VMS changes company form and becomes an AG (Corporation)

Heidelberg, 2008/11/19 – The SAP benchmarking and optimization company has chosen to become a corporation

VM Solutions GmbH, a leading SAP optimization and benchmarking company with headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany, has become VMS AG (VMS Corp.). The company’s co-founders, Ralph Treitz and Professor Dr. Andreas Mielke assume the chairmanship of the corporation. Treitz will be responsible for the area of sales and corporate development, and Prof.Dr. Mielke for software development and benchmarking. Dr. Anette Weisbecker assumes the chairmanship of the supervisory board. An official public stock-market listing is not planned at this time.

Converting the company to AG form creates a higher degree of transparency for customers and potential investors and promotes the growth of the company. An additional essential motivating principle is to ensure higher employee motivation and connection to the company.

“The high competence of our employees is enormously important for the quality of our work and the satisfaction of our customers. The motivation and hard work of employees is, however, critical for the growth of any young company”, said Ralph Treitz, chairman of VMS AG. “Conversion into a corporation allows us as the employees, who drive the growth and expansion of the company, to participate adequately in the success of the company. Together with the expertise of our supervisory board, we are well-equipped for future growth”.

Supervisory board: collective expertise
The three employees of the newly-formed supervisory board put their core competencies in the service of VMS AG. They represent the perspectives of product development, corporate development, and of the market.

Dr. Anette Weisbecker takes on the chairmanship of the supervisory board. She is a member in the Directorate of the Frauenhofer IAO in Stuttgart, Germany and heads the Competence Center’s Software management team. With her extensive knowledge from her research at the Frauenhofer Institute, along with her knowledge of innovative software development at companies, which she gained over many years, she is able to provide additional ideas for the development of VMS products and services.

“Automating the processes was for a long time the main objective of commercial IT”, stated Dr. Anette Weisbecker. “Software is increasingly used for process measurement and process improvement. VMS emphasizes this idea with an excellent mathematical-statistical foundation, and a fully new approach in benchmarking, and I am glad to help guide the corporation down that road”.

Klaus-Dieter Laidig provides his wide-ranging experience developed in the IT market and in the promotion of young companies. He uses his 40 years of experience, which includes being the German managing director at Hewlett Packard, and in the supervisory board of SAP AG, to promoting the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany as a center for business, for example as a founding father of one of the most successful Business Plan Competitions, CyberOne.

“For years, I have been involved in various capacities in empowering young companies and their managers to convert their business ideas into reality”, is how explained Klaus-Dieter Laidig explained his work at VMS. “We can only move Germany forward as an economic center of business, and overcome crises such as the current one, through entrepreneurial creativity”.

Werner Schulteis, ICT Director of Randstad, Germany, represents the target group and VMS’s market in the supervisory board. As the previous Business Director of Development and today the IT manager, he knows the risks and rewards of IT and along with that, the working environment in which VMS AG is striving for faster success using benchmarks and optimization.

Werner Shultheis states, “As a customer, I have experienced what VMS can achieve with methodology, creativity, and hard work”. “I see great potential for that approach, and with it for the development of VMS, and I will do my part to help make that happen”.

About VMS

VMS has been optimizing SAP landscapes since 2002. VMS scans SAP installations from the process-level to the transaction-level and, partnering with CIOs, and identifies strengths and weaknesses. In doing this, VMS works with an integrated concept that comprises the IT infrastructure and the IT and business processes. VMS’ methods are “minimally invasive”, because the work puts only a minimal strain on the client’s resources. VMS offers the collected experience and data from about 2,600 SAP systems that it has measured, and that enables VMS to provide action-oriented advice on optimization and cost management. The structure and dynamics of the IT environment are then reproduced in a final VMS Report, which is used as the navigation system of the SAP landscape.