significant numbers of devices, means that partners need to work with one another to deliver a customer solution in this space.

Boswell said that he too is seeing this, and that no one company - vendor or reseller - can deliver IoT alone.

"IoT is a team sport," he said. "It really depends on each one of the customer engagements we are in. Really the art and science of this is being able to pull together teams which consist of not just our customers and ourselves, but of other partners which may be specifically specialist in a certain area and working together to deliver the outcome a customer is looking for. I think it would be a bold statement, even from an IBM or one of the large providers, if they said they had everything covered."