ePlan Consultants aims to redefine how enterprises navigate change, bridging the gap between legacy systems and the modern era.
Led by Christos Topouzis (Director), Vassilis Papadopoulos (Managing Partner/CCO), and Marios Christodoulou (Managing Partner/COO), the firm simplifies the digital transition, viewing this shift not as a hurdle, but as the fundamental architecture change, required for sustainable success in a digital-first world.
How does your technology streamline planning and workflow processes compared to traditional methods? What measurable impact have you seen?
Marios Christodoulou: We believe that effective streamlining is achieved through integration and immediate action, minimising disruption. Our core philosophy is to help transition organisations from disjointed legacy systems to unified, cloud-native environments, ensuring that they “live and breathe digital”. We primarily utilise Google Workspace and Odoo to overhaul, transform and optimise internal and external processes. Google Workspace transforms team collaboration by integrating videocalling, email, chat and document handling in one place, protected by Google’s enterprise-grade security. This allows our clients to collaborate in real-time from any device. Crucially, the integration of Google’s Gemini AI for Workspace means every client can harness generative AI to craft compelling content, generate data insights and conduct deep research, dramatically accelerating tasks.
For structured business workflows, we deploy Odoo, a unique cloud-based ERP suite that provides fully integrated business applications for CRM, eCommerce, Accounting, Inventory, Project Management and HR Management. Odoo simplifies processes by reducing data entry, offering innovative AI features and providing a blazing-fast user interface. While every client’s measurable impact varies, the core benefit is operational speed and efficiency. For example, by integrating apps like Odoo’s accounting module, we see processing times for certain documents drastically reduced, allowing teams to shift focus from data entry to high-value tasks like reporting and advising clients (a key benefit that we have seen, similar to industry reports highlighting shifts in accounting processing time from days to hours).
When we execute migration plans, our efficient processes guarantee near-zero downtime for the company, which itself is a massive measurable impact compared to traditional, disruptive methods.
What distinguishes ePlan from its inter-national competitors and how are you positioning the company for expansion beyond Cyprus?
Vassilis Papadopoulos: Our primary differentiators are our deep expertise, our high-tier partnership status and our unique service model. We are one of the few providers globally capable of integrating and expertly supporting key platforms such as Google Workspace, Google Cloud, and Odoo simultaneously, and we can assist our customers in fully leveraging their synergies. Specifically, we are proud to be a Google Workspace Premier Partner and the biggest Odoo Partner in Cyprus. These achievements signify that our team not only sells licences but also possesses validated, deep technical expertise to implement, customize and support these critical systems for organisations of all sizes. We position ourselves not just as a vendor but as a strategic partner that accompanies organisations on their digital journey from start to finish. We offer strategic assessment, migration services with zero downtime, optimisation and ongoing support.
Regarding expansion, while we are based in Cyprus, we are not limited to the region alone. Our high-level partnerships are our passport and our status with Google and Odoo grants us international credibility and resources. As we continue to serve clients across various industries, from retail and financial services to manufacturing and software/gaming development, we are strategically targeting neighbouring markets where there is a strong need for integrated, AI-ready cloud solutions built on Google Cloud Platform. As part of that strategy, we have already established a presence in Greece through a wholly owned subsidiary of the Cyprus entity, ePlan Consultants Greece.
How are Cloud technologies integrated into ePlan’s infrastructure and what advantages do they bring to your clients?
Christos Topouzis: As a certified Google Cloud Partner, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) forms the secure, scalable backbone of the solutions we deploy for our clients. Of course, the same applies to our own internally used infrastructure. GCP is designed for developers and AI, enabling the building of fast, secure and modern applications. The advantages that GCP brings to our clients are multifaceted and directly address the key challenges in digital transformation:
AI Functionality, which is the most transformative benefit, gives access to cutting-edge AI. Vertex AI, Google’s fully managed AI platform, enhanced by Gemini and over 200 foundation models, empowers developers to build generative AI applications and intelligent agents with ease. This enables the use of AI for everything from improving customer service with conversational AI products like Speech-to-Text to accelerating developer productivity with Gemini Code Assist.
GCP provides elastic infrastructure, allowing clients to run customizable virtual machines using Compute Engine and automatically deploy and scale containers using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or Cloud Run. For large-scale data needs, services like BigQuery for data analytics offer 26%-34% lower three-year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than alternatives, and Spanner for virtually unlimited scale and 99.999% database availability.
Security is paramount and GCP uses the same security technology Google uses, helping to defend data and applications against threats and fraudulent activity. Integrated solutions like Google Threat Intelligence can be utilised to understand and respond to threat actors and potential attack vectors. Furthermore, Google Workspace also provides enhanced AI-powered security features that automatically identify and classify sensitive data to safeguard confidential information.
From a Managing Partner’s perspective, what has been the toughest strategic decision you’ve had to make?
Vassilis Papadopoulos: The toughest strategic decision we’ve navigated was to truthfully prioritise depth over breadth. In the rapidly evolving, often turbulent digital landscape, many solution providers try to offer every available tool. For us, the challenge was committing immense resources and focus to achieve top-tier mastery across a few key, highly complex and integrated platforms – namely Google Workspace, Google Cloud and Odoo. Our end goal was to become an Odoo Gold Partner and a Google Workspace Premier Partner, which are the highest tiers a partner can achieve. This decision demands continuous specialization and investment in our team, rather than the easier path of generalized IT services. However, this focus ensures we deliver truly transformative integrated solutions.
What does the next stage of growth look like for ePlan?
Christos Topouzis: The future for ePlan Consultants is focused on solidifying our role as the definitive AI-powered transformation partner in the region and beyond. This involves three pillars: AI Integration and Automation, Vertical Specialisation and Regional Leadership.
We aspire to be able to offer full integration of generative AI into every client workflow using Gemini and Vertex AI. The goal is always to maximize productivity and collaboration through AI-powered apps. We plan to leverage the industry solutions provided by Google Cloud for industries such as retail, financial services and healthcare to develop highly customised, deeply integrated Odoo and Workspace solutions that address industry-specific challenges, like detecting bank fraud or optimizing manufacturing supply chains.
Building on our success in Cyprus, we will actively pursue the expansion that, as we have already indicated, is underway. Our superior partnership status and our proven expertise will enable us to guide more organisations through their modernisation and digital transformation journey.
We see ePlan Consultants evolving to become less of an advisor and more of an architect, continually building the innovative future that our clients will inhabit.
This Special Feature first appeared in the December edition of GOLD magazine. Click here to view it.
