Softchoice наращивает штат и продажи на 50% благодаря синергии с WWT и практике Microsoft

Softchoice CEO On Microsoft Surge, Hiring Spree, AI And WWT Synergies Softchoice CEO Andrew Caprara explains to CRN his company’s hiring strategy, sales growth and WWT synergies that is taking Softchoice into the enterprise. Softchoice is growing revenue at a 50 percent clip thanks to a roaring Microsoft practice, a hiring spree of technical and pre-sales roles, and huge synergies with parent company World Wide Technology, which is taking Softchoice into the enterprise. “It’s just been this amazing growth curve for us since last year,” Softchoice’s CEO Andrew Caprara tells CRN. “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,” Caprara said. Following World Wide Technology’s $1.3 billion acquisition of the SMB and midmarket-focused, Canadian-based solution provider in 2025, Softchoice has been on a hiring spree thanks to its sale growth and customer expansion over the past 16 months. Softchoice’s more than 5,000 customers are now reaping massive technical benefits as award-winning Microsoft partner Softchoice makes waves in enterprise accounts. CEO Caprara takes a deep dive with CRN about Softchoice’s hiring strategy, Microsoft practice, go-to-market model and AI vision. Has Softchoice’s employee headcount declined or grown since the company was acquired by WWT? We have more people now than we did before the acquisition, no doubt. 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. 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.’ Also there wasn’t a lot of overlap. So there wasn’t a lot of disagreement over who owned which account. Where are you adding new employees and in what specific roles? Now we’re adding dozens and dozens of new people across North America to go and serve customers in new areas. So data and AI specialists, modern infrastructure specialists for the data center work, cyber security specialists—these are all investments that are modeled after the best of what World Wide has done in enterprise and now taken to the mid-market and SMB segment. There’s dozens of hires that we’ve made just this year alone in important pre-sales roles to have more technical capability to support our account executives. Click through to read what Caprara says about Microsoft, AI and more. What does Softchoice’s Microsoft practice look like in 2026? Are you getting in front of large customers? We now have dozens and dozens of Microsoft service engagements in large World Wide enterprise customers. 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. As everyone’s preparing for AI, there’s a lot of components in Microsoft’s current product offering that are great enablers of effective AI adoption and rollout. Our legacy with Microsoft is very strong. We were the U.S. Scale Solutions Partner of the Year even before integrating with World Wide. Our Microsoft performance has been really strong, as Microsoft’s platform has become so much more important as customers are thinking about building that secure and data platform in an AI world. So our Microsoft business continues to grow. The investments we made in software continue to grow at a rapid rate. We had that solid footing already underneath us, and we saw the growth rate start to increase as we went through last year. How is Softchoice scaling WWT’s enterprise model into SMBs and the midmarket? 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. 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. So we’ve come out with a model that allows us to bring those specific roles into the midmarket and SMB space. The reality is there are differences between SMB and enterprise companies. But from a technology perspective, there’s a lot of similarities in terms of what a CIO of a 500-person company needs to think about at the core of their infrastructure and preparing for AI as a larger organization. What has been one successful go-to-market change in 2026? We have now been able to put these advanced technical pre-sales people out in the field. We had some of that before, for sure, but when you can have this billion-dollar services organization with all of the capabilities that World Wide has available to your customer base—it’s a lot easier to start making those pre-sales investments. We’re adding a lot of these people right to the front lines out in the field to engage with our 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. How is it driving sales? So we’re able to break into these new areas like helping customers with their infrastructure. As a public company, we were pretty open that our strategy was very much to be a software and cloud-focused solution provider because those were the areas where we had great strength and capability and scale. We served our customers in some of the hardware areas, but not at the same scale as World Wide does. So now we’ve got that capability. We plug in these technical people, and they’ve got the credibility of this machine behind it to be able to go and give customers real confidence that we’ve got the know-how and the ability to invest in helping them grow those areas of the business. Are you bringing Softchoice customers into WWT’s popular Advanced Technology Center? 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. They don’t have as much time for understanding new technology or maybe they don’t have the ability to train and scale their people as easily. So 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. 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. 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. What is Softchoice’s AI strategy as part of WWT? When you think about the capabilities that we’re building, we’re really focused on helping customers really derive value out of those AI investments. There’s a lot of talk in the industry right now about setting your AI strategy. There’s a lot of, ‘Let’s revamp your business model.’ And all of that could be very important for some organizations. But what we’re finding actually is [that] what organizations need help with is jumping into that first workload or that first workflow and figuring out how they can revamp that and infuse AI into it. So we’ve built a whole set of capabilities that scale from SMB all the way up through the biggest enterprises to actually help them derive value out of their AI investments much more quickly and not have as much time spent up front on sort of planning. But really getting down to ‘How do we help you get impact quickly?’ So when you think about the model: Taking that capability down market with the roles that we have but still maintaining that same level of quality and engineering depth and access to the Advanced Technology Center is really the key here. What does the second half of 2026 look like for Softchoice? Even with all this growth this year, we still feel like we’re still ramping up, not down. 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.