Symmetry and United VARs Tap into Cloud Hosting Momentum Driven by SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA Migrations

First year of partnership marked by customer acquisition, partner business development and significant investment in European infrastructure and commercial team

Symmetry announced key milestones in the wake of completing its first year as the worldwide cloud infrastructure and SAP HANA hosting services partner for United VARs, the world’s largest reseller of SAP software licenses. Operating as one of only nine SAP Platinum Partners, United VARs is comprised of 45 resellers operating in 90+ countries and serving more than 8,000 customers.

According to a recent industry report, SAP S/4HANA will be the biggest opportunity in the SAP services market since 84% of the SAP installed base has yet to buy S/4HANA but will need to before 2025. Often viewed as multi-step projects, enterprises are increasingly migrating their on-premise SAP environments to cloud-based versions of the HANA platform and eventually to SAP S/4HANA, creating significant market opportunity for Symmetry and United VARs member companies.

“We expect that a very high percentage of our customers will use the deployment of S/4HANA as an opportunity to move to the cloud,” said Detlef Mehlmann, Managing Director of United VARs. “Our cloud hosting partnership with Symmetry has given United VARs the ability to provide a complete solution, and help our customers fully realize the value of their SAP investment.”

Announced one year ago, Symmetry has achieved key business objectives in its partnership with United VARs, including:

• Customer acquisition – successfully closed several SAP cloud hosting opportunities through United VARs member companies for customer deployments including a large multinational metal manufacturing company, a managed network and communications services company, a multinational industrial equipment manufacturer, a multichannel media company and an apparel company.
• Business development with partners – developed strong relationships with several United VARs member companies and signed partnership agreements with regional leaders Answerthink, Augusta Reeves Group, BG Business Solutions, Illumiti, Seidor, Sofigate, Westrocon and 2BM.
• Infrastructure investment – extended the company’s global infrastructure for providing SAP application management, security, governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and hosting services with a new cloud hosting platform in Amsterdam. This platform integrates with Symmetry’s four other locations to deliver a flexible, high-performance global cloud hosting service with geographic redundancy for any SAP implementation.
• European commercial team – hired Sarah Hengeveld as the Director of EMEA Sales and Steve Lofthouse as Solutions Architect of EMEA to support Symmetry’s growing business in Europe. Based in the United Kingdom, both have extensive experience working with enterprise customers directly and through partners on designing, implementing, maintaining, migrating and hosting SAP environments.

“The combination of the United VARs global partner footprint and our hosting platform optimized for SAP environments – fueled by key investments in European hosting infrastructure and talent – has significantly accelerated our acquisition of multinational enterprise customers this year,” said Kurt Andersen, Chief Marketing Officer at Symmetry. “The complex, multi-step projects required to take on-premise SAP environments to the cloud are ideally suited to our partnership that brings the local market expertise of United VARs partners with our market-leading experience in migrating and hosting SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA in the cloud.”

Read more

Back