Billionaire David Steward's World Wide Technology wins $230 million US Army modernization contract

World Wide Technology, the St. Louis firm that billionaire David Steward built into the largest Black-owned business in the United States, has won a $230 million contract to modernize the U.S. Army's technology backbone.

The 12-month award covers the Army's Global Enterprise Modernization Software and Services program, known as GEMSS 2.1. WWT secured it alongside Cisco, its partner of more than three decades, and announced the deal on July 7.

The agreement is a consolidation. It folds the Army's Voice, Video and Security program, the earlier GEMSS 1.0 contract, and 30 separate Cisco enterprise agreements into a single support arrangement. The Army wants one centralized way to manage software and hardware across its global footprint, cut duplication, and keep its networks current.

The terms are built around always-on support. The Army gets round-the-clock coverage for its hardware through Cisco's commercial technical services, software subscriptions, and advanced help implementing and running its Cisco systems, along with specialized training. WWT handles much of the delivery, leaning on a federal practice it has spent years assembling.

This is not new ground for the company. WWT won the first GEMSS agreement in early 2025, supplying the Army with Cisco networking, security and collaboration software under a pricing model designed to stay predictable. The follow-on expands that work and hands the company a deeper role in the Army's day-to-day IT operations.

Government is one of WWT's core markets. The company equips military bases, courthouses, prisons and schools, sitting between roughly 100 technology manufacturers and the institutions that buy from them. It makes little hardware itself. It takes a margin on what it sells and charges for consulting, testing and installation, a model that has scaled into one of the biggest private businesses in the country.

The numbers are large. WWT generates about $20 billion in annual revenue and employs more than 12,000 people, ranking as the largest Black-owned company in the United States and among the biggest privately held firms of any kind. Its reach runs across cloud computing, cybersecurity, data centers, networking and artificial intelligence, serving Fortune 500 companies and government agencies from a St. Louis base.

Steward built it from close to nothing. He founded WWT in 1990 with Jim Kavanaugh, a former professional soccer player who serves as chief executive, after leaving a sales career that included a stint as a top account executive at Federal Express. The early years nearly broke him. The company's debt climbed to $3.5 million, and at one point a collection agency repossessed his car from the office parking lot.

A federal introduction changed the trajectory. The Small Business Administration steered the young minority-owned firm toward government customers, and WWT landed its first federal contracts. A 1995 deal to supply computer workstations for U.S. troops in Bosnia proved a turning point, pushing the company to build software that helped the military track its equipment. The partnership with Cisco, struck in 1994, gave it a product line to sell at scale.

Steward remains chairman and the company's largest shareholder, a stake that has made him one of the wealthiest Black Americans. He has also founded Kingdom Capital, a private investment vehicle he describes as values-driven, backing artificial intelligence work in healthcare, cybersecurity and social justice. He has long tied his business philosophy to his Christian faith, laying it out in a book on running a company by biblical principles.

The GEMSS award adds to a run of recent contract wins. WWT recently secured a position on a cooperative purchasing agreement valued at roughly $500 million to serve state and local governments and schools, its second turn on that vehicle. The steady flow of public-sector work underpins a revenue base that has roughly doubled since the end of the last decade.

Cisco framed the Army deal as a way to simplify management of critical infrastructure at scale. Carl De Groote, the company's area vice president for U.S. federal, said the two firms had worked closely with the Army to streamline its software and IT environments. Scot Gagnon, WWT's vice president for federal, said the expanded agreement builds on the earlier GEMSS work and delivers the software management and technical expertise the Army needs to run more efficiently and securely.

The contract runs for a year, with the consolidation of dozens of legacy agreements giving WWT a central seat in how the Army buys and supports its Cisco technology. That position tends to make the next round of procurement decisions harder to unwind, keeping the company embedded in one of the largest IT customers in the world.

WWT now moves to deliver on an agreement that ties its federal business more tightly to the Army's modernization timeline.