1Mby1M Deal Radar 2013: Approyo, Palo Alto, California

Approyo is a premier SAP HANA–focused company that supports companies with their shift to the HANA platform. The company develops ready to deploy and secure predictive analytics solutions for customers in sectors like retail, oil & gas, manufacturing, and healthcare. Within two years of its launch, Approyo has created tie-ups with 23 resellers in 14 countries and has crossed $1 million in revenue.

Approyo was founded by Christopher Carter in 2011. Before starting Approyo, Carter was associated with SAP for about 20 years and has developed expertise in cloud computing and big data. Carter sensed there was a huge quality gap in the SAP HANA space where under-performing solutions were offered at exorbitant prices. Seeing the need for a professional company that could not just host SAP services but also develop cost effective, secure, and strategic solutions using the SAP HANA platform, he founded Approyo.

Initially, Approyo targeted the retail, healthcare, and oil & gas sectors where massive amounts of data were being generated and stored without being analyzed. For companies in these sectors, Approyo gave them the ability to not increase footprints in their data centers, save on internal staff costs, and recognize a solution to analyze existing data faster.

Approyo’s solution aligned the strategic needs of these companies with the appropriate data sets. For example, for a hospital looking at reducing indirect costs, it considered various data sets – average energy costs, quarterly costs, patient days, housekeeping, and the cost of cafeterias, maintenance, and repairs – to understand the hospital’s workflow and impact on energy consumption costs. Ultimately it created a solution that cut costs by 28%.

What sets Approyo apart from other SAP HANA resellers is that rather than just providing hosting services for SAP HANA, it helps companies develop a road map for implementing the technology. It develops solutions using the data provided by various APIs to derive big data insights for better business outcomes and ROI.

Its success with vertical solutions has led Approyo to offer Ignite, a set of industry-specific templates. Ignite expedites the implementation of SAP HANA technology that is aligned with a company’s business strategy at minimal cost. The infrastructure cost based on vRam, storage, network, and OPEX per month is added to the SAP license cost. It comes to about $10,000 for an average solution of 128 gigabytes of RAM. This structure allows customers to choose a pay-as-you-go model or a monthly subscription.

Approyo targets the growing SAP ecosystem of more than 75,000 customers. As only 1.6% of SAP customers are on the HANA platform, there is scope for Approyo to tap deeper into this ecosystem. Specifically, the fastest and easiest companies to adapt are larger companies with massive amounts of data, but in reality the fastest to close are nimble organizations that are ready to take on disruptive solutions to grow their business and are looking at Approyo as an OPEX solutions provider.

Approyo is bootstrapped with seed funding from Carter, who is the owner and founder. Though the company is being approached by investors, Carter is not yet looking for funding but rather for the right people who can help develop contacts. He believes that building a successful company has to do with more than money.

Regarding an exit, Carter says he would rather like to keep riding the wave of success with Approyo but would take a prudent exit if offered the right price.

This segment is a part in the series : 1Mby1M Deal Radar 2013