Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Do you sometimes do product development work for smaller companies for equity?

Sanjay Dhawan: We did … not for equity per se, but it would be more from a risk and reward standpoint. We structure the engagement model where a portion of the payments are tied to either achieving certain outcomes or a portion of the payment is revenue share, that type of stuff.

SM: Switching to your 4,000-people operation, is that all in India? Is the development team largely or entirely in India? >>>

Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask my question again now that you’ve provided context that would be helpful for our readers about what you do. Let’s say Salesforce.com or IBM or a company like that is trying to make a decision about what are they going to build in-house and what are they going to outsource to an OPD (outsourced product development) player. How do they make that assessment, and what have you learned in your business with them? >>>

Outsourcing: Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Symphony Services (Part 1)

In the early days of software, using it was as simple as buying a licensing agreement, and then uploading the software to each employee’s desktop. The evolution of computers is moving at such a rapid pace that in order to keep up, companies have to refurbish existing software to accommodate employees who are no longer chained to their desks from nine to five. Instead, telecommuting or making the most of long commutes on public transportation by using their laptops or smart phones to get their work done. That’s where companies like Palo Alto, California-based Symphony Services come in. Symphony has a presence throughout the United States and India and in Surrey, United Kingdom, and has a client list with names like Oracle, Yahoo, Motorola, Google, and Hitachi. >>>

Outsourcing: Arul Murugan, Founder and CEO of Enrich IT (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You said that it’s not easy to do IT services. That’s not entirely true, you know. I think what you are going to see — and you have not seen this yet — but in a way, what you are doing right now with the services business is almost, as you said, very specialized, and it’s almost productized services.

Arul Murugan: What I meant was if  I am a doing pure services, like consulting services, it’s hard to scale up a consulting services business. It’s easy to scale up a cloud computing business, because cloud computing is more productized. For example, what I am doing on the supply chain as a private cloud model, it is easy to scale up. For example, if I want to grow to $100 million in the next few years, I cannot just grow that in my consulting services. It’s plenty of hard work for me to do that, but on the private cloud model, it’s easy for me to grow. >>>

Outsourcing: Arul Murugan, Founder and CEO of Enrich IT (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I really like the way you have done your positioning. I think you’ve got on the front end of a trend that is developing.  I have talked to enough CIOs at this point to know that the trend is there. Where would you point entrepreneurs? You’ve obviously done a nice positioning of where you saw a gap. You see an opportunity to [create] a substantial business. Where would you point entrepreneurs who are coming into the outsourcing space or into the cloud computing space? Using this kind of a model of services and outsourcing and so forth, where do you see some interesting opportunities? If you were a young entrepreneur today and you didn’t have Enrich IT, where would you start? >>>

Outsourcing: Arul Murugan, Founder and CEO of Enrich IT (Part 4)

Arul Murugan: Yes. We are in the early stage, and now that we’ve got three customers, this is an area which I believe will help us to get Enrich IT to the $100 million mark in next three to five years >>>

Outsourcing: Arul Murugan, Founder and CEO of Enrich IT (Part 3)

SM: Yes. So, you are managing the private cloud supply solutions for these enterprises?

AM: Exactly. Now our focus is on private cloud to large clients that are already using Oracle EBS. We also provide a public cloud model. But we are seeing more success in private cloud since that fits into the IT policies of mid to large enterprises. Moreover, it provides them true integration to their on-premise ERP systems where the public cloud has a lot of challenges. Also by providing private cloud, we are able to scale and increase the footprint to other applications. For example, with one of our clients we started with providing e-sourcing and e-procurement solutions on the private cloud. At a later stage, when the client decides that he needs to have a good MDM solution for products and suppliers first, before rolling out the e-procurement solution across the globe, we are able to put Oracle MDM into our private cloud. That gives a huge value proposition to the client, since we can deploy much faster in our cloud than their on-premise system, and it accelerates their time to value. >>>

Outsourcing: Arul Murugan, Founder and CEO of Enrich IT (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have this business from a financial services client. How does that business roll out from an implementation point of view? Is it that you are providing them with the 30 people that you were talking about, or is it [something else]?

Arul Murugan: Those 30 people are aligned for the managed services project that we got where they will be working both on support, which is SLA based, and ongoing project work. If any major implementation projects come in addition to regular enhancement and compliance projects, then we will do the effort estimation and sign another deliverable-based SOW. >>>