Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You became one of the major SAP Hana developers. You are part of the SAP Startup Focus program. Now you have core expertise in doing facility management and energy optimization for hospitals. When you go back to the SAP Startup Focus program, are they able to match you up with all the hospital energy optimization opportunities that SAP has in their customer base?

Chris Carter: SAP’s Startup Focus program mission is to help our organization as well as others in the program to have conversations with SAP and to really be able to understand who we are, what we are, why we do it and our capabilities. They promote us to the account executives and other folks in the companies themselves.

It is also imperative for us as an organization to talk to those individuals and to work with them. I just came back from a meeting with the retail team out of Chicago. We work with them continuously, following them, showing them use cases, giving them ideas of how they can talk to their customers and discuss what benefits are and what a use case could be for an organization to not only sell Hana into it, but also to control the future and tell that organization the real cost benefits of starting to deploy Hana, how the payback will come forth quickly, how revenue optimization and growth for their organization is going to continue, and how they can continue to leverage all that. We are working with SAP and their team to make that happen.

SM: What do you see as Hana’s big differentiated advantage compared with other big data technologies out there?

CC: There are a couple of points that give Hana an advantage. Hana gives you the ability to fit structured and unstructured data right into the system, not having to have massive deployment of commodity hardware all over the place, I can put it into an appliance very cost effectively and be able to do a compression ratio of up to sevenfold and really get my hands into it within days. Then I have the ability to scale that data, to see it in a number of different ways from anywhere in the world, grab data I want to grab, and put it through the system and have it within milliseconds.

I just came back from Shanghai and I was showing on our iPad how we can use [SAP’s] Lumira, which is a BI tool within SAP, take that information and as I clicked the button it came back up. Those servers were back in the U.S., and I was still in Shanghai.

SM: Is there anything else you would like to add?

CC: Big data is something you are going to have to get used to. If you are not working with an organization, you are behind already. If you are not using your data as well as the data that is freely available in the world to make decisions, you are falling behind. [Edward] Snowden just got granted [temporary] asylum in Russia. He may have told people what the National Security Administration is doing. Because of all the data in the world right now, because of what is on Facebook APIs, Twitter APIs, Google +, and so on, I can probably come up with more information than any individual or company in this world right now, very quickly and easily. You too as an organization can use that to better your organization and better your use of your employees’ time and capabilities. It is a fantastic database world.

SM: It was great talking to you, Chris. I hope to see you on our roundtable soon.

CC: You bet you will see us soon.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo
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