World Wide Technology’s EMEA leader has flagged sovereign AI as the “most exciting” new topic on his radar as he opened up on plans for a local hiring spree.
US-headquartered WWT rose to second spot in Oxygen 250 2025 after its UK business shattered the $3bn-revenue mark.
The privately held resell and services goliath is in UK hiring mode as it looks to grow beyond its stronghold in verticals such as financial services and life sciences, VP of global accounts, EMEA, Dominic Pierce, told IT Channel Oxygen.
It is looking to hire new sales and supporting resources to help it go deeper with existing customers and acquire new ones, he explained.
“We need to diversify into new verticals, and we’re looking to make the right hires to help us achieve that,” Pierce said.
“I’m not saying we want to go after [specific] verticals – we’re just assessing the market and looking at the opportunity versus what we do. There are disruptive new technologies like GenAI and the partnership with NVIDIA that may lead us into other customers that we wouldn’t traditionally have pursued.”
“Huge in a very short space of time”
WWT in December 2023 committed more than $500m over three years to drive enterprise AI adoption “at a global scale”.
Pierce said WWT is currently sizing up the opportunity around sovereign AI, a concept evangelised by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on a recent tour of Europe that took in London Tech Week, GTC Paris and Germany.
According to NVIDIA, sovereign AI ensures nations can develop and deploy AI using local infrastructure, datasets and expertise.
“This topic of sovereign AI has just become huge in a very short space of time,” Pierce said.
“It’s about how the data that resides in countries – whether it be healthcare data or financial services data, whatever it may be – is gold for that country.
“Working out what that means for WWT in the European region is going to be the big thing for us.”
“Being clearer on who we are and who we are not”
Having joined WWT from Cisco last February, Pierce acknowledged that his first nearly 18 months at the global VAR/integrator involved an “enormous learning curve”.
WWT is either number-one or two globally with most of its key vendors, which include not only Cisco but also Dell, HPE, NetApp, F5 Networks, Intel, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks, Pierce said.
“Although we’re an enormous global organisation with $23bn of revenue, we don’t have anything like the brand recognition in the UK and European market that Cisco does – and therefore that first client interaction is a harder thing to secure,” Pierce said of his vendor-to-VAR move.
“I was 16-odd years at Cisco. You are looking at your competition through a certain lens… and then you end up partnering with them.
“It’s been an enormous learning curve to look at the market through a more external lens and work out how to partner with all those amazing vendors.”
Being “really clear” to vendors and distributors about “who we are, and who we are not” is one of Pierce’s priorities for the second half.
Generally, “but not always”, this means serving large global enterprises headquartered in the UK and across Europe.
“I’m not sure we’ve been as clear as we should have been with the partner community about the capabilities we have, and the go-to-market and client profile where we believe we can be successful together,” Pierce said.
“I’ve spent an awful lot of time with our largest partners to make sure we’ve got a joint plan to go after the right markets together.”
“Our productivity stood out”
According to numbers it split out for us, WWT’s UK top line was only topped by Softcat last year thanks to a 60% annual uplift.
What’s driving that market-busting growth?
“Largely it’s come from doing larger deals and the types of deals that consolidate vendor spend and software capability into transactions that the customer consumes in one go,” Pierce responded.
“The interesting stat isn’t so much the billions of dollars, it’s the number of employees to deliver it [WWT 2024 headcount figure stood at 262].
“Our productivity really stood out.
“That’s not because we’re better than any of those other fine organisations in the top ten; it’s more that the profile of business we go after is laser focused on those larger transformational engagements and transactions that follow.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
