Worldwide Services

WORLDWIDE SERV I CES saving them as much as 80 percent of their costs. Recently, however, VanOrden reports that Worldwide Supply has evolved in the direction of becoming more of a global IT services company – thus Worldwide Services has come into being. “We were always known as the refurbisher, the used network equipment guys. That was who we were and what the company was branded as. That was our expertise,” he states. “Last year, though, we made a commitment that we were really going to focus on more of a services direction, which was the opposite of what we had done for the last many years – it’s always been hardware first with complementary services. We put that stake in the ground and formed Worldwide Services with a new website, which speaks specifically to the services area – third party maintenance, professional services, as well as software. The hardware will always be a portion of what we do, but where we used to lead with hardware and then provide complementary services, we flipped that model. “We put together a go-forward strategy to execute our aggressive growth plan, and as we started to focus on third-party maintenance, one of the things that we realized that made us very different than almost every other competitor in the market, is that we had this network equipment and network technology experience and just about everyone else has come from a server/storage type of background, trying to get in and support the network equipment. And they’re having significant difficulties because they don’t understand the technology and they don’t have the experience. So, it’s given us a huge competitive advantage as we go into the market space, because we’ve grown up in that world.” VanOrden adds that the company’s new initiative is based on what he calls a “Truth-Based Design philosophy,” which differentiates Worldwide Services from the OEMs - the manufacturers of equipment, the VARs - the value-added resellers, and the third-party maintenance companies. He explains, “The manufacturers tell a client, ‘You should have everything under maintenance, it should only be new, you should refresh every three years regardless of the capital investment