World Wide Technology CEO unveils his five big bets for 2019
Jim Kavanaugh runs through where the global reseller and systems integrator will be investing heavily next year
As the CEO of one of the world's largest solution providers, with sales topping $10bn (£7.8bn), Jim Kavanaugh faces higher stakes than most when deciding which technology areas behind which to throw his weight.
During his visit to London last week, Kavanaugh (pictured) shared his thoughts on the market, before running us through which technology hotspots his firm will target next year.
1) SD-WAN
SD-WAN has been touted as a growth hotspot by analysts, with IDC forecasting it will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 70 per cent until 2021, when it will be worth $8.05bn. Kavanaugh said the technology has suddenly become "prime time".
"I'd say two years ago there was a lot of tyre kicking and evaluation going on in our labs and now SD-WAN has become prime time. That's an area where we see a lot of opportunity," he said.
"It's been an interesting space. Two or two and a half years ago I would say the leader or innovator was Cisco around their IWAN space and that morphed in a period of time with new entrants such as Viptela and Silver Peak and now you even have VMware with Velocloud.
"We have all these different capabilities that we've been working with for years now in our labs, building out different proof of concepts in a sandbox environments to help demonstrate to customers what works for their specific environments.
"In that space Cisco has been a leader with Viptela, and VMware with Velocloud is an interesting one that has come in a little later but is a pretty interesting and compelling solution. We've put a lot of time into not only building out the labs and using them to train and educate our customers and our employees, but we've also built out the technical practice along with the business advisers to go out and help customers to deploy SD-WAN tech."
World Wide Technology CEO unveils his five big bets for 2019
Jim Kavanaugh runs through where the global reseller and systems integrator will be investing heavily next year
2) WWT's 'Advanced Technology Center'
Kavanaugh singled out WWT's 'Advanced Technology Center' as his first high-level investment focus for WWT for 2019. WWT claims the testing lab was used by one major oil company to chop the time it took to evaluate complex object storage from six months to two weeks.
"At a very high level I'd say there are a couple of areas of focus. One is that we have built out something that I think is a very unique: our Advanced Technology Center," he said.
"This is a physical set of buildings and datacentres that we have virtualised to be able to do proof of concepts in sandbox environments for a broad base of technologies, from tier-one providers such as Cisco, VMware, HP, Dell and NetApp, to emerging technology providers in the SD-WAN and software-defined space, and cloud, converged and security space that we build into the advanced technology centre ecosystem.
"That allows us to go in and work with CTOs and CIOs to help modernise their IT infrastructure."
World Wide Technology CEO unveils his five big bets for 2019
Jim Kavanaugh runs through where the global reseller and systems integrator will be investing heavily next year
3) Chief technology and chief digital advisers
Kavanaugh pinpointed WWT's teams of chief technology advisers and chief digital officers as a second high-level investment area for the St Louis-based firm. These are former CTOs, CIOs and CDOs who sit across WWT's technology practices.
"We are building out practices around chief technology advisers, who are former CIOs and VPs of IT, along with a practice we call our chief digital advisers, who are individuals who have come out of more the digital ad agency space who also understand and are very familiar with software development," he explained.
"Those two groups of advisers not only guide and advise clients on IT infrastructure modernisation but also digital strategies and digital solutions that are implemented which drive a different customer experience from an application development perspective, healthcare experience or an operational/manufacturing experience. We feel from a high level that ability to bring relevance to the line of business with the IT organisation is something that has been incredibly well received by our customers by being able to bring those groups together."
World Wide Technology CEO unveils his five big bets for 2019
Jim Kavanaugh runs through where the global reseller and systems integrator will be investing heavily next year
4) Cloud consulting
With more infrastructure spending shifting off-premise, but customers not always sure what to put in the cloud or when, Kavanaugh flagged up cloud consulting as another area WWT is investing in heavily.
He explained: "[One growth area is] going out and helping customers sort out the complexity of on-premise, private cloud to hybrid cloud and to public cloud solutions.
"[It is about] being able to help them assess what they have today, where their applications are sitting, what's cloud-ready what's not, whether their infrastructure is ready, and if not, how you design and build an infrastructure that allows you to build an IT enterprise architecture that will support both on-premise, hybrid and public cloud capabilities.
"So that's an area we are spending a lot of time building out capabilities for in our lab and building solutions."
World Wide Technology CEO unveils his five big bets for 2019
Jim Kavanaugh runs through where the global reseller and systems integrator will be investing heavily next year
5) Next-generation flash and NVMe
Kavanaugh pinpointed next-generation technologies within the storage arena as a final area WWT is positioning itself to exploit next year.
"On the storage side, there are a number of differing things," he said. "Some of the mainstream vendors - the EMCs and NetApps - continue to make progress. Hats off to George Kurian at NetApp; he's done a good job of revitalising that app over the last couple of years with a good strategy and new products.
"But there are also emerging providers in that space, such as Cohesity in deduplication and backup, that are pretty interesting. I'd also say that next-generation flash is something we're seeing becoming mainstream, and NVMe technology. That's something our technologists are working with in our labs today and it is getting quite a bit of interest from our customers."