BEYOND ESSENTIALS
Core insight: Julio Medina founded Perceptio in 2000, which is now a 250-person SAP S/4HANA Cloud company that became the UNITED VARS Member for Colombia and Ecuador in March 2026.
Consequence: Perceptio is building on that membership fast, pulling in specialist help from members like Syntax and iprosis for client opportunities beyond its own scope, and contributing Gephi, its own platform for searching, validating, and hiring from a network of around 2,000 certified SAP consultants, which is free for any UNITED VARS member to use.
Mid-market angle: For a mid-market company running SAP, the Gephi platform means specialist SAP consultants are a search away instead of a months-long recruitment process.
In March 2026, Perceptio became the UNITED VARS Member for Colombia and Ecuador. Perceptio was the first professional services partner in America to go live on SAP GROW, a project that earned it an SAP Excellence Award.
Julio Medina, CEO, founded Perceptio in Medellín, Colombia, in 2000, using the Latin word for perception and knowledge as the company name. Julio lives in Medellín with his wife and two daughters, aged 25 and 8. His youngest daughter, Sara, is his biggest source of inspiration. “She's the engine of my life,” he says. “She motivates me every day to become better, both personally and professionally.”
When not working, he enjoys spending time with his family and expanding his knowledge of chess. “Studying chess with my teacher is like a spiritual retreat for me,” Julio says. “It’s my moment of zero stress, when I’m not thinking about anything else.”
Before founding Perceptio, Julio worked as a software engineer. “We had to build software completely from scratch on every project,” he recalls. “So, I built a team whose job is to create reusable components. By enhancing and integrating SAP software to drive real adoption and value, we could transform lives one company at a time, one user at a time.”
Perceptio developed deep expertise in SAP implementations and business transformation as an SAP Service Partner before becoming a Cloud subscription sales partner in 2023. That accelerator-driven approach later helped Vialtis go live on SAP S/4HANA Cloud in just 14 weeks using GrowFast by Perceptio. The company now has 250 employees, and over a three-year period has gained 13 active clients on SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
In 2025, Perceptio closed one of the ten biggest deals in the region with Colombian hospital, Fundación Cardio Infantil. The transformation project is based on SAP S/4HANA RISE private cloud and worth $2.3 million in licenses alone.
It wasn’t only the size of this deal that made it significant. SAP had exited the healthcare-specific module that was previously built into its legacy ERP. SAP's revised strategy is to use SAP Integration Suite to connect modern, cloud-based HIS (Hospital Information System) providers to the SAP S/4HANA ERP core.
“SAP proved with us that they're still as good as ever,” Julio says. “Cardio Infantil is ranked first in Latin America in cardiology, and first for customer experience too. Proving we could deliver for such a mature and respected hospital is also proof that S/4HANA is still the perfect solution to sit behind any hospital's own clinical systems.”
Soon after joining UNITED VARS, Perceptio had an opportunity with a Colombian fashion retail SAP client, so they asked for a UNITED VARS fashion specialist to join the initial discussions.
Julio recalls, "We’d only been in UNITED VARS a few weeks, and were already experiencing the reality of UNITED VARS’ ‘stronger than one’ tagline. We can now bring world-class expertise to our clients in areas outside our own specialisms, and that's a huge advantage for everyone. Syntax spoke to the client with real authority about SAP for fashion businesses and how alliance members work together and share expertise on global SAP rollouts."
Colombia has a strong fashion retail sector with many organizations that still run SAP ECC and are considering moving to cloud ERP. By combining Perceptio's local SAP knowledge with Syntax's specialist fashion experience, the two members can offer Colombian-based fashion businesses a stronger cloud migration proposition.
Perceptio is exploring collaborations with other members including iprosis, the alliance's Specialized Member for Data, AI and Integration. At a recent industry event, a potential client asked Julio about SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). Julio says, "I don't know much about SAP BDC, so before being a UNITED VARS member I wouldn’t have pursued this business opportunity. But I know that Amit from iprosis is an expert in BDC, so I called him and within a few hours he joined us in a meeting with our prospective client to discuss a potential BDC implementation."
As well as collaborating with alliance members, Perceptio is involved in the UNITED VARS Centers of Excellence for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP BTP and Customer Success.
Perceptio has a separate business unit that’s focused on helping companies find the right SAP talent.
“We’ve built Gephi, which is a platform for searching, selecting, validating and hiring experienced SAP consultants and teams,” Julio explains. “We have a network of about 2,000 certified SAP consultants worldwide, and any UNITED VARS member can search for someone, validate their experience, and hire them directly. Gephi is free for both talent and companies to join, as we only charge a fee to the hiring company for each contract they confirm on the platform.”
Julio is ambitious for the future. “Our strategic goal for 2028 is to be the top SAP S/4HANA cloud adoption partner in LAC North, which includes Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Central America,” he says.
AI is a big part of Perceptio’s plan to achieve that goal. “Clients aren't asking whether they should use AI anymore,” Julio says. “Instead, they're now asking where it will deliver the greatest business value. We’re building an AI-first culture internally and helping our customers identify practical SAP Business AI use cases to improve their operations and accelerate time-to-value.”
Perceptio was founded 26 years ago. For the first 22 of those years, the company built its foundation as a service partner, developing deep expertise in SAP implementations and business transformation. Around four years ago, Perceptio made a pivotal shift: it became a Cloud subscription sales partner and effectively reinvented itself as a Cloud-native company within the SAP ecosystem.
This repositioning has enabled rapid growth. Today, PERCEPTIO serves 12 active clients on SAP S/4HANA Cloud — the majority running on Public Cloud — and continues to scale. In parallel, PERCEPTIO has developed a dedicated SAP talent placement practice, helping UNITED VARS members staff and strengthen their own implementation projects with the right experts at the right time.
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Contact: Alejandro Valencia, CRO
E: Alejandro.valencia@perceptio.net
T: +57 3004847330
Mid-sized companies should go global without losing speed or local identity. UNITED VARS brings together hand-picked local market leaders with real people on the ground in 100+ countries to remove legal, cultural, and language barriers. As a strategic alliance, UNITED VARS provides clear accountability from start to finish. UNITED VARS is the world's only SAP Platinum Partner alliance, delivering end-to-end SAP services for the mid-market.
stronger than one.
Perceptio, a 250-person SAP S/4HANA Cloud company founded by Julio Medina in Medellín in 2000, became the UNITED VARS member for Colombia and Ecuador in March 2026. It was the first professional services partner in America to go live on SAP GROW, a project that earned it an SAP Excellence Award.
Gephi is Perceptio's own platform for searching, validating, and hiring from a network of around 2,000 certified SAP consultants worldwide. It is free for any UNITED VARS member to use, and Perceptio only charges the hiring company a fee once a contract is confirmed on the platform.
It gives them access to specialist expertise beyond Perceptio's own scope, without a lengthy search for the right partner. Perceptio has already brought in Syntax for fashion retail knowledge and iprosis for SAP Business Data Cloud, so a local client gets alliance-wide specialism through a single, hand-picked local market leader.