Atea – Enabling organizations to tame complexity, manage growth

Atea is focused on helping organizations maximize the value of their IT investments—from initial deployment, throughout their lifecycle, and into the next generation of technology solutions. With almost 8,000 employees located in 85 offices across seven countries in the Nordic and Baltic regions of Europe, the company offers a complete range of hardware, software and services to help organizations solve problems and gain more from IT to meet their business objectives.

 As Håkon Gutierrez, Atea’s business development director, points out, one of the most vexing challenges many organizations face is complexity resulting from years or decades of IT updates and changes, and Atea is uniquely able to help them. “Complexity is something that favors Atea because we have a deep breadth of knowledge across all the IT vendors. That gives us the leverage to help customers with any given challenge.”

For more than two decades, Atea has been solving complex business challenges in partnership with VMware. Today, that means enabling customers to adopt a multi-cloud strategy. Gutierrez notes, “What we see is that our customers typically let their application define the strategy. And that means putting the application in the right cloud, where it is most cost efficient and performs the best. Our relationship with VMware is super important in doing that.”

Improving efficiency for a public sector customer

With close to 4,200 working within Services in its organization, offering skills in Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS public clouds, as well as private clouds and hybrid cloud environments, Atea is in a perfect position to help organizations match their workload requirements to the right cloud or clouds. And VMware plays a key role in enabling them to do just that.

“Our customers are moving their applications between on premises, off premises, private clouds and public clouds,” Gutierrez says. “Being able to offer cross-cloud services with VMware is super important for Atea to be able to optimize this multi-cloud environment and enable customers to achieve the business outcomes they want.”

One example is a public sector customer located in the Nordics. This customer has about 6,000 users dependent on an aging data center, which the customer wanted to modernize. “Being a partner with VMware gave us the opportunity to think out openly and widely on possible solutions,” Gutierrez says.

In the end, Atea and VMware recommended a hybrid cloud solution that could extend the organization’s workloads from its on-premises data center into Azure, utilizing the Azure VMware Solution. 

This enabled the customer to get its workloads close to cloud-native services. Additionally, it improved the cost efficiency and resilience of the data center by enabling applications to reside both on- and off-premises.

“What we found when we moved the workloads into the Azure VMware Solution is that performance of the customer’s SharePoint farm was enhanced by about 30 to 40 percent,” Gutierrez reports. “Think about 6,000 users always going into applications in different environments every day. Instead of always having latency and waiting three or four seconds before they get to what they want to do, now they hardly wait at all. They now have a great experience, which helps them be more efficient. That’s a super-good return on investment.”

Cloud-smart solutions deliver choice and flexibility

For Atea, being part of the VMware cloud-smart ecosystem is all about providing customers with maximum choice and flexibility—allowing customers to place their workloads where they want, when they want. And looking toward the future, Gutierrez is confident Atea’s partnership will only continue to provide customers with the right options to meet their evolving needs.

“Atea is optimistic about VMware’s multi-cloud roadmap and the reason is simple: because it gives the customer the ability to choose where the application is most cost efficient,” Gutierrez says. “And it helps us to deliver technologies in Azure, GCP, AWS, on-premises, or anywhere.”

He concludes, “Atea is in the business of digital transformation, and digital transformation is about making sure the customer is super-efficient. That could be in their operational processes, the way they do business, or it could be about culture. But at the end of the day, it all means enabling the customer to get the most out of their technology investments, and that is done with VMware.”

To learn more about innovative, cloud-smart companies like Atea, visit the resources on VMware Partner Executive Edge, and check out our Cloud Smart Strategy whitepaper.