Bechtle moves customers to modern, multi-cloud platforms based on VMware technology to meet needs of business growth and expansion
Bechtle is one of Europe's largest IT system integrators, resellers, and service providers, with some 13,000 employees, 70,000 customers, and €5.3 billion in revenue last year. The company helps customers with their digital transformation, supplying them with everything they need for IT, from customer lifecycle services to hardware and software.
This year, Bechtle won the VMware Partner Collaboration Award, which recognizes VMware partners that collaborate with partners with complementary skills to deliver exceptional value to customers using innovative or bespoke solutions based on VMware technology.
Bechtle received the award for its work with partner Evoila to help a European logistics provider modernize its IT infrastructure on VMware vSphere Enterprise, VMware NSX, and VMware Tanzu. The logistics provider now has a single secure and scalable platform for its developers to deploy and manage Kubernetes and to handle its future growth as it brings on new customers.
Helping customers build a better business
Bechtle COO Michael Guschlbauer oversees Bechtle’s system integration, managed services, cloud, and application business areas. He describes Bechtle’s 2030 vision this way: “First, we empower business for our customers. Second, IT is our passion. Third, growth and foresight underpin our success. And last but not least, we aspire to lead the market.”
As the vision shows, Bechtle’s services are designed to help companies build a better business for their future. Bechtle accomplishes this with customer transformation plans that include working with its business architects to create workshops designed for stakeholders in the C-suite down to the departmental level. In these workshops, stakeholders identify company and departmental goals, which Bechtle then uses to devise how to best transform a company’s IT to meet these goals.
Bechtle works with companies in a range of industries to improve their everyday operations and recently completed an engagement with a manufacturer of electrical power equipment.
Digitally transforming a traditional company
The 150-year-old manufacturer was experiencing tremendous growth through acquisitions, which presented significant IT challenges. Operations in the company’s own data centers were disconnected, and the manufacturer lacked the speed, flexibility, agility, and ability to provide new services to acquired companies. The old infrastructure could not keep up with the company’s growth: It was time to shift to a new approach to IT.
Using VMware Cloud on AWS, Bechtle enabled the company’s engineers and designers from different locations around the world to easily and quickly access the secure infrastructure they needed to do their work. Bechtle also created a multi-cloud platform based on the private cloud using VMware on AWS and Google Cloud VMware Engine and lifted and shifted the customer’s applications to Google Cloud. This provided the flexibility and agility the customer needed to manage new acquisitions without requiring the newly acquired companies to refactor applications or change their tools and processes to move to the cloud.
The journey continues
Roland König, Managing Director and Head of Virtualization at Bechtle says, “We are now starting another project to help them with our custom operations center to manage all these platforms, so they can better focus their resources on creating new solutions for their customers.” To that end, Bechtle and the customer are talking about developing new modern applications, securing the infrastructure, and managing all the identities of individuals added to the new multi-cloud platform.
König emphasizes that the platform “puts the customer in a good position to bring new solutions very quickly to their employees and their own customers.” The results for the company are already evident. “The onboarding time for new solutions is down from months to days, and they are able to give new applications to their customers globally.”
What’s next?
Bechtle plans to help the company modernize its legacy applications to run in the multi-cloud environment. König explains, “At the end of the day, the challenge is how to modernize the apps, and how to bring new solutions to the business. The next discussion with our customers will be how we turn these requirements into practice. And Tanzu is one of the biggest options we see in the market now, from a mid-size to enterprise company, to address this opportunity.”
“On this platform we can develop new solutions to design new future-oriented applications. It’s amazing to have existing data centers, existing technologies, and existing services, and transform them step by step in a new world,” says König. “That's a part of a real transformation success for us, for VMware, and also for our customers.”
A longstanding, strong partnership with VMware
Bechtle and VMware have partnered to deliver customers solutions based on VMware technology for more than 17 years, with Bechtle investing in developing expertise with VMware solutions by earning multiple VMware Master Services Competencies, including:
- Data Center Virtualization
- Cloud Management and Automation
- Cloud Native Apps
- Network Virtualization
- VMware Cloud Foundation
- VMware Cloud on AWS
- Digital Workspace
- Cloud Verified
König says, “The technology from VMware is perfect for us. We can create new services around their technology.” He continues, “It's part of our change and our transformation that we can develop new customer services, and these services are designed to help companies in their digital transformation journeys.”
Stay tuned for more spotlights on our 2022 VMware Partner Achievement Award winners just like this one. Interested in becoming a VMware Partner? Learn about the VMware Partner Connect program. Looking for a VMware Partner like Bechtle? Find one using our Partner Locator. Then learn how VMware Principal Partners can help drive your business success.
