Technology is rapidly changing and impacting business in new ways. If companies aren’t adopting new technology, they are losing ground and not innovating. The SAP landscape continues to evolve and SAP customers need to keep up with these changes.
Featuring in The Enterprise World’s this issue of Top 5 Successful Entrepreneurs To Watch In 2022 is Christopher Carter, CEO, helping change businesses and impact in new ways. In this interview, let us unfold his journey.
1. Brief us about your journey at the Approyo , what inspired you to start the company?
With a love for technology, I began my journey when I attended the Georgia Institute of Technology. In college I began working with SAP and realized how much I enjoyed working with innovative solutions. I eventually went on to own my own business which I later sold. I was in retirement for a very short period when I heard about SAP’s announcement of SAP HANA. I saw great potential for this solution and decided to jump back into the SAP space, thus creating Approyo.
2. What are the initial challenges you faced and what are the reasons behind company’s long-standing success?
At the start, one of the main challenges Approyo faced was finding the right clients. It was difficult to find clients who had complete understanding of the cloud, so it was seen more as a “risk” than a step toward innovation. A lot of companies were satisfied with their old legacy systems, so we really had to work toward educating our clients and proposing every benefit of moving to the cloud. Eventually, people became more and more interested in its capabilities, and solidifying our services and expanding our proof of success through new customers is what pushed us to be a leader in the SAP industry.
3. What are the products or services the company focuses on? How are your services different from those in the market?
Approyo provides deployments, migrations upgrades for any SAP core instance. The company acts as a reliable partner delivering SAP projects on time and on budget. The process behind Approyo’s services begins with a tailored roadmap fit to each clients’ business needs. After an SAP project is complete, Approyo offers their managed cloud services, such as hosting, monitoring, and 24/7 SAP Basis support. Approyo’s global team of SAP experts works around the clock to ensure that all of their clients’ systems are running efficiently and securely.
4. How do you decide to take the company a step further?
We decided we wanted to move into working with other global cloud providers, expanding our partner network, and overall broadening our solutions portfolio. To differentiate Approyo from the competition, we thought it was valuable to our clients to create our own AI monitoring tool to allow clients to have continuous business with no downtime. Recently we released a new advanced analytics and business Intelligence monitoring tool that allows us to track all our clients’ applications, servers, databases, etc. under one platform.
5. Being a successful leader, please share your views on current business scenario across globe after Covid19 pandemic.
Covid-19 has dramatically changed the business world and plenty of companies are still recovering from it. Now more than ever companies are realizing the value that an advanced cloud platform can bring to their business. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Approyo continued to support our clients through providing migrations, deployments, and managed services to help them navigate the new working world. Supply chain demand has risen while container ships are behind schedule. Having a successful cloud solution such as SAP S/4HANA in place allows companies to track their shipments and update their stock accordingly to streamline the process. Positioning ourselves as trusted partners who can help our clients navigate these times and challenges has contributed to our own success.
6. Why it is said that the workforce plays a vital role in every business’s growth? Please tell us about your team.
Approyo’s team is globally and remotely located. We have employees throughout the U.S. as well as India, Brazil, and Europe. Our technical team has hundreds of combined years of experience in providing successful migrations and projects across multiple industries. Many of our employees hold different certifications, and we offer education and learning opportunities for them to gain new skills to extend our services even further.
7. Can you please brief us about your professional experience?
Christopher Carter is the CEO and Founder of Approyo. With over 25 years of experience in the SAP industry, Chris has been globally recognized as a leader in the technology industry space. Being recognized by Hadoop World, SAP Users Group, Cloud Expo, SAP TechEd, etc. he has made a name for himself as a self-made entrepreneur and educator.
He is also known as a technology and security expert, as you will see him on TV and radio shows speaking about subjects concerning top technology news stories in the U.S. He is also a member of the Forbes Technology Council, where you will see he posts insightful articles, continuing to educate on the importance of data security. At Approyo, he manages the executive team and creates an all-encompassing vision for the mission of the company to be successful year-over-year.
8. What are the key achievements of your business journey?
Seeing Approyo receive the recognition it has within the SAP ecosystem, being able to hire from among the most talented in the space, and the relationships I’ve built along the way are my most meaningful achievements to date
9. ‘Innovation is the key to business growth’, Please share your views.
I’ve seen too many companies perish for want of innovation. In most cases it’s not a lack of ideas or effort but an absence of an accommodating mechanism to innovation that proves fatal. Our own pivotal growth moments have resulted from adaptations to unforeseen circumstances—less because we had the best ideas for the moment than that we had the right structure and openness to ideas that could push us forward in those moments.
10. Any client experience you would like to highlight?
We have had many clients over the years, from providing only SAP Basis support to implementing full cloud migrations onto SAP HANA. We have experience in a broad range of industries, including hospitality, manufacturing, supply chain, technology, etc.
Here are two examples of projects that prove our SAP expertise:
A global hotel brand needed to upgrade, migrate, and offload daily management of their existing SAP infrastructure. The company needed a partner to help them undergo a cloud migration and consolidation of their SAP systems. Approyo’s Center of Excellence crafted a complete Azure cloud migration roadmap, including rightsizing and consolidation of infrastructure, lowering their Total Cost of Ownership, gaining operational efficiencies from geographic consolidation, providing centralized governance, and high availability and flexibility of SAP on Azure.
With continued support, they can now leverage advanced support, development, testing, and security with automated backup and data recovery. Because the brand is such a large enterprise in the travel and hospitality industry, this implementation not only benefits the industry as a whole but benefits millions of customers around the globe looking for a great experience in their travels.
A global designer and manufacturer of small firearms and light weapons needed a partner to seamlessly migrate their cloud environment to SAP. With their new U.S. entity, they needed an architecture scalable to fit their expansion, while complying with U.S. regulations. Post-project, they needed a partner who would provide expert SAP Basis support, to ensure quality operations in the future.
The results of the SAP HANA migration resulted in better visibility into their data, simple reporting, real-time analytics, and overall enhanced performance of their SAP landscape. The company experienced improved governance, monitoring, and efficiency of their financial operations, as well as optimized supply chain management to better understand their inventory. They also benefitted from improved compliance and security of their data.
