How WWT’s Softchoice Deal Became A Huge Win-Win For Both Companies

(l. to r.): Jim Kavanagh, Co-Founder, CEO World Wide Technology, and Andrew Caprara, President, CEO, Softchoice

New hires, new markets, new opportunities: More than 15 months after the acquisition, WWT and Softchoice are going full steam ahead to leverage the skill sets and the vendor portfolios that each brings to the table.

**O**ftentimes, the hardest part of an acquisition is selecting the right target in the first place.

Jim Kavanaugh, co-founder and CEO of World Wide Technology, believes the solution provider found just such a target in Toronto-based Softchoice, the approximately $770 million solution provider it acquired for $1.3 billion in March 2025 that is now the engine behind its unprecedented charge into SMB and midmarket accounts.

WWT was already a formidable enterprise- and government-focused outfit with $20 billion in revenue, a strong focus on AI and a slew of vendor awards perennially filling its trophy case. Softchoice, for its part, was a 35-year-old publicly traded solution provider renowned for its software, cloud, cybersecurity and AI capabilities, serving over 5,000 clients.

Now, 15 months after the close of the acquisition—as both companies are running full bore to leverage the skill sets and portfolios that the other brought to the table—the results have surpassed WWT’s hopes, with plenty of room to grow, Kavanaugh said.

“We didn’t really have much of a presence in the SMB and low end of the commercial market before Softchoice, but it’s now playing out better than we wished,” Kavanaugh said in an interview with CRN. “On the Softchoice side, I’m betting we will see 50 percent [revenue] growth this year. And we’re just scratching the surface.”

The acquisition has brought together two complementary companies that each open new opportunities for the other. In addition to its SMB and midmarket prowess, Softchoice unlocked the Canadian market for WWT and ushered it into the Microsoft partner ecosystem. Meanwhile, Softchoice has gained access to WWT’s innovative Advanced Technology Center (ATC), enterprise skill sets, extensive technical expertise with vendors such as Cisco and VMware, and its go-to-market teams.

Finding an acquisition target that would mesh well with and enhance WWT’s capabilities was certainly top of mind in 2024 as the St. Louis-based solution provider searched for a company to buy as it sought to expand its AI capabilities and geographic reach while growing revenue.

“When looking at different companies, one of the things we wanted was somebody complementary and synergistic, so not necessarily overlapping and competitive where you’re going to get into this challenge when you try to integrate the companies, where you have all these overlapping pieces,” Kavanaugh said. “[With Softchoice], there’s very, very little overlapping conflict of sales reps and go-to-market things. … You never know on acquisitions, but I was very happy about the strategic reasons why we made the acquisition of Softchoice.”

Making such an acquisition was not something WWT took lightly. Known for its focus on organic growth, the Softchoice deal was its first in a decade and only its third acquisition since it was founded in 1990.

It perhaps comes as no surprise, then, that Kavanaugh is treating the integration of Softchoice with care. He has thus far eschewed the organizational consolidation and job shedding that often accompanies such deals and has kept Softchoice President and CEO Andrew Caprara as well as his leadership team in place, continuing to use the Softchoice name for that portion of the business.

In fact, WWT is adding hundreds of new positions to its 14,000-strong employee base as it aggressively pushes downstream into SMB and midmarket accounts.

“We have more people now than we did before the acquisition, no doubt,” Caprara said.

“We made no structural head count cuts as part of this acquisition. Like, unequivocally, there was no number I was given. There was nothing that we were cutting out,” said Caprara. “The whole transaction thesis from the World Wide side was, ‘How do we take the best of these two organizations to this bigger pool of customers?’ It wasn’t about, ‘Well, let’s try to cut a little here and cut a little there.’”

Another strategic decision has been a recognition of the importance of respecting and maintaining a strong corporate culture.

WWT has been recognized by Fortune Media and Great Place To Work’s “100 Best Companies To Work For” list for 15 consecutive years due to its corporate culture. Prior to being acquired, Softchoice was also recognized for its culture, being named on various Best Workplaces in Canada lists.

“[They are] just great people, smart, ambitious, hardworking, they fit the culture and the core values of World Wide, which is really important from an integration standpoint, so we feel like we have synergized that,” Kavanaugh said. “They have been recognized as a Great Place to Work for years, World Wide has too, but it still doesn’t guarantee that the cultures are aligned and synergized. Fortunately, they are.”

The result of those deliberate moves is that the new combined entity believes it has a recipe for success that Kavanagh projects will lead WWT’s income to climb over 30 percent in 2026.

WWT Filling Hundreds Of New Roles

With WWT’s high growth expectations for its new SMB and commercial business in North America, Kavanaugh is adding more fuel on the flames with plans to hire hundreds of new employees in 2026, with a focus on new technical presales and account executives, alongside new engineers, software developers and consultants.

“We’re being very aggressive around hiring on the sales and business development side and the consulting and software development side. That is also very much aligned with what we’re doing with Softchoice in hiring different types of engineers—who are probably aligned more to higher-end compute engineers, network engineers, cyber engineers—that are complementary to what Softchoice is doing,” Kavanaugh said.

Caprara said customers and potential clients are already viewing Softchoice “in a different light” as it gains unprecedented access to executives and clients “that we could not have been in before” because of its connection to WWT.

“From a customer perspective, what we’re doing is we’re scaling the World Wide model into the midmarket and SMB right now to provide what I think is an unmatched level of capabilities,” said Caprara.

Softchoice has been able to bring some of the foundations of WWT’s enterprise-focused best practices to smaller clients, he said.

“In World Wide’s model, when they’re serving Fortune 10 companies, they have a number of people dedicated to each customer across different specialties and areas. We said, ‘Hey, we can’t do that in SMB and even midmarket because that’s an expensive model. It wouldn’t scale.’ But what we learned is how they’ve structured those roles and what kinds of capabilities customers need,” Caprara said. “So we’ve come out with a model that allows us to bring those specific roles into the midmarket and SMB space.”

WWT is also using its hiring spree to model Softchoice teams and go-to-market roles after its own enterprise success.

“There’s dozens of hires that we’ve made just this year alone in important presales roles to have more technical capability to support our account executives,” said Caprara. “We’re adding a lot of these people right to the front lines out in the field to engage with our customers.”

Softchoice is adding new hires in areas like AI, infrastructure modernization, data center and cybersecurity to expand existing client accounts and gain greenfield customers.

“These are all investments that are modeled after the best of what World Wide has done in enterprise and now taken to the midmarket and SMB segment,” Caprara said.

Kavanaugh said the goal is to bring a great value proposition that’s not too expensive for SMBs and doesn’t need too many Softchoice reps on a single SMB account.

Part of it is automating and operationalizing through WWT’s software and AI back-end capabilities.

“Whether they’re looking at orders access or new bids or new RFPs, or they’re looking at the services and deployment capabilities—all of that are things we are looking to automate and provide better access to our customers in a more collaborative way,” Kavanaugh said.

A New AI Platform For Every Type Of Customer

To achieve this goal of accommodating businesses of all shapes and sizes, WWT is currently building out an AI-native technology life-cycle platform that will coach customers on how to discover, buy, manage and get more value from their technology over time.

“It’s very different what an SMB customer needs versus a Fortune 50 company,” Kavanaugh said. “That platform is being brought together in regard to both hardware and software, and how do we bring a holistic ‘one-button-to-push’ capability in the SMB and commercial space, but something that provides a very holistic capability in the enterprise space.”

WWT’s platform aims to make every customer AI-ready by connecting data, insight and execution across the full client life cycle. The platform incorporates expertise and capabilities honed through WWT’s ATC, global supply chain ecosystem, and long history of systems integration success and deep customer context.

WWT Opens ATC’s Doors To SMBs

WWT’s ATC is a world-renowned IT testing lab, advisory center and technical validation engine where enterprise customers can design, build, test, evaluate and implement their IT systems.

“We’ve now activated the ATC for 100 percent of Softchoice customers, so if you’re an SMB customer, you now get access to this amazing set of labs and learnings, which is even more important for SMBs since they have smaller teams,” Caprara said. “When you can bring WWT’s engineering capabilities and the ATC into the midmarket and the Canadian marketplace, there really isn’t anybody [else] who has those kinds of capabilities.”

For example, one of Softchoice’s oil and gas clients was using Softchoice more as just a transactional software partner rather than as a strategic solution provider.

“We weren’t getting the audience at the CIO level in that customer because they viewed us as providing a great service, but on things that were less strategically important to their business,” Caprara said.

However, WWT’s presales organization, ATC capabilities and successful enterprise use cases in oil and gas—combined with Softchoice’s SMB skills and customer knowledge—made the oil and gas customer bet big on the “new” Softchoice that is now part of WWT.

“We brought in the best of the Softchoice team and the best of World Wide into the conversation, and in just four months we completely changed the relationship that we have with this customer,” said Caprara.

“We had over 5,000 customers and, all of a sudden, we can walk in with this amazing bench of technical talent and set of capabilities in the ATC. It really got customers to start to see us differently. They’re starting to trust us with new capabilities and new technology lines that we’re now able to help them with,” Caprara said. “Once they start engaging with ATC and having much deeper conversations, like around OT [operational technology] and IoT technology on devices and infrastructure, they’re viewing us in a different light.”

Softchoice Customers Doubling Down On WWT

Another longtime Softchoice midmarket customer wasn’t able to use the solution provider for international operations due to Softchoice’s limited geographical capacity and limited hardware sales capabilities prior to WWT.

Immediately after Softchoice was acquired by WWT, the Canadian consumer goods customer doubled down on its longtime channel partner.

“We immediately had international capabilities to serve them across the world. So they immediately started moving more business through us. So we started shipping Cisco-related gear internationally,” said Caprara. “While we helped them in Canada, we couldn’t do anything in Europe or Asia, and now we could. So overnight, we expanded the relationship with that customer, and we became even more trusted in helping them with their deployments around the world.”

The consumer goods organization followed up by seeking more of Softchoice’s new WWT-enabled services and resale capabilities around infrastructure modernization and artificial intelligence consulting.

“We brought in some of the most advanced technical people from the World Wide pre-sales team to go and engage with a bit of a strategy session with that customer. From there, it’s now opening up the opportunity for us to be the provider for their data center hardware business,” said Caprara. “We’ve now become the provider for their entire infrastructure business as well.”

WWT ‘Supercharges’ Softchoice’s Cisco Business

One of the low-hanging fruits of WWT’s acquisition of Softchoice was leveraging WWT’s decades-long successful relationships with data center and infrastructure market leaders like Cisco and Dell Technologies to create new opportunities for Softchoice.

“Softchoice was a good Cisco partner, but they didn’t do a ton of Cisco business. So there’s a big opportunity to supercharge that,” WWT’s CEO Kavanaugh said.

WWT and Softchoice teams are now working together to offer Cisco networking hardware as well as AI and cybersecurity solutions to its customer base.

“If you look at some of the tier-one OEMs that are big partners with World Wide, we are bringing all that expertise to Softchoice in their existing customers and adding additional reps that are going after new accounts,” Kavanaugh said. “The activity that we are seeing—and the customer engagement—is validating that.”

This helped lead Softchoice to being named Cisco’s Canada Security Partner of the Year in 2025. Meanwhile, WWT won Cisco’s 2025 Global Enterprise Partner of the Year award, Americas Partner of the Year award, Mass Scale Infrastructure Partner of the Year and Asia-Pacific Growth Partner of the Year, among others.

Tim Coogan, senior vice president of Global Partner Sales at San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco, touted that Softchoice’s SMB and midmarket capabilities tied with WWT’s enterprise expertise “represent the kind of partner ecosystem Cisco is building toward.”

“WWT and Softchoice together extends the depth our customers can access without changing partner relationships they already trust and unlocks Cisco hardware, cybersecurity and AI capabilities at a scale neither company could deliver alone,” said Coogan. “The momentum shows up in the depth of the joint capability.”

Coogan said Softchoice’s Cisco customers are benefiting greatly from access to WWT’s ATC and AI Proving Ground Lab.

“It gives Cisco customers in the SMB and midmarket segments the same caliber of technical resources that have historically been available at the enterprise level. That alignment matters because Cisco is putting renewed focus on Select [commercial] accounts—and the combined WWT and Softchoice is uniquely positioned to lead in that segment,” Coogan said.

WWT Boosting Softchoice’s VMware Prowess

WWT is also revamping Softchoice’s VMware business which—like for many other VMware partners—significantly changed when Broadcom acquired VMware.

“They were a partner with VMware, but we’re now supercharging that by bringing in more value and more [VMware] capability,” said Kavanaugh. “With Softchoice and WWT together, we have built a really complementary and very value-added bidirectional partnership with VMware, so that is growing. Our services business there is growing quite significantly, and our resale business in the markets where VMware allows resale is growing.”

Caprara said he’s having high-level conversations with vendors like Cisco and VMware unlike ever before.

“I’ve had so many meetings with tech companies where they say, ‘Gosh, we’ve been trying for years to get World Wide to go into midmarket and SMB because they’ve got this great set of capabilities,’” said Caprara. “Our [vendor] partners are really leaning in, and we’re having great conversations with some of the deep relationships that World Wide has traditionally had. Then we’re using that to expand the connections with those partners and the investment those partners are making in us and our customer base to activate all the technology.”

Softchoice’s Microsoft Business Attracting WWT Enterprise Customers

Although WWT is providing new hires, technical capabilities and vendor investment for Softchoice, for its part Softchoice is taking WWT’s Microsoft business to the next level backed by over 300 Microsoft certifications.

Softchoice is a 30-plus-year Microsoft solution provider that consistently wins Microsoft partner awards, including the 2025 Microsoft Americas Channel Partner of the Year Award for Canada and Microsoft’s 2024 Scale Solutions Partner of the Year Award for the U.S.

Prior to Softchoice, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft was not a priority for WWT or even seen as an area of growth opportunity, Kavanaugh admits.

“We just didn’t feel we were going to grow ourselves with Microsoft, and we weren’t going to be able to go get those [Microsoft] certifications,” Kavanaugh said. “Now I feel like we have a lot to bring to Microsoft from a value proposition and go-to-market that is meaningful.”

WWT is now investing in Microsoft AI sales and customer implementation around Copilot, Agent 365 and other Microsoft AI offerings thanks to Softchoice’s award-winning Microsoft success.

Softchoice’s Microsoft business is now seeping into WWT’s enterprise client base, which Caprara says is leading to “really strong” growth.

“We now have dozens and dozens of Microsoft service engagements in large World Wide enterprise customers,” Caprara said. “It’s such a core platform for so many organizations out there, and the ability for World Wide now to be able to tell that complete story that they had before—plus this amazing story around the Microsoft platform—is really starting to create an even more differentiated conversation in the enterprise space.”

Microsoft Global VP Sees ‘Strong Momentum’ With WWT-Softchoice

Nina Harding, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Americas Global Partner Solutions, said her company is already seeing “strong momentum” in WWT and Softchoice “accelerating” co-sell execution and aligning to Microsoft’s priority markets such as AI, cloud migration and security.

“What stands out most is the shared ambition between Microsoft and WWT to deepen co-sell engagement and deliver outcomes across every customer segment—from enterprise to SMB,” said Harding.

She said Softchoice brings proven operational rigor and a highly differentiated Microsoft practice, while WWT is adding global reach, deep engineering expertise and access to enterprise customers at scale.

“Softchoice’s strong presence in the SMB and midmarket is now benefiting from WWT’s global scale and engineering depth to create a true end-to-end model for customer transformation,” she said.

Kavanaugh, for his part, recently attended Microsoft’s highly exclusive CEO Summit at Microsoft’s headquarters hosted by Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella.

“We’re just scratching the surface in the opportunities that we have to work and partner with Microsoft in a very, very strategic and meaningful way. And that is something that has not necessarily been core to World Wide in the past,” said Kavanaugh.

WWT’s Total Addressable Market Ahead And ‘Healthy Paranoia’

Another thing WWT believes is it is just scratching the surface of is customer demand.

Over the last three years, WWT’s net income has annually increased at over a 30 percent clip, a trend it expects to continue in 2026, even on an annual run rate that is well over $20 billion.

“World Wide’s total addressable market [TAM] is just massive,” Kavanaugh said. “The U.S. market, the North America market, and even the global market—the TAM for IT infrastructure modernization, for AI, cybersecurity, software development, digital transformation—is just so massive. So you can come to the conclusion that the TAM is not the problem or the challenge.”

The challenge for WWT will be continuing to drive a successful push into the lower SMB and commercial markets.

“It’s about, ‘How do we get very good at bringing the right value prop and not one that’s too expensive to the SMB space so that we don’t [overprice] that go-to-market strategy, methodology and approach?” Kavanaugh said.

One thing is for certain, WWT doesn’t plan on slowing down in an increasingly complex AI world.

“The day you take your eye off the ball and you’re not working your tail off because you think you have it figured out is when you don’t have it figured out,” Kavanaugh said. “So we are grinding away with a significant level of healthy paranoia every day, but also equally excited and seeing very good success.”

Softchoice’s CEO, for his part, is expecting massive tailwinds ahead for WWT.

“Even with 30 percent growth this year, we still feel like we’re still ramping up, not down,” said Caprara. “We’ve got all these capabilities; we’ve hired all these people in the last three or four months and are continuing to hire. So as we get into the second half of the year, we’re expecting even more tailwind from all of that.”