WWT EVP On VMware VCF ‘AI Factory In A Box’ And Broadcom Relationship

WWT’s top executive Bob Olwig takes a deep dive with CRN about his $20 billion company’s relationship with Broadcom and its plan to drive customer adoption of VMware’s new VMware Cloud Foundation 9.

Solution provider superstar World Wide Technology is betting heavily on VMware’s newly launched VMware Cloud Foundation version 9 as WWT’s relationship with Broadcom is as solid as ever.

“VCF 9 is an AI factory in a box,” said Bob Olwig, executive vice president of global partner alliances for WWT, tells CRN.

“It’s turnkey. It provides GPU as a Service. It’s taking advantage of a lot of the Nvidia software that we know is important to Nvidia in terms of their enterprise software adoption,” he said. “VCF is really an end-to-end, secure and scalable AI solution for customers. So I couldn’t be more excited about the second half of this year and going into 2026 as it relates to the VMware partnership, what value we collectively bring to our customers together.”

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WWT is generating over $20 billion in revenue with significant new customer momentum coming via its blockbuster $1.25 billion acquisition of Softchoice this year, making the company’s headcount exceed 12,000 employees globally.

In June, Broadcom launched the general availability of VCF 9, VMware’s full-stack IT platform packed with new innovations.

WWT’s Broadcom/VMware Partnership ‘Hasn’t Been Better’

Olwig has been one of WWT’s top leaders for over 30 years, having helped grow and transform the St. Louis-based solution provider giant for decades. He currently leads WWT’s global partner alliances team.

“Our relationship with Broadcom, in a lot of respects, hasn’t been better in terms of the collaboration and the intentionality in our partnership,” Olwig tells CRN.

“World Wide has come to appreciate Broadcom strategy and investments that they’re making in partners. And I should say, the investment that they’re making in fewer partners, in terms of how they’ve lessened the number of partners that they have in their program,” he said. “We also have hired some of the best and brightest as it relates to engineers and architects and VMware experts.”

In an interview with CRN, Olwig takes a deep dive into WWT’s channel relationship with Broadcom as well as VCF 9 customer adoption and total cost of ownership versus the competition.

“Customers have invested heavily in VMware expertise through the years. So with migrating to VCF 9, they’re protecting that investment and all of that knowledge and expertise that they accumulated through the years,” said Olwig. “That also makes customers more comfortable about sticking with VMware because they have the resources and they have the know-how.”

What follows is more of what Olwig had to say.

Many VMware customers have price increases since Broadcom shifted to selling bundles like VCF 9 versus point products. How are WWT customers dealing with the price increase, but at the same time, getting the benefit of a full-stack architecture with offers like VCF?

Broadcom made business decisions on how they were going to price that out.

So we’re helping customers now in kind of the same pattern that we’ve had working with customers for years. We help customers evaluate the technology. We map that against their user requirements and what the business is trying to achieve with IT. Every customer is unique. So every situation has been unique and different, especially in the large enterprise accounts that are very invested in IT and have been building up their IT estate for decades.

So we help them understand the technology, and there’s a lot to understand with VCF 9. It’s an end-to-end platform. It’s got a lot of rich features that many customers don’t know about or are unaware of. So we help them evaluate that.

We do it using our Advanced Technology Center. We’ve been investing in that for over 15 years now. We either bring customers in to get hands on, stick time with the software, or they can remote in virtually into our labs.

We also have hired some of the best and brightest as it relates to engineers and architects and VMware experts. They can really help find out what the client’s requirements are and then map those requirements to exactly the features that exist within VCF.

So it’s a lot of advisory and consulting services that we deliver through briefings and engagements with our customers to help them evaluate VCF.

How is WWT’s overall channel relationship with Broadcom-VMware currently?

Our relationship with Broadcom, in a lot of respects, hasn’t been better in terms of the collaboration and the intentionality in our partnership.

World Wide has come to appreciate Broadcom strategy and investments that they’re making in partners. And I should say, the investment there that they’re making in fewer partners, in terms of how they’ve lessened the number of partners that they have in their program. World Wide is one of their top partners that they’re working with right now. So we’re excited about that.

Obviously, there’s been a lot of change that has gone on in the Broadcom ecosystem.

There’s no doubt that some of that was a surprise to us and some customers, but that’s in the past now, and we’re moving forward.

VCF 9 just became GA. What does WWT like about VCF 9 and what are customers saying?

VCF 9 maybe the latest version to the industry, but we have been helping customers on their VCF journey for years now.

The current VCF 9 version is just extraordinary in terms of the feature set.

In the over 40 years that I’ve been in the IT industry, the number one thing that customers are typically trying to do is to modernize their infrastructure day in and day out. How can they improve their infrastructure? How can they help the company grow with IT? How can they create more leaner and more efficient IT operations? How can they minimize their costs as it relates to maintenance or operations? That all comes as a result of infrastructure modernization.

If I were to sum it up: VCF 9 is really IT modernization in a box.

It is a turnkey, foundational technology that wasn’t just built yesterday. This has been built over nine versions of VCF that really packed a lot of end-to-end capabilities that customers are looking for—whether that’s to help give visibility to their operations, to supporting AI workloads, to improve orchestration.

There’s just a ton of value in the platform.

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How does VCF 9 fit into the AI era?

I’m super excited about VCF as a platform for AI.

A lot of enterprises want an on-prem solution. There’s a heightened sense of privacy and security, at least right now, in customers minds as it relates to AI and the data that AI uses.

So a lot of them are looking on-prem for a platform. I said VCF was IT modernization in a box, I would also say that VCF is an AI factory in a box.

It’s turnkey. It provides GPU as a Service. It’s taking advantage of a lot of the Nvidia software that we know is important to Nvidia in terms of their enterprise software adoption. Their partnership with Nvidia is great, so that GPU as a service is powered by Nvidia.

VCF is really an end-to-end, secure and scalable AI solution for customers.

So I couldn’t be more excited about the second half of this year and going into 2026 as it relates to the VMware partnership, what value we collectively bring to our customers together. It’s synergistic with World Wide’s overall go-to-market where we want to help our customers.

Then you add on top of it an accelerator, like an AI factory in a box coming from VCF 9, it’s just super exciting.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a big thing VMware wants to highlight with VCF 9 versus public cloud providers and competitors who don’t offer an end-to-end stack. How is VMware’s TCO versus competitors in the market right now?

It’s early days still with TCO and proving out the entire value of VCF, certainly VCF 9, because it’s early days in terms of that product release.

But, in general, anytime a customer can consolidate and leverage a platform as it relates to IT operations and support, there’s going to be a business value and a return on that in terms of: more efficient and streamlined operations, better resource utilization of people and so forth.

The other thing is that customers have invested heavily in VMware expertise through the years. So with migrating to VCF 9, they’re protecting that investment and all of that knowledge and expertise that they accumulated through the years.

By the way, that also makes customers more comfortable about sticking with VMware, because they have the resources and they have the know-how. It’s not something brand new and it’s been proven in their production environments oftentimes for decades.

It’s still early days on the TCO, but I think it’s promising for sure, in terms of the benefits that VCF is going to bring.

VMware wants to push service sales to the channel. What is WWT’s VMware services strategy for the second half of 2025 that is driving revenue?

There’s a lot of rich functionality within the VCF platform itself that customers need to understand and learn. And frankly, it’s to their benefit to maximize now their VCF investment and have a lower total cost of ownership. Broadcom is definitely messaging that to the clients along with us.

There is a lift to get customers from previous versions and a consolidation of other VMware products that they may be using today. So we have to assess how they’re being used today, and then how might that can all be migrated into VCF 9.

So there’s an analysis and migration services that needs to occur there.

There’s also the value that World Wide brings. We’re not just a VMware provider, but there’s a lot of ancillary ISV software that customers have in their existing environments and connectivity and integrations with software like ServiceNow. So World Wide has that experience to help maximize VCF by optimizing it within the customer environment.

That goes back to us being more advisory and understanding, ‘What does the customer have? What are they already invested in? How can we optimize what they’ve invested in with VCF 9?’

The engagements are bigger as well. Because this is a pretty significant platform that customers are migrating to. There’s a lot of consideration so that that upfront assessment and evaluation is critically important.