From AI to cybersecurity, WWT focused on enabling customers

“Our partner relationships and our alliances are critical. We can't do what we do without those relationships and working together with our customers,” commented Jason Brouwers, Vice President, Head of Asia Pacific, Japan and China.

World Wide Technology’s presence in the Asia Pacific region started as an extension of its global financial business which predominantly ran out of the UK and the US. But in the last decade, the technology services provider and systems integrator has built its local presence in the region. Today, WWT has a strong presence in Singapore, India, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Australia.

In a conversation with CRN Asia during WWT’s AI Day in Singapore, Jason Brouwers, Vice President, Head of Asia Pacific, Japan and China stated that WWT now has the capability to not just deliver globally for customers but also deliver for local customers globally outward.

“It's interesting because a lot of the initial deals that we did, the business that we did with the local logos, was helping them expand into other countries, and then we grew the business back into Asia as well. There were a few Singaporean companies that we started doing that with, where we helped them build data centers in the US and South America, etc, and then we brought back a bit more business here in Asia as well. And now we're at the point where we're a fully functioning, very successful business on our own, here in Asia Pacific, with the local business,” said Brouwers.

Echoing Brouwers’ sentiments is Eric Helfer, Area Vice President, Asia Pacific. For Helfer, WWT’s global accounts are equally as important as the Asia outbound accounts.

“Our Asia outbound accounts are growing at a tremendous rate at the moment across the region. From a go-to-market perspective, WWT has really come in as a breath of fresh air to a lot of these places. There's been partners that have been in place for 10, 15, 20 years, and when we come into a new market, or we start to see new customers, they look at us like a sounding board. What are we doing globally out of the US? What are we doing globally out of Europe? Please tell us what's happening, and please teach us what they're doing! And we're trying to bring a local flavour of that into the market, and that's where we're seeing a lot of our success as well,” said Helfer.

Brouwers also highlighted that the key differentiator that WWT has in this market is its global integration centers. WWT has a large integration center in Singapore, another in Mumbai, and they're building others in the region. He added that WWT will also start to expand the supply chain, which is critical for some of its global customers to be able to run their business.

“The second major differentiator we have is our advanced technology center, where we have the multitude of the biggest and best technologies in the world, all in one place. Our customers can run proof of concepts, demos, but more importantly, they can get great engineering insights into the technology stack that they want to build and test for their environment,” added Brouwers.

In fact, Brouwers said what excites him most about APAC is that the region is starting to lead the world.

“For many years, it’s a very exciting growth area, but you're now seeing massive opportunities for Asia Pacific, from Australia up to India all the way up to Korea. There are opportunities everywhere, from the skills of the people to the opportunity and the fact that things aren't necessarily a geographic limitation anymore. Even when you look in the field of AI, the ability to export tokens is the new commodity that will become extremely valuable and Asia Pacific has the opportunity within the AI to own that space, just through the nature of the different geographies throughout the region and the skills of the people and the ability to execute on that,” said Brouwers.

The AI opportunity

Tim Brooks, Managing Director & Chief AI Advisor at WWT, who was also in Singapore for the customer and partner event, explained that AI has been part of their offering even before the technology became mainstream.

“We're not new to this. We've deployed hundreds of solutions, everywhere from data science and machine learning early days to now very complex GenAI solutions and GenAI solutions combined with machine learning. So, it's a deterministic with machine learning, but accessible through GenAI in those layers. Through that experience that we've gained over the years, it has accelerated with the mass adoption and interest in GenAI and the scaling of the infrastructure to support it,” said Brooks.

Brooks also pointed out that AI represents the fastest growing dimension for WWT currently. He added that the growth of AI is also fuelling the demand of both cybersecurity as well as security for AI infrastructure. Brooks also mentioned that as customers want a reliable and experienced partner that knows how to deliver results using AI, WWT has almost 3,000 employees with an AI driver’s license which better equipes them to talk to customers in their AI journey.

“In Singapore, I've found the customers and the conversations very rewarding in that there's a lot of ambition and energy for artificial intelligence. Singapore is highly ranked on world indexes for artificial intelligence adoption. I do see that there is an opportunity here for real scaling of not just AI infrastructure, but all of the different applications and solutions that can be reliably hosted in Singapore. Customers want data sovereignty, they want reliability on where it's hosted, they need that and Singapore is a great environment for that,” he added.

Meanwhile, while WWT’s AI development started on the infrastructure side of the AI building capacity from the GPU side of things, Brouwers also stated that the focus has now expanded to the consulting and use case development. This includes areas around cybersecurity which predominantly are challenges that a lot of financial institutions and other large enterprises have that's critically important.

“We help them get to that as quickly as possible. We help them define what they need, and it takes a lot of questions around how big should we go? How should we scale this? Because they know they need to do something as they just don't know how far they need to go. So, we can use our AI proving ground within our advanced technology centre to test and validate that so they can then grow that effectively,” said Brouwers.

Cybersecurity at the core

According to Helfer, security remains at the heart of every conversation WWT has with customers in the region. And it’s a critical one as it’s the integrity of every organization, whereby its crucial to be highly dependent on making sure they're secure as cyber is now also a board level discussion.

“Companies have got to manage their risk, and the cyber posture of their company is critical. And that's why it's so critical that we lead a lot of our discussions around that cyber posture and how we can help them as well, whether it's related to AI or a general technology sense,” said Helfer.

This is also why Brooks believes that while AI is great for what it can be used for, it's also an attack vector, security-wise, for things that organizations are concerned about.

“The C-suite has a whole lot of decisions to make that they didn't have to make before AI. And where our value lies are in helping them make their way through all those decisions, taking all that complexity, and then mindful of their own specific needs and strategies, helping transform it into a series of important choices that they can make reliably. Hence our AI proving ground and our thin consulting layer comes in. But at the same time, we preserve their optionality going forward for where they want to host workloads, what kind of workloads they want to do. And I think we're uniquely positioned to do that,” said Brooks.

As businesses seek more cybersecurity solutions in their AI journey, there is also a lot of vendor consolidation happening in the industry. Brouwers said the vendor consolidation in cybersecurity is huge because the organization initially bought tools for specific use cases but eventually ended up with 50 different tool sets where they must manage and monitor. And a lot of times, they don’t get full use of them as well.

The partner ecosystem

For Brouwers, he believes this is one of the reasons why WWT is valuable, not just to the customers, but to its partners as well, especially for having that ability to translate the needs into technology dependencies or vice versa.

“Our partner relationships and our alliances are critical. We can't do what we do without those relationships and working together with our customers. So, we don't do it in isolation. It's really a tri-party success, which is the customer, the partner, and ourselves to make that work,” said Brouwers.

At the same time, he believes it's critical for solutions to be led by the customers.

“We have great partnerships, and we do great things with all of our partners. Depending on the region or the customer, we've got challenges, and we've got great opportunities. We've got the whole spectrum. And the thing is, we just need to do what fits best for the customer. We'll obviously work closely with our partners to work on the best possible solution, but at the end of the day, the customer's got a challenge or a problem, and we just need to get them to a solution or to a posture that helps them as quickly as possible. And we'll work by all means to try and make sure that we do that,” said Brouwers.

This can even go down to the way customers monitor their data and even just trying to get the signal out of the noise that they have in their network. Customers might be getting a lot of false positives in what they're receiving from the data in their network, and WWT helps them clarify that as well.

“So, there's a whole spectrum of ways that we can help our customers get there, and all of our partner ecosystem can help in different ways to achieve that,” added Brouwers.

At the end of the day, WWT aims to be the lightweight accelerator for its customers so that they become self-sustaining, build up skills internally and be off to achieve their goals.

"And that's really a differentiator for us that I'm finding in the marketplace versus the classic consulting model, or the data company, or BPO, and then of course classic integrators. We uniquely have all those functions available to our customers,” concluded Brouwers.