SAP has extended its distribution pact with Avnet Technology Solutions to include the United States and Canada in addition to the countries in Asia where the two had been working together.

Under the agreement, the Arizona-based solutions distributor will take on a variety of SAP’s products, including its SAP HANA in-memory database technology, as well as mobile device management, analytics and other technologies. The distributor will take on SAP Afaria mobile device management, SAP Business Objects, Crystal, and Lumira software, and the Sybase database platform.

For SAP, which has been on a quest to get its global channel business north of 40 percent of its revenues, it’s another opportunity to reach out to a different set of partners. Its early-days goals with Avnet include largely onboarding new partners in North America, but Avnet is also going to focus on building out connections to its major hardware vendor partners, including HP, IBM, and Cisco.

“HANA is going to be our entry point into converged solutions,” said Scott Look, vice president and general manager for Connected and Secured Solutions for Avnet Technology Solutions Americas. “We have HANA expertise on board already, and we have more business development folks coming on.”

In recent years, Avnet has been bolstering its services offerings through a series of acquisitions, culminating in the launch of a specific Avnet Services division earlier this year. Look said Avnet will build out a whole series of services around its newly acquired SAP lineup.

Over the last year, Avnet has been focused on building out reference architectures, custom configurations and other steps to make technically-complex solutions more accessible to a broader swath of its solution providers. Look suggested it will take a similar approach with the combination of SAP software and hardware from a variety of its core vendors. “We want to help our partners simplify as much as possible and really accelerate our partners capabilities,” Look said.

Pre-configured hardware and software configurations around HANA are likely to be the first steps, and over time, the distributor will look for ways to bring HANA and other SAP technologies into its various SolutionsPath segments focused on both key technologies and vertical markets. The strategy will be “technology first, verticals second,” Look said.