Sedat Yalçınkaya who has been performing his duties in APRO for 6 years assigned as General Manager. We have made a cheerful conversation about his new assignment.
Could you speak of APRO a little?
Sedat Yalçınkaya: APRO is an organization founded in 2000 in order to provide consultancy and training about Microsoft technologies. After students invited APRO to their own companies for business, APRO become a Project and Consultancy Company 5 years later. APRO completing business partnerships with many System Infrastructure software and hardware vendors in following 10 years continued as System Integrator Company offering turnkey projects to clients.
As a result of vision created by management associates who have consultancy and training experiences for many years, APRO decided to significantly invest in “Software Defined Datacenter” technologies after reconstruction of organization in 2014. After 1 year-long preparation phase together with VMware Turkey, APRO become not only one of the important actors in Turkey but also in the region for VMware Professional Services organization by becoming expert in all of the SDDC technologies. This is just the time when I joined in APRO family.
APRO makes serious investments in VMware. As a result of such investments, it is one of the most competent business partners of VMware in Turkey. It also has been continuing to render service as partner in professional service organization. About 90% of our projects in APRO are related to VMware technologies. We have been providing other VMWare related technologies to our clients. We may summarize APRO as such.
You are also exporting your services. I think you are not only in Turkey?
Sedat Yalçınkaya: Yes, We may conduct implementation and configuration on behalf of VMware because we are part of VMware Professional Services organization as I mentioned before. Because of METNA region we are part of in VMware, we have completed significant projects in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Dubai and also in Germany and Serbia apart from that region. As a result of such successful projects, we have crowned our success by being selected as one of the Best 5 VMWare Service Organization Companies and granted VMware Rising Star Partner in VMworld organization lastly held in Barcelona before pandemic. Because of our region, we have completed many projects in these countries. We have also completed projects in Germany and Serbia apart from these regions. As a result, we are an organization providing added-value to our country and exporting services besides our local projects.
Considering your team, we have here different structural team percentages such as sales in brands, technical etc. How is your team in this respect? How is your team structure? What are the important aspects while creating such teams?
Sedat Yalçınkaya: Here in APRO, our organization is consisted about 30 people. 3-4 of those 30 are administrative personnel, 3-4 of them are sales organization, and rest of the team is our Professional Services team that is consisted of engineers and consultants. In addition to experience gained in many projects completed with vendors as system integrator for many years, our colleagues have developed themselves and become a team providing contribution to both our clients and company. We have a mission to hire fresh, successful graduates and teach them instead of hiring experienced resources. I believe we are very successful at this. We have hired third generation of fresh graduates I have mentioned before. Training of these colleagues started, I agree it’s not an easy method, however we will bring these colleagues who have passed certain phases into sector again in near future.
We may easily say that you have a team having high technical capability then?
Sedat Yalçınkaya: Of course. After all, biggest difference separating APRO from other system integrators is quality of consultancy services and strength of technical team.
What will be the future position of APRO and in what direction your existing structure will evolve?
Sedat Yalçınkaya: We are attaching great importance on this topic as management team. Because technology does not wait. VMware had mainly four solutions while we were starting to invest in Vmware technologies; now they have 40. One of our primary objectives is being competent on entire VMware technology portfolio. Vmware is an enterprise leaping forward every day. They add new solutions to their products; consequently, we need to increase our skills about its products to next level. Besides that, there are software-defined solutions that we have adapt and is strongly backed by technology and IT. We also chase to be more effective in this point as APRO. We started to form a dev-ops team that is mainly not present within the body of system integrator companies like us. Because, we need to evolve to an organization that may interact with software, develop and alter code in a world full of software-defined solutions. There should be at least a team within our body. We mainly focus on these topics these days. Security is trend topic of today! It is a big issue! We have some opinions such as “What can we do here?” We are trying to determine our roadmaps. However, attitude of end-users and enterprises in Turkey is important for this topic. It is not up to us our our decision like “let’s invest in here”. We prefer to invest in significant technologies and solutions according to client’s needs.
You are working with APRO for a long time, but you have a recent position change here, what do you think about that?
Sedat Yalçınkaya: I am in my twentieth year at sector. Majority of these 20 years passed in distributor organization, Arena Bilgisayar. I worked in every level of sales organization in Arena Bilgisayar. Lately, I was working as manager. In order to make a change for my personal development, I wanted to change my career from distributor organization to system integration ecosystem. Because system integrators are companies having much more intense customer experience and technology. I have never regretted of that decision, in fact I think it’s a decision taken late for me. However, crossing roads with accurate organization is also crucial. I believe roads of APRO and mine has crossed in right time and right point. Esteemed partners of APRO have supported me a lot during this process. I have been working with APRO for nearly 6 years. I have started with sales organization and assigned as Deputy of General Manager and now I will continue my work life in APRO as General Manager after transferring of General Manager Position from one our partners Mr. Bora. One of our primary goals is struggle of making our ongoing organization more efficient. In addition to that, companies like us need to become a corporation and take accurate steps while planning next 3-5 years. Making APRO more corporate and a company having solid organization by keeping our amateur soul and college understanding would be our primary goal.