World Wide Technology (WWT) is a St. Louis-based systems integrator that you’ve likely never heard of. But the company works closely with a lot of familiar names in the U.S. wireless space. WWT is the primary systems integrator for one of the Big 4 U.S. wireless carriers, although it doesn’t name the carrier.
Joe Wojtal, CTO of WWT’s Global Service Provider organization, said WWT operates a 1.1-million-sq-foot warehouse in St. Louis where every piece of this operator’s RAN equipment from various vendors passes through. It’s not just radio equipment from Ericsson and Nokia, but it includes everything from routing components to optical components, as well as compute equipment from the likes of Cisco and Dell. “We kit it together and send for deployment,” said Wojtal. “This program has been in place for several years. The customer was struggling because they had so many distribution points around the United States.”
WWT has also built a $500 million Advanced Technology Center in St. Louis where it can do validation work for customers that want to test new technology. “Given that mobile operators are focused on disaggregating mobile infrastructure, we’re spending a lot of time with them,” said Wojtal. WWT is working with Altiostar on radio access network (RAN) technology validation, and it’s also working with Cisco and Affirmed Networks for mobile packet core technology innovation.
Recently, WWT announced it was working with VMware, MobiledgeX and Altiostar to deliver new mobile edge computing solutions for consumption by service providers’ end customers. MobiledgeX is scaling a catalog of enterprise edge applications that will be built on top of a Dell Technologies and VMWare Telco Cloud infrastructure stack. The applications are being demonstrated at WWT’s Advanced Technology Center.
In a blog posting earlier this year, Bob Olwig, VP of business development and marketing at WWT said, “As WWT celebrates our 30th anniversary in 2020, we’ve cultivated a global network of alliances with industry leaders – most notably Intel, whose architecture forms the foundation for more than 95% of customer solutions in our Advanced Technology Center."
Once technology is validated at its Advanced Technology Center, then WWT takes it to one of its four global integration centers in order to deploy it at scale. These integration centers are located in St. Louis, Mumbai, Amsterdam and Singapore. “We’re calling it the next generation factory,” said Wojtal.
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He added that WWT is finding a lot of new opportunity in both the wireless and wired network ecosystems with the trend toward disaggregation of hardware from software. Operators aren’t buying all their gear from traditional telecom providers like they did in the past. “That’s why there’s this unique opening for WWT to integrate all the hardware and software components and validate that it works together and deploys at scale,” said Wojtal.
WWT is a private company with an annual revenue of about $12 billion. It employs about 6,000 workers.