Outsourcing: Arul Murugan, Founder and CEO of Enrich IT (Part 1)

Enrich IT was founded by Arul Murugan and his wife, Kavitha Palani, with the idea to help companies by providing them with tailored solutions in areas like business process management, technology services, enterprise application management and software licensing. Bootstrapped with $25,000, the company is now a multimillion dollar enterprise that specializes in Oracle supply chain and procurement solutions. 

Sramana Mitra: Hi Arul, to start would you give us some context about Enrich IT, your business, the lay of the land and so forth.

Arul Murugan:   Sure. We work with extending Oracle solutions. Our core competence is Oracle ERP. We primarily work with Fortune 1000 companies and provide them with Oracle financials and supply chain solutions. We provide implementation, upgrade, application management services and cloud services for mid to large enterprises that have chosen Oracle EBS as their global ERP platform. We understand our customers’ unique business requirements and tell them how they can configure, implement, and support complex business scenarios in Oracle’s ebusiness suite. We are a platinum partner with Oracle, which is the highest level recognized. We are also one of the three tier one global partners of Oracle providing procurement and supply chain solutions in the cloud with subscription-based pricing.

We have been in business since 2003, and right now we’ve crossed the $20 million mark. We have about 200 employees, of whom 120 are in the U.S. and 80 are in India.

SM: Where in India are you located?

AM: We have development and Oracle COE centers in Hyderabad and Chennai.

SM: And what about the U.S. operation?

AM: We are a U.S.-based company headquartered in Alpharetta, which is the technology hub in the Atlanta area. But we operate in 25 states, so we are truly national.

SM: The 120 people are basically doing on-site work in companies all over the United States?

AM: Correct. Some of them, about 30 people, work from our office for some of our projects, and the rest of them work at the clients’ sites.

SM: And you work specifically in Oracle financials and Oracle supply chain?

AM: Yes, Our core competence is in Oracle supply chain and financials

SM: Tell us a little bit about the kinds of customers you work with. What size customers, what kinds of verticals and so forth?

AM: We primarily work with Fortune 1000 companies in financial services, telecommunications, retail, manufacturing, health care and high technology. One of the good things with Enrich IT is that we’ve never lost a customer, and most of our customers provide repetitive business for us. Our goal is to be a niche provider. We fill the gap between, I would say, Accenture or Deloitte or IBM and Tata or Cognizant or Infosys.  We provide a similar quality and level of service as Accenture but at a more affordable  rate. We are not as low cost a provider as  Wipro or Tata. That’s given us a good positioning within the marketplace. My clients consider us as a tier one Oracle solution provider.

To give a good example, we started with a financial services company about two and a half years ago, and we were awarded to do a multimillion dollar global roll out project. At that time, the competition was between Hitachi, Cognizant, and us. In terms of price, we are positioned in between Hitachi and Cognizant, but they awarded it to enrich IT because the senior VP of application development felt that we understood their requirements better and estimated the work efforts properly with the right on-site and offshore mix. We did global rollouts for Europe with 13 currencies [and] Malaysia, bringing all their operations into Oracle.

Based on our project success, a few months ago when they decided to outsource most of their IT function, they outsourced their Oracle ERP department, including both support and ongoing project activities, to Enrich IT. They outsourced non-Oracle [work] to Capgemini. As part of this, we hired eight of their business analysts, and in total, we have about 30 resources for this client supporting them  24/7 on a global delivery model. As another example, a few months ago we engaged with a Fortune 500 industrial company, which has more than 50 ERP systems and considered using Oracle ERP as one global ERP system. But the challenge is it would take three to five years to accomplish that, and their procurement team needs to achieve about $100 million of cost savings in the next three years. So, they went with our private cloud Spend Management solution, which is deployed using our 30 days rapid implementation framework, using a preconfigured solution. This helped the client to  accelerate the time it took to get these cost savings. I hope explains how we are positioned as a tier one Oracle solution provider and the kind of work we do for our clients.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Outsourcing: Arul Murugan, Founder and CEO of Enrich IT
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