Stronger as One: How Infosys and MRE Are Energizing the Future of CTRM

Dru Neikirk:

It's really great to see so many of MRE's team members together here today. This is great. We haven't been together probably since the holiday party, and I'm glad you guys could join us, and it's also great to be joined by some of our new Infosys team members. I definitely on behalf of the management team want to thank Infosys for this great warm welcome, hosting this event. It's given us a chance to all meet, kinda get to know each other and learn about the opportunities that this is presenting for all of us. So again, for those of you who haven't met me, you're fortunate. My name is Dru Neikirk, and I'm one of the founders. And Shane and Mike, obviously, are here today with me as well. Kind of an interesting fact, we have a lot of little cliches at MRE, but one of them is Mike, Shane, and I, we call ourselves the three-legged stool of MRE. So the reason we do that is because we kind of realized early on that our own unique skills and abilities created a perfect balance. Over the many years that we've built and grown this company, we're proud of the fact that we've maintained that balance even though the company's grown and we've continued to expand our management team. I think it's incredibly important. So MRE was founded in 1994. Well, I guess you guys first office was in a house, right? So similar, but and over the 31 years MRE has endured and grown because we're adaptive, we're dynamic, but most of all and you know, it's kind of unique we are talking about… I did my speech and we really didn't know what each other was gonna say. There was no collaboration. But we hire great people and that's you guys. So one of the things I learned really early in my career is as a consultant, you're in the people business. And I say that all the time, you know, guys, we're in the people business. I got good news and I got bad news. We're in the people business. So, another interesting fact about MRE is that this is not our first merger. So, our first was actually back when MRE merged with my firm QCS in 2000. And so, the rest they say is history. So, until now. So, today, as we're hearing, as we realize we're now part of Infosys. And as you can see, this is kind of overwhelming for the MRE standard, but they are a large, dynamic, successful company. And we’re very… all of us are very excited about what the future holds with all of us together. So, I think what's important is we mentioned six or eight months, but really we started talking with Infosys, well, many years ago. As matter of fact, in 2012 we had a meeting and I met Joseph through a phone call. Then again in 15. But almost two years ago, this next month, we were approached. We were approached the year before to do some partnering at BP, but I said, I don't want to create a competitor. It's just not in my… what's in it for us? So a year later, they tried again and finally they said, okay, here's what's in it for you. So let's just get together and do this. Over this whole period of time, we've had a lot of dialogue, a lot of meetings and interactions. And I think what's important that you all know is that we have found that even though they're a larger company, they're another company like us with the same shared values of integrity, of respect, of people, and ethics, and ultimately hard work. So that was very encouraging to us. As you can see, I mean, it's a great fit. We continued as we experienced one another. Nothing's changed. Everything's been consistent through the whole process. Another thing that we've found is although Infosys is a very large organization, the way that they're strategically organized and aligned allows them to be agile and effectively operate across industries, service lines, regions, teams, and cultures. So I think it's pretty impressive. And just to give you an example, MRE, from a day-to-day perspective, we're aligned with Infosys Consulting's Sure service line, which I was gonna tell you the definition. We've already had that. Literally, our speeches are like right on top of each other. And so although Infosys has over 320,000 employees, post-merger with MRE, we're part of a company that's much, much smaller. So to give you an example, with the addition of MRE, the Infosys Consulting Sure team has a global headcount of around 1,000. And the North American group, which is currently our focus, is about 375 now. So we were pretty big add to that group. And so I'm very excited about that. Ultimately, when you look at this structure and organization, being organized this way, I think allows each team to stay focused on their real strengths and abilities and then leverage and get synergy out of the strengths and abilities of all the other teams across the company. So when you look at what was our thinking in this. Well, it's been the founder's goal always to figure out a way to expand and grow not only our offerings, but our expertise and approach to more clients and geographies. And so, we all at MRE know what we do is special and we've always wanted to see that flourish and grow. After doing the diligence I talked about with Infosys, we quickly came to the realization as a group that this merger and partnership with Infosys and MRE was the key to unlock the goal that we had. So through all these discussions, we quickly realized that we are stronger as one. And so Mike, why don't you share a few thoughts?

Mike Short:

I'm Mike Short. I want to also thank Infosys for the warm welcome today. It's a little overwhelming, but it's much appreciated. Dinesh, Dash, thank you for being here. It's an honor to have you here. Stronger as one. For me, I think of the MRE strengths and how, I mean, we’re going, I believe, we’ll be the tip of the spear that brings more value to our clients. We want to create great leverage around the capabilities that we've built. Sort of three strengths I'll touch on. We have a robust service model, deep domain expertise and as Drew said, I'll say it again, we can't say it enough, great people. You know, the service model goes from assessments, software selections, implementations, upgrades, custom development, managed services, support and maintenance. We've got a broad offering, deeper in some areas than others. But that's definitely one of the strengths that we think we can leverage with Infosys global capabilities. Our domain expertise is cross commodity business model technologies. For 30 years, we've really been part of building the HRM ecosystem. We've co-developed with the ION products through client work. Solved new problems for the industry. But we're more than each arm technologists. I mean, we've also expanded into Salesforce. We've integrated Salesforce into our each arm solutions. And we've built a strong delivery team of project managers, business analysts, data analysts, and managed services. And finally, it's you folks. We've got a great team to join with, with Infosys' great team. And our folks are committed to our clients and value for our clients and each other. And I want to thank the MRE folks for helping us get to this point. The bottom line is we're pretty awesome. But we'll, we'll be stronger together as one. And I can't wait to see what we accomplish.

Shane Merz:

I'm Shane Merz and kind of repeating what Drew and Mike said, we really appreciate the warm welcome. Pretty much since day one when we started this journey trying to decide if we were gonna get married, I've always felt very comfortable about the relationship. And that's continued all the way through today, and I can't be more excited about what that's going to mean for tomorrow. So I'm super bullish on our joint future. Kind of transitioning, like Mike and Drew also said, if we made money off of public speaking, we'd be really broke because there's no way that this is what I would do as my day job. So I made some notes and you'll see me read off of them a little bit. I also thought about the format and I was thinking I'd really like the long pod kind of podcast format better than the Jennifer, two minutes you have to get up and talk about 30 years, what 30 years might mean to you and what the future looks like. But I'm going to give it my best. I've read it a few times and it's about two minutes. Generally today's theme is stronger as one. And I believe that wholeheartedly. But as we start that journey, I think it's worth just a few minutes to look back on the past and kind of figure out how the MRE team got here. I like the term that kind of MRE was the OG of CTRM Systems Integrators. It's a 30 year history. We have lots of folks who were around back in 1996 who will remember that we came about this close to being a software company. We had built a custom application and we were actually competing with a company called SolArc who was acquired by Openlink, who was acquired by ION. And so we were just a couple degrees of separation away from being a software company. So luckily we didn't win that competition. One mantra that we've always had, going back to kind of the Arthur Anderson days, was that we wanted to build a company that our employees could be proud of and that our customers would always recommend for the next work or invite us back to do more work. And those two fundamental kind of guideposts are what I think has gotten us here today. So I know it's not really customer appreciation day, but a big shout out to all of our customers, too, that have helped us get where we are today. In 30 years, the markets in this industry has seen a lot of ups and downs. A lot of companies have come and gone into this space that we share. And we've weathered all of those storms. There's a storm that's coming up that I think is the biggest one we've ever seen. And it's the graying of the workforce and the CTRM kind of service integration space. That paramount challenge is also a huge opportunity because whoever solves the problem and can meet the challenge of building the next generation of great CTRM consultants, will set the stage, will be the leaders for the next generation, and I am 1000% convinced that our combined group will be the entity that does that. So, with that scale, I tried to coin a phrase and I'm not sure if it's original or if I just dreamed it, but I've been wanting to continue to say that we are trying to deliver CTRM at scale. And if we can figure out how to do that, we will lower the cost of ownership for our customers. We'll bring up the next generation of great consultants. And it will enable us to take our platform of success to new geographies and to actually be able to win and deliver kind of the massive enterprise scale competitions that in the past MRE could never really compete for without a balance sheet. And now we can go win those competitions together. And I think we'll be able to provide some great services for our customers going forward. So keeping Doug kinda accidentally stepped on a Star Trek theme, but I'm gonna continue it real quick as I close up, I think that our success means that we're genuinely going to change the CTRM ecosystem at warp speed. And stronger is one, and together, I believe that we will strongly, well, will boldly go where no SI has gone before. He did it. I can't believe he did it. So thank you very much, and I'm looking forward to our next shared chapter.

Dru Neikirk:

Yeah, thanks, Shane. Yeah, okay. So, you know, another thing about the stronger as one that I think is really intriguing, and it should be for all of us in this room, because I have a feeling it's definitely on its way to impact everyone's lives, is the data and AI boom that's occurring. What this enables us to do is because Infosys already has a head start and they're a huge organization investing lots of money. As a matter of fact, it's gonna give us access to their Topaz AI platform as well as they have things like a Lex knowledge or training platform. I mean, there's a lot of great tools that are gonna help us train and then build and enable so many things for our clients. And then when we leverage that with Emory's deep expertise, I mean, the sky's the limit on what we can do with complete end-to-end solutions. So, together, we're going to be embracing this digital future and we will be able to do things like build and automate complex trading processes. We're gonna be able to build compliance and regulatory detection systems. We're gonna also be able to streamline and automate and improve efficiency around logistics and operations. All these which will drive lower time to value for our clients and we know they're all gonna be demanding them. that's a really exciting part about being one with a company like Infosys. On that note, this isn't just talking ideas. Keith Farris and Partha Chatterjee from MRE have already been working with a team of about eight from the Infosys AI team, and they have been working together to build, using their agentic AI, an energy industry demo. And so they put something together, and we just happened to have a conference coming up where we joint went and participated. So we're already starting to see that kind of collaboration and synergy. And from everything I heard, we previewed kind of the content of what we're doing. And according to the feedback, it's been very well received. Some interesting things about the feedback is apparently we had numerous customers in the booth. And several of the clients, good clients, had said, hey, we know MRE and we know Infosys. And we think this is great and we're excited to see what this is gonna mean for us. And so as I understand it, there's already five kind of customer follow ups now in the works based upon just that joint collaboration and what we're doing in that space. So hopefully you can all see and get a sense and really start to visualize how stronger is one, what it means. And that it's opening up many new opportunities and offerings for all of us. But all this is going to require a lot of planning, a lot of collaboration and coordination. And so to that end, we as a management team are knee deep in like 100 day planning to really figure out how we're going to develop and work through the plans to unlock this synergies so that we can expand our collective digital technology and consulting services and offerings in order so that we can energize the future together. So we appreciate everybody's time and coming today And I think up next we have a panel discussion where we're gonna delve a little further into how we can boldly unleash this new energy. Thank you.