WWT 2011 National Sales Meeting: Transformation. Collaboration. Acceleration.

WWT 2011 National Sales Meeting 5K Runners

Congratulations to our sales team for a great 2010!  We just wrapped-up our annual 2011 National Sales Meeting (NSM) held this year in sunny Phoenix.  It was a fantastic event that included our entire field sales and pre-sales teams.  We also appreciated having many of our partners attend, especially Cisco, HP, EMC and NetApp.

Joe Koenig, President of World Wide Technology, hosted the event and was joined by co-founders Jim Kavanaugh, CEO and Dave Steward, Chairman.  Joe, Jim and Dave spent nearly all of their time meeting the team and, most importantly, listening intently for feedback on how we can improve.

Joe and Jim’s recap of 2010 and their outlook for 2011 provided a view of what we see in the future: lots of opportunity!  Jim said it best at our 20^th Anniversary celebration in 2010, “As the world grows smaller, our opportunity grows larger.”

Our partner keynotes, Rob Lloyd, Senior Vice President with Cisco; Tom Mendoza, Vice Chairman at NetApp; David Scott, Vice President with HP; and Chuck Hollis, Global Marketing CTO at EMC also set the stage for growth and opportunity.

I was particularly impressed with the sessions where our teams talked about how we were helping customers with major initiatives within their organizations, whether it’s deploying 30,000 phones for the State of Missouri, or helping a large New York bank navigate along their “journey” to the private cloud.

Our theme of “Transformation. Collaboration. Acceleration.” was quite evident throughout the presentations and keynotes.

Transformation seemed to be highly appropriate for this week’s event.  WWT is continuing our transformation from a VAR to a ‘problem solver’ and, in more and more instances, a ‘value generator’ in terms of providing consulting and advisory services to help customers build new infrastructures that can deliver IT as a Service.  Our account managers are also transforming, as they realize the depth and breadth of capabilities that World Wide has invested in over the past few years.

From an industry perspective, data center Transformation is shaking the very foundation of IT infrastructures.  Our Data Center practice is only a few years in the making but we already have over 100 pre-sales and professional services technical architects and consultants at WWT.  We also have a multi-million dollar Advanced Technology Center (ATC) equipped with integrated VBlock, FlexPod and BladeMatrix infrastructure where we can physically in St. Louis, or virtually anywhere in the world, show these architectural platforms in action.

A side note.  There are some things that we don’t want to transform that Jim Kavanaugh is quick to point out:

“When dealing with new markets, new technology and new business models, we must be agile, flexible and creative!  When dealing with our culture and core values, we must be solid as a rock.”

It’s also difficult to overlook our transformation from a Cisco core routing and switch partner to an end-to-end provider of unified communications and collaborations solutions.  In the past year alone, we’ve engaged on deployment projects totaling over 100,000 phones.  (Note: We still are and will remain a very good core routing and switch provider!)

Speaking of collaboration, we would not be successful if we didn’t have the teamwork and collaboration that goes on amongst our internal teams and the unique collaborative relationships with our strategic partners.   And most importantly, the highly collaborative relationships we’ve created and nurtured with our customers to help them solve their most pressing business problems through technology.

A word about Acceleration.  As I’ve said in a previous post, (Speed: An Elementary Particle of Business) I think speed is a universal variable that is measurable for any given business process and increasing the velocity of business processes seems to be an indisputable goal.   Acceleration is about ‘increasing speed’ and is evident in WWT’s desire to quickly help our customers, whether that’s turning around a product configuration and quote or deploying sophisticated unified communications solutions faster so that our customers, in turn, have a faster ‘time to savings’ or ‘time to revenue.’

The IT industry has always been a highly competitive market.  I believe acceleration also speaks to the sense of urgency related to the opportunity we see in our future.

NSM was a time for recognition, learning and collaboration.  It was also time for having some fun and celebrating our success together as WWT and with our extended team of our OEM partners.  We left a lot of round, tiny “World Wide Technology, Inc.” billboards strewn across the Phoenix desert last week!  And there were a brave, few (very few) souls who made the 5K run Wednesday morning – that’s me taking the picture and, yes, I did run!

A heartfelt thanks to the NSM planning team, especially Danielle, Holly and Sara, who spent a lot of time and energy making the week an informative and fun event for all.

After seeing and meeting all of the highly professional and passionate sales reps that we have across the country, I know for certain that 2010 was a great year for World Wide Technology but I left bullish that 2011 will be a fantastic year!