World Wide Technology
Kavanaugh said World Wide Technology’s success could also be attributed to its concentrated effort to build a corporate culture that celebrates integrity and holds its management team accountable for execution. “We hold people accountable to our core values,” he said. Those values are embracing change, diversity of people and thought, being passionate about work, having a positive attitude and being a team player, he said.
Outsourcing is in for World Wide Technology.
“We made a conscious focus on our evolution from being a VAR to being able to deliver fairly large outsourced supply chain solutions,” said Jim Kavanaugh, president and CEO of World Wide Technology, St. Louis. “That’s a big and growing piece of our business—being more of a managed outsourced solution provider for large organizations.”
That evolution helped the company grow its revenue a whopping 71 percent year over year, to nearly $1.4 billion for the 12 months ended June 30, 2004, up from $801 million for the prior-year period.
Kavanaugh said large enterprise customers have come to rely on World Wide Technology to handle “pretty sophisticated” supply chain solutions—everything from network infrastructure and desktop deployments to the disposition of old products. “We manage the full life-cycle process,” he said.
World Wide Technology’s growth has also been helped along by its presence in some large vertical markets, including the telecommunications, automotive and federal government markets. “We’ve tried to position ourselves in multiple markets,” Kavanaugh said.
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Another key element to World Wide Technology’s ongoing strategy for growth is to gain organizational efficiencies by integrating its processes more deeply and broadly with key business partners. For example, the company has seamlessly integrated Cisco Systems’ Web configurator tools into its order management applications, which has greatly reduced the time needed to accurately configure and price network solutions. World Wide Technology offers this supply chain solution directly to end-user customers through a customized Web services offering.
“That capability provides a pretty cost-effective means of deploying products and solutions,” Kavanaugh said, adding, “As the market consolidates and margins erode, you’ve got to be a very efficient organization.”