WWT CEO On Softchoice Acquisition, Nvidia Partnership, And AI Data Center Opportunities

‘We found the build-out of Softchoice in the SMB space and the midmarket and commercial space, both in Canada and in the US, to be very attractive, because that's a big market that we haven't necessarily gone after, and we don't necessarily have the, I would say, muscle memory. We haven't built out the go-to-market around that space. So instead of trying to invent that ourselves, we thought Softchoice could be a very good acquisition to accelerate that,’ says WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh.

This week’s Nvidia GTC 2025 conference brought together hundreds of companies looking to grab a piece of the AI action spearheaded by Nvidia by means of its industry-leading GPU and DPU technology.

Among the exhibitors at the conference in San Jose, Calif., was St. Louis-based solution provider World Wide Technology (WWT), which just recently closed its $1.25 billion acquisition of Softchoice, a Toronto-based software and cloud-focused IT solution provider.

WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh (left, in photo) told CRN that his company has been an Nvidia Partner of the Year for the last eight or nine years in a row.

WWT ranks No. 7 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500 list, while Softchoice ranks at No. 35.

Kavanaugh said that 99.9 percent of WWT’s growth over the last 35 years has been organic, and that his company continues to see enormous opportunity for organic growth. But he said his company is open to making more acquisitions along the lines of the Softchoice deal.

“Those acquisitions, from our perspective, could be ones that complement and synergize what we do today, and it could be technology-based acquisitions focused on AI, cloud or cyber,” Kavanaugh said.

“Or it could be a combination of technology-based synergies along with geographic capabilities that would help accelerate our capability to expand domestically and in North America and globally. So we put together an acquisition team about a year and a half ago and started building a pipeline of different companies that we were potentially interested in.”

The first acquisition from that pipeline was Softchoice, which Kavanaugh said had the synergies and complementary capabilities WWT was looking for.

“We found the build-out of Softchoice in the SMB space and the midmarket and commercial space, both in Canada and in the US, to be very attractive, because that’s a big market that we haven’t necessarily gone after, and we don’t necessarily have the, I would say, muscle memory,” he said. “We haven’t built out the go-to-market around that space. So instead of trying to invent that ourselves, we thought Softchoice could be a very good acquisition to accelerate that.”

WWT also found Softchoice’s focus on the cloud and cybersecurity to be very complementary to what it was doing, Kavanaugh said.

“And we liked their focus on AI, specifically around Microsoft, them being a big Microsoft partner in the SMB space,” he said. “I would say 90-plus percent of their focus has been in the SMB space. All of those things were very attractive to World Wide, and we felt very complementary to what we're doing. And we also felt very, very good about their CEO and their leadership team. We really liked them. We liked their mindset and the culture of the organization.”

Softchoice CEO Andrew Caprara (right, in photo), told CRN that, while Softchoice was a very profitable independent company, its growth was attracting a lot of attention in the industry. The temptation to become part of a larger company like WWT was also fueled by the consideration that the company had to make a move to meet its responsibility to its shareholders.

“As we started going through the process, it just became really clear that the combination of Softchoice with World Wide would really stand out in the marketplace,” Caprara said. “When you think about some of the combinations in our space in the past, it’s usually more like-for-like M&A. It’s a hardware-focused company buying another one, or somebody buying something at a low multiple. This is really one of the first times where you’re seeing one of the premier Microsoft and software solution providers joining forces with one of the premier infrastructure and AI and cybersecurity solution providers.”

The acquisition felt like a good fit from a solution and a people perspective, Caprara said.

“It felt like now is the time to take advantage of the opportunity, because, as you know, there’s a lot of change for our customers right now and they’re really looking for somebody that can help them with an end-to-end solution. And I think we can do that now like no one else can.”

WWT At Nvidia GTC 2025

When asked what WWT was doing at Nvidia GTC 2025, Kavanaugh said his company has built multiple AI use cases based on its 10-year relationship with Nvidia and found that having a presence at the conference was a great way to show them off to clients and potential clients.

These include use cases around WWT’s unique ability to design, engineer and build out AI purpose-built data centers around Nvidia technology and the other components that go into the architectural build, he said.

“And then we have also use cases that we have built for our customers, and some of them for ourselves internally, like an AI-generated RFP [request for proposal] assistant that we have designed and built internally and have deployed for customers,” he said. “And there are some things around computer vision that we’re doing, some digital twins that we showed.”

WWT has been working with Nvidia on the data science, natural language processing and machine learning side, Kavanaugh said. The emergence of GenAI and ChatGPT and related technologies put WWT in a great position with Nvidia given its established data science group along with software development and infrastructure expertise.

“We are a big partner with Nvidia on the infrastructure side, helping with data center and AI purpose-built data center buildouts,” he said. “We’re working with them domestically, in Europe and in the Middle East on that. And we’re working with them also on the inference, the outcome side. With our management consulting software development group, we’re working with them and our customers to help build out different capabilities, whether it’s a digital twin or some type of computer vision capabilities around AI use cases.”