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For many mid-market enterprises, the decision whether to maintain their own SAP data centers or move to a hosted model comes down to one of two issues: control over the data and the infrastructure on which it is kept, and the cost of the data center migration. Symmetry Corporation, a leading provider of technical managed services for SAP applications and an SAP(R)-certified hosting partner, says it has resolved those issues with the development of its 21st Century services model for hosting.

Traditional hosting providers often dictate which platform will be used in their data centers. In Symmetry's revolutionary 21st Century hosting model, the customer decides what infrastructure is best for their SAP environment and business, not the provider. Symmetry's method provides significant cost savings for the customer and a greater return on project investment by minimizing migration costs and disruption to the business and ensuring a smooth transition from in-house to outsourced hosting.

"Most mid-market enterprises have spent a great deal of time and money building their SAP data centers," said Dan Wilhelms, President and CEO of Symmetry. "Because of the complexities, though, they may eventually decide they no longer want to manage it. When they look into a traditional hosting provider, they find the entire data center may have to be rebuilt because, say, the enterprise is running SAP on HP hardware and the hosting provider is using IBM. We think that's wrong."

Working with Symmetry, enterprises can specify the hardware they want to host their SAP solution. They can choose to lease or buy new hardware or even pack and ship their current data center to Symmetry's headquarters in Milwaukee, where it will be reconstructed and managed by the hosting provider's team of SAP Basis experts.

Symmetry's 21st Century hosting model provides greater security and separation of data. Rather than enterprises sharing hardware in order to minimize cost for the provider, Symmetry uses dedicated hardware for each of its customers. This arrangement allows complete separation of data from that of other companies, which is important to mitigate governance, risk and compliance issues. It also prevents problems with one customer's applications from affecting other customers by taking down a server or servers, SAN storage, or tape devices they may share.

"The old school model of sharing space is like buying an entire apartment building just to get one apartment," Wilhelms said. "We've re-thought everything to make the entire experience much more palatable and affordable for mid-market enterprises."

Symmetry's focus on SAP, rather than being a general hosting provider, is another advantage according to Wilhelms.

"A generalist, old-school hosting provider is normally focused solely on keeping the hardware running," he said. "It might have one Basis administrator available if there are issues, but otherwise the provider has to bring in an outside expert (such as Symmetry). Because providing technical support for SAP is part of our core business, we have a great breadth and depth of knowledge to draw from. Any problems that arise can be resolved quickly by our own experts."

With Symmetry's unique, SAP-centric approach to hosting, the only things that change are the location of the data center - and the amount of time and budget the enterprise's IT department has to spend on it.