Interview with EPAM founder

Arkady Dobkin's answers to Dev.by users' questions

Studying the logs

First of all, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to tell the visitors of dev.by a little about the company EPAM Systems.

I suspect that a serious percentage of them are employees of our company (some, admittedly, in the past, but many also in the future), and many know it well enough in their own way. As I gathered from the materials on dev.by, those who never worked at EPAM Systems know even more about it than those who worked or work there today. And that is completely natural -:).

So I will add my own version of what is going on to the existing myths. At least the one I believe in more than in many of those presented on the site before -:).

For a clearer presentation and to avoid repetition, we regrouped the questions somewhat and combined them into several thematic sections. At the same time, I still did not answer some of the questions, but I tried to explain directly why. The style and spelling of the authors of the questions have been preserved.

Thank you,

Arkady

About EPAM

Who are EPAM's competitors in the software services market, and how does EPAM manage to win contracts from the same Indian companies? It would be interesting to learn real examples of projects won thanks to this and that... as well as examples of lost opportunities, with your comment on what EPAM is doing to change the situation and win more serious customers in the future.

Before answering this question, I would like to settle the wording a little. I think this will be very useful for the following questions and answers as well.

First, software services can be offered both to the corporate and to the individual (consumer) markets. EPAM Systems, as of today, works only in the corporate market, and the further discussion will mostly relate to that market.

Second, the definition of software services is rather vague. Many companies that position themselves as product companies are often forced to spend 70-80% of their effort, in essence, on service - on refining and improving their product and bringing it to a level that brings real or at least some benefit to the client. I would also note that even for true product companies, market leaders, especially in the corporate segment, the share of custom development in an implementation can exceed 50%, while the share of unused functionality (in essence, the client seriously overpays for a small share of functions useful to them) can reach 70-80%.

At the same time, there are service companies that have built up (and legally formalised) quite a variety of software assets and specialised experience and knowledge, which they can use effectively when developing a specific solution for a customer, while not claiming any direct reward for these investments.

And finally (to confuse the situation even more), as you all know, today very many companies deliver their products under a service model (SaaS), which blurs the boundaries of the definitions even further.

As a result, customers mostly look for a SOLUTION acceptable to them in terms of functionality, quality and cost, and this SOLUTION is most often a combination of a product (or many products), custom development and serious efforts to integrate them (custom development again, if you will).

Moreover, the more complex the customer's requirements, the more tangled the final solution is, and in many cases the less it is determined by the quality of the products underlying it and the more by the abilities and skills of a particular company to bring and refine this solution to a state that meets the customers' expectations.

I understand that all this sounds rather trivial (and, of course, greatly simplified), but reading many blogs and forums (including dev.by) gives the impression that many people in very heated discussions forget even about this level of complexity in the real world of software and its implementation, as opposed to the ideal world of marketing campaigns.

Now let us get back to the original question.

Undoubtedly, the market of corporate software services, or, to be more precise now, software services & solutions, is a very large market, and thousands and thousands of companies work in it.

These companies may position themselves as product, service, consulting, offshore or outsourcing companies, combinations of all or some of these definitions, etc., etc. But in reality, the only thing that matters is their ability to successfully meet a particular customer's requirements for solving that customer's specific problem.

So then. Today EPAM works, in essence, in two segments:

helps product and other technology companies make their products better, faster and cheaper by participating in all stages of the SDLC, including both architecture and design, and coding, testing and support, and often specialised refinement for their (the customers') own clients;

helps large corporate customers implement and further support specific business and technical solutions (from scratch or based on certain products), very often critical for these companies' operations, and takes full responsibility for such implementations.

In these two segments, in each particular case, our competitors may be a selection from a very wide list of companies:

very large companies (with revenue of around and above $1 billion) that use the Global Delivery Model (GDM) as the basis of their business and are mostly based in India. These include companies such as TCS, Wipro, Infosys, HCL, Cognizant and a few others;

similar mid-size companies (from $100 to $500 million). There are several dozen of them;

very large international companies that use GDM and have resources both in Asia and in Eastern Europe. These include IBM Global Services, Accenture, Capgemini and a few others in the US and Europe;

more specialised mid-size companies (from $100 to 500 million), also using GDM. For example, Sapient and Thoughtworks.

local specialised companies (from the US, Europe or the CIS);

product companies;

relatively large companies from the CIS (with revenue of more than $50 million)

occasionally, small companies from the CIS.

Note that practically all companies use GDM, so the cost factor no longer plays such a critical role as it did 4-5 years ago. Back then many companies did not yet have enough experience in using a distributed development model, and one could relatively easily try to compete on price alone. Today, on serious projects this is practically impossible - everyone (or almost everyone) uses GDM, and the only question is how effectively. Therefore, understanding of the domain and quality issues are becoming much more critical.

It is possible to win against anyone. Which we have successfully proved to ourselves over the past more than ten years. Naturally, I am talking now about dozens of serious projects, where by serious I mean at least the following criteria (many other factors are very subjective):

a multi-million project budget within a 12-month period;

real competition for the win with well-known companies represented in at least two of the first seven categories listed above;

a decision made in corporations with revenue of more than $1 billion or in product/technology companies with revenue of more than $100 million;

at the level of CEO/CIO/CTO/Head of Business Line (which shows how important such a decision is for the business, as opposed to tactical situations when the decision can be made at a middle or lower management level).

Now a few examples of where EPAM Systems has won during only the last 24 months (some projects are already finished, and some have just started) in competition with the world's leading companies in the software services & solutions segment:

a global corporate portal for 100.000+ (10.000 concurrent) users for one of the largest corporations in the world - The Coca-Cola Company. This implementation is the world's largest solution built on the SAP Portal platform. We won thanks to unique technical expertise gained over ten years of work on product development for SAP. As a result, today we are recognised as the main development partner for all portal solutions for this client;

a CRM/Loyalty solution for the world's largest hotel group (Intercontinental Hotel Group). We won thanks to the demonstrated experience in the travel industry accumulated while working for many product companies that deliver solutions in this sector. And also thanks to our own components already used in creating turnkey solutions for companies such as Aeromexico, Mandalay Bay, ATA, OJSC Sibir Airlines, www.vegas.com and others;

Over the last 18 months we have signed two large contracts with two of the world's leading investment banks (UBS and Barclays). Each of them contains a portfolio of projects of approximately 150-200 man-years in 2010 alone (with further growth in 2011). We won thanks to demonstrating serious expertise in developing complex software products, as well as the knowledge and experience accumulated in the specialised competence centre created at EPAM more than two years ago to develop business in the financial sector.

Quite a lot of such examples could be given. It is only worth noting that today EPAM Systems has about 50 customers with revenue of more than $1 million a year and about 10 with revenue of $5 million and more.

So how do we lose?

Three or four years ago, when we had already become quite big, we could still lose a serious order simply because we were not large and financially stable enough in the client's eyes. There is a certain threshold of maturity/seriousness that large corporations need to see in a potential partner before they start to trust it. It seems that over the last few years we have crossed that line.

Today the reasons for losing can be summarised quite easily: it is either a lack of demonstrated expertise for a particular project, or a lower price that some competitors can offer. In large and serious projects, as a rule, expertise comes to the fore, and price is increasingly a secondary parameter.

A few years ago we had an opportunity to demonstrate our experience and potential to several large financial companies. The result was unsatisfactory. We failed to prove that we had sufficient expertise in the domain, and all our considerable efforts were wasted. Almost. Almost, because we realised that we needed to focus more deeply, create a competence centre and accumulate specialised knowledge and experience. In the end, two years later, in 2009, this helped us seriously, despite the fact that our competitors tried at the last moment to offer the potential customer significant discounts.

This example illustrates what we have been doing and will do in the future much more purposefully - developing expertise, creating competence centres in both industry and technology directions. And also strengthening real partnerships with our product clients in order to develop the custom solutions business around the expertise already built up. These tasks will be among the main ones in 2010.

Arkady Mikhailovich, tell me, what was the key turning point in the development of your company that allowed EPAM to get so far ahead of everyone who started in the nineties?

This is, in fact, a very difficult question - why the company has achieved what it has achieved. Too many different events and factors that could have played a role or not in each particular case for each particular company.

At the same time, with regard to EPAM, I think several moments, one after another, played an important role.

Moment one - the choice of a specific business model.

From the very beginning EPAM was conceived and started to function as a company that works according to a distributed model and is 100% oriented towards Western clients. Thus, the initial requirements for quality, and for processes, and for communication standards were laid down, assuming that there are teams working TOGETHER on one project but geographically remote from each other. This was not at all as trivial as it seems now. 17 years ago the internet was in its infancy, and even well-known Indian companies worked according to a model of an on-site landing party rather than distributed development. So EPAM gained a certain head start, which it was able to realise later, with respect to many companies working initially from one room.

From the first day EPAM Systems had a team that was small at first but permanently located on the customer's premises. The main competitors, on the other hand, appeared initially on short visits, did not understand the problems of potential customers well enough and mostly tried to work with them only remotely, which, in addition, limited the complexity of the projects they could take on.

Moment two - the opportunity to work with truly serious clients.

Quite early EPAM focused on development for product companies. It cannot be said that this was a consciously chosen model, but it turned out to be very effective for building a stable business. It helped us very early to see how the world's leading software companies work, adopt the best, and gain first-hand experience from leading specialists.

It also allowed us, already in the mid-90s, to take part in custom development and implementation of complex solutions for a dozen very large global corporations, such as Colgate-Palmolive, Bally of Switzerland, Honda, Ford, ABB, Renault, Sprint, etc., which took place all over the world (in the US, and in Latin America, and in Europe, and even in Japan) and, naturally, significantly broadened the experience and horizons of the leading employees of our company.

All this was a very serious school. Let me just give a few examples from the early life of the company to explain what projects we grew on and what experience our employees gained as long as ten years ago, and how much this differs from what many put into the stereotypes of outsourcing.

In 1994 we designed, developed and implemented from scratch a warehouse management system for the large global retailer Bally of Switzerland. In 1995 we also built and implemented from scratch a Sales Support System for them (the term CRM was not used at that time).

In 1995-1999 the company EPAM developed and implemented in more than 20 countries a Sales Support System for Colgate-Palmolive, which continues to work today.

In 1997, when SAP representatives saw this solution at Colgate, we were offered to design and develop the concept of a similar product for demonstration at the annual SAPHIRE 97 user conference.

After that we also received an order to participate in the design of the whole product, which was accepted for production by the SAP technical committee in 1998.

Why am I giving these examples? Because in all these cases we either were fully responsible for the architecture of the solutions or played a key role in creating it.

Moment three - the focus on creating a scalable company with a real presence in the geographies of our clients.

We also understood quite quickly (already in the early 2000s) that for real competition on a global level a company must grow and have a real presence in all the main geographic markets of the customers with whom we plan to work. And such growth could not be ensured quickly enough purely organically. It could take too long, and we would probably simply be too late to make a serious statement about ourselves and manage to occupy the right niche. So EPAM became, in essence, a pioneer in the field of mergers and acquisitions in our segment and geography and ensured a significant presence, in addition to the US, in Western and Central Europe, and in Russia, and in Kazakhstan.

Moment four - the understanding that achieving serious development goals requires attracting external investment.

To support growth and have the level of investment needed for it, the company EPAM was one of the first in the region (if not the first) to attract serious external investors into the IT business. At the same time it watched its financial health very carefully and never allowed itself to relax, hoping that investment money would cover possible losses instead of actually using it for its intended purpose, investing in the future.

In general, I think EPAM Systems has always been focused on its main business somewhat better than many other competitors, and did not allow itself to be distracted by other things not directly related to the company's main business model or to software production at all. This may have turned into some missed opportunities for us, but at the same time it allowed us to achieve what we have today.

It would be interesting to know what you consider the greatest achievement of your company and its greatest failure?

Several things...

Our company is 17 years old. We have achieved predictability of our results year after year and built a real and stable business.

We have more than 150 clients, including dozens of the most famous and largest global brands, which entrust us with tasks very important to them and for which we have become partner No. 1 in custom solution development. Today EPAM is a leader in the software services & solutions sector in Central and Eastern Europe.

EPAM is also one of the world leaders in a specific segment of this sector - product development for product companies. That is why our name is well known among the highest-level executives responsible for product development at companies such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Novell, ATG, Parametric Technology and dozens of others.

We helped draw attention to the problems of the industry in Belarus, which, as a result, I hope, also helped the creation of the HTP - and that is a great achievement for Belarus (and I am ready to argue about this with the pessimists:). We helped draw attention to Belarus in the world of software services & solutions, and perhaps our example helped many start-up companies in Belarus to feel more confident.

Surely I have missed something else, but at this point it seems to me that the greatest achievement is how the company is overcoming the crisis. It was very important during 2009 to convince our clients that they are dealing with a partner that has come of age, one they can rely on and develop business with even in these difficult conditions. We succeeded.

It is very important to understand that all past achievements have very little meaning without future ones. So what is truly important is what will become our achievements tomorrow, and what needs to be changed today for those achievements to happen.

That is why today we plan a focused development of vertical and technology expertise, the building of the corresponding practices and competence centres, and the transformation of the company into one of the real world leaders in providing services and solutions in the market segments we have chosen. And through this - the building of even stronger relationships with clients on the one hand and with employees on the other, when we can offer them far more interesting opportunities for professional and career growth.

And the greatest failure today I consider to be that we have not yet achieved our tomorrow's goals. I am sure that real achievements end at the minute when a person or a company remembers past successes too much and hopes only on that for their automatic repetition in the future.

About the future

Arkady Mikhailovich, what do you think are the characteristics of the company because of which programmers will choose EPAM as a place to build their careers? Your vision now, and what strategic plans do you have in this direction?

As you have noticed, we have already smoothly moved into the future in the previous question.

Indeed, why will programmers choose EPAM?

Briefly, I hope because we will succeed in the goals set out above to create more interesting opportunities for professional and career growth. Through getting serious and interesting projects for serious and interesting clients. Through building and effectively developing competencies, so that within EPAM Systems employees can become not only good specialists in Java, .NET or testing, but also experts in financial solutions, or in the travel business, or in modern BI and CMS, or in mobile applications, or in managing large projects and programmes. Or in something else that we do not know about now.

In fact, much of this already exists today, although not everyone knows about it even inside EPAM (and that is another problem we have to solve). But in any case, we believe that what exists today is not enough, and all these initiatives must receive additional development.

We also understand that all this is not an effort of a single day, that it will require great concentration from us to succeed, and that we will certainly make mistakes along this path which will need to be corrected promptly.

As confirmation of the seriousness of our plans, it can be said that already at the end of 2009 a serious transformation of the SAP Solutions practice was started at EPAM, headed by Alexey Shlykov, who was at the helm of SAP CIS for more than five years and then worked for several years at SAP Canada.

Competence centres for investment markets, CMS and BI will be further developed. In the coming months centres for e-Commerce solutions and solutions for mobile devices will be formed. During the year we plan to open several more centres, which it is too early to talk about at the moment. Each of these centres will become an accumulator and distributor of expertise, which, as a rule, even today at EPAM Systems in many cases is much more developed than in some specialised companies. The other thing is that we were not focused enough on the purposeful development of this expertise in the past.

As a result, at EPAM it will be possible to try and learn different things, to try and learn the connection between these different things, to try and learn how these different things are applied inside the largest corporations in the world, and, finally, to try and learn how these different things are produced at the best technology companies in the world.

All this, we hope, will attract new people and create additional opportunities for the company's current employees.

There were talks that EPAM was going to hold an IPO? Was it done, and if not, are you going to do it?

No, there has been no IPO so far. It is one of the possible ways of attracting additional financing at a fairly advanced stage of the company's development. For us, given the size of the business and our financial performance, such a step may well be considered as a working option. Whether we will do it and when is a separate question depending on many things, so commenting on and predicting it now is a thankless task.

Is there further potential for EPAM's development in Belarus, or are you developing your directions more actively in the regions of Russia or Kazakhstan?

Today we plan to develop actively, first of all, in Belarus and Ukraine. There will also be development in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Does your company plan to expand its regional offices in Belarus, because developers from regional centres often prefer to stay in their own city and freelance rather than work in large companies, due to the significant gap in salaries between the regions and the capital?

Yes. We intend to actively develop all the regional offices in Belarus.

Does EPAM Systems plan to enter the global market with products of its own development?

As of today we are only going to make accelerators for our vertical and technology solutions. We have several products for the investment markets business, but their main purpose is also to open doors into business solutions. So it can be said that today there are no such strategic plans. That does not mean they will not appear tomorrow.

Does EPAM plan any further acquisitions or mergers on the global market? How effective is such a method in times of crisis? Have the mergers with Vested Development, Fathom Tech, etc. justified themselves?

We are always open to considering various opportunities. In the US, in Western Europe and in Belarus as well. But there is no goal in itself of expanding simply through acquisitions - today we are able to grow organically by 30-40% a year. Everything must have a concrete meaning - either interesting clients whose business can be significantly expanded, or unique expertise that is hard to find on the market and is useful for working with our clients.

Therefore the ultimate effectiveness of such steps largely depends on how successfully these opportunities can be realised.

So far the acquisitions we have made have been quite successful for us. Fathom allowed us to make a statement about ourselves and establish ourselves in the European market, and VDI in the CIS market.

About business and outsourcing

Would you go into outsourcing if you had to build a business from scratch today?

To begin with, it would be good to understand what outsourcing means in your understanding of the word. Too broad and vague a term in such a short formulation, and I would not like to discuss anything at the level of stereotypes. What we do I have tried to describe above. So if the question is, would I personally start building a business similar to the one EPAM is from scratch today, then personally and today - probably not.

Just as today I would not start a business similar to many other successful businesses that were started 15-20 years ago. Today there is already very serious competition in such sectors, and I am not sure it is a good idea to start from scratch.

As far as I can judge, in IT outsourcing having connections (contacts) is very important when searching for and getting orders. What could you advise a start-up company that does not yet have the necessary connections and portfolio in order to break through? Is it worth moving to the States to look for orders, or is it really possible to do it from Belarus?

Having connections is useful in any business. But it is not the most important thing.

Being closer to clients is always useful, so if you have the opportunity, move closer to clients. And finding orders from Belarus is probably also possible. Many people do that. Everything depends on what goals you set and what orders you look for. The ones we want to have today can practically not be found that way.

Companies providing outsourcing services can increase their revenue mainly by increasing the number of employees in the company and, accordingly, the volume of services provided. That is, the company's revenue depends mainly linearly on the number of employees in the company. How does EPAM plan (or not plan) to increase profitability per employee, that is, to increase the capital capacity of the employee (HR)? Does EPAM plan to develop its own software products, or investments in that direction? Or is the strategy of expanding the company (growing the company's revenue) through the number of employees the main strategy of the company's development?

As I mentioned above, we already today develop components that allow us to increase profitability through faster development of solutions.

We plan to invest more in such development, but we do not plan today to market it as software products and sell licences (once again, there are some exceptions, but they do not noticeably affect our business).

Increasing specialised expertise also allows us to achieve an increase in productivity per specialist.

We expect that in this way we will be able to increase revenue per employee by 30-50% over the next few years.

While developing our own products is not ruled out in principle, it will by no means necessarily help solve the problem of increasing revenue. It is a fundamentally different business with serious investments in marketing and the sales system. And with very serious RISKS in general. We know the product business well because we have more than 50 clients in this segment, and we have seen well the rises (supported by investment) and falls (dictated by the real market and the quality of ideas and products) of a sufficient number of companies. That is why both internal initiatives in this direction will be considered by us very scrupulously, with a detailed analysis of risks.

About the crisis

As an employee of a regional branch of the company, I remember 2009 for the total optimisation of resources and expenses. Could you reveal the plans for the development of the branches in the coming year? What can developers expect in the new year?

Cost optimisation was not only in the branches and far from only at EPAM. Today we have open positions in all the branches.

Do you not think that in the outgoing year the company thoroughly damaged its reputation by carrying out rather mass layoffs. I cannot vouch for other development centres, but for example in our city (Grodno) a rather large number of programmers who were just starting their careers at your company were affected. I understand that the Grodno branch is rather small and is not decisive within the whole company, but nevertheless the fact remains a fact.

Was the staff reduction at the beginning of 2009 an extreme measure? After all, there are already many open Java vacancies now.

No, I do not think so. I believe we acted correctly in the situation that had arisen.

For the last 10 years EPAM Systems has always built long-term plans for training personnel. We knew that we would grow in headcount by approximately 30-40% a year, and we understood that it is unrealistic simply to take the required number of people from the market at the right moment.

That is why we invested a lot both in developing relations with universities and in additional training of personnel, both on their basis and inside our own training centres, where the number of people could reach hundreds. These young people were already becoming our employees, but at the same time were still only preparing for real production activity. Such preliminary training according to our standards (before a young specialist would be allowed to work on real projects) could take up to six months.

And when the crisis came, it was exactly this category of employees that turned out not to be needed for an indefinite period of time. We did not lay off specialists from other groups.

From the second half of 2009 we resumed hiring. About 30-40% of those laid off came back. The rest found jobs in other companies during this year. In the fourth quarter we already added 250 people to our ranks. The work of the personnel training centre was resumed. Today the headcount of the company has exceeded what it was at the end of 2008.

Do you think the global economic crisis affected EPAM? If yes, how strongly, and (most importantly!) can it be said at the moment that the company has already reached the pre-crisis level?

Yes, it did. And I do not think there is any sufficiently large company that can say the crisis did not touch it. Above I noted one of the specific effects of the crisis.

We all know that the year was hard. Especially its first half, when it was impossible to predict what our customers would do, and they in turn how their customers would behave. The most acute situation for us was in Russia, where the markets in both the manufacturing and the financial sectors shrank significantly.

Despite all this, I would say that the year turned out to be successful for us. In any case, much better than we assumed 12 months ago.

We managed to pull ourselves together, to focus and not only did not lose a single one of our most significant customers in the US or in Europe, but also seriously strengthened relations with them. Our customers felt that EPAM Systems is a reliable, strong, long-term partner.

In addition, in this hard year we managed to get several new, very large, strategically important customers, including, for example, two of the five largest investment banks in the world.

2009 became a very successful year for us in Europe. The investments in the region made by the company in previous years gave a real return. To support business growth, in addition to the UK and Germany, offices were opened in Sweden and Switzerland.

For us the main thing is that we have undoubtedly become a more noticeable player in the market. At least, the attitude of truly large customers (those in the top hundred of the world's largest companies) towards our ability to become strategic partners for them has become much more favourable in this hard 2009 compared to what it was just a few years ago.

So, if we sum up, it can be said that we came out of 2009 in much better shape than we entered it.

About Belarus

How do you assess the current potential of Belarusian IT specialists? What do Belarusian programmers lack in order to compete more successfully, for example, with the Indians?

It is clear that competing in the size of contracts, in the variety of services and, at the same time, on price is very hard. Different scalability. At the same time, one can compete very successfully already today, when quality and specialisation are the main criteria of success. And here there certainly is potential. I tried to illustrate this with the examples above.

Arkady Mikhailovich, does Belarus actually have the potential for the further development of the IT industry? In the pre-crisis times, when salaries were growing and rates accordingly, it began to seem at a fast pace that the market limit had already been reached and that there were simply no good free specialists left on the market. And many admitted that a specialist's remuneration was far from always adequate to their level (in the sense that a newcomer simply received substantially more than those already working, due to the fact that they appeared later).

Naturally, we are familiar with the realities of the labour market in Belarus. I think there is potential for development, but to realise it serious efforts must be made. We, well understanding all the difficulties and limitations, are ready to overcome them. This will happen both through university graduates (using our internal personnel training system) and through experienced specialists, whom we will attract with truly serious projects for serious customers.

Lately I have been seeing such a trend more and more clearly: all the truly innovative and knowledge-intensive projects that shape the field of IT technologies and the world in general, and also bring large dividends, are developed by the West at home. To outsourcing countries such as Belarus, India, etc., mostly projects are transferred that require not so much programming as a science and engineering as coding. These are mainly websites of various kinds, as well as business automation according to a layout provided by the customer, that is, the replacement of manual labour with machine labour. How do you assess the future of Belarusian IT in this respect? Will programming as a knowledge-intensive production of primarily technologies and the products supporting them appear in Belarus? How do you assess the prospects of system programming in Belarus? (Including for Windows and Linux platforms)

I would not like to speak on topics in which I do not consider myself a specialist. I have tried to describe in fair detail what EPAM does, who our competitors are, and what prospects I see specifically in this field for Belarus. At my amateur level I do not entirely agree with some of your conclusions. For example, I do not think there is any point in developing national operating systems, but I do not think it is worth discussing within the framework of this interview.

As is well known, the rating and recognition of the IT market of Belarus to no small extent depends on how a company positions itself before large customers. Usually this is a sales and representative office in Western countries (which is a physically vital necessity - that is clear). However, at the same time, both the existence and the degree of importance/weight of the software development market of Belarus itself are often masked (from the point of view of the market); companies far from always strive to present themselves as a company from Belarus, preferring to work with a Western flavour. I believe that this to a significant extent prevents the development of the IT market in serious directions. I would like to ask how EPAM Systems approaches this question? Do you think companies are embarrassed, in the context of business, to announce themselves to customers directly from the blue-eyed land? What conditions, in your opinion, are necessary for this situation to change for the better? This question concerns the whole market as a whole, of which your company is the leading player, so I am talking about companies, that is, about general trends.

The first client came to us in 1996, and it was an executive vice-president from SAP Labs. Bringing him to the office back then was very inconvenient - the conditions were far from today's. So we never masked anything. And there is certainly no point in doing it now. I believe that one should focus on what one can influence, that is, on one's own company, its services and its people. Our presence in Belarus has never hindered us, and after the very first visit of a new customer here all the awkward questions evaporated.

Arkady, your business, like any outsourcing, is built on the fact that Belarus is a poor country. Do you see Belarus becoming rich one day? And would you like that?

I would like to correct that: any outsourcing is built not on the poverty of a country, but on the availability of qualified personnel in that country who are able to perform specific work with quality and competitively in cost. Our business depends even more on the qualifications of personnel than any other. I am convinced that today there is a global shortage of qualified personnel, and it will exist tomorrow as well. For example, today it is quite hard to find qualified specialists in the US even for very decent money. Therefore, if Belarus (and Russia then too :)) becomes rich, it will only mean that our services will become truly in demand in Belarus and Russia. And if by that time the experience and expertise in certain segments at our company fully correspond to the world leaders (or even exceed them, which is not impossible), then our services will be in demand in our current markets as well - the US and Europe, because there too there will be a shortage of qualifications even at the new price. Interestingly, I considered the scenario of a rich Belarus in my first childish business plan for EPAM Systems back in 1993 and assumed then the same as now.

So yes, I do not object at all to Belarus becoming a rich country. Everything we have done over the last 15 years in Belarus only helped this, and in no way the opposite. Another question is whether I see Belarus rich in the near future - I do not know, but let us hope and contribute to it.

Arkady Mikhailovich, in your opinion, is there a likelihood that the world's largest IT companies, such as Google and Microsoft, will open development offices in Belarus within some foreseeable timeframe?

I think it is possible. I do not know specifically about Google or Microsoft, but I will not be at all surprised if well-known IT companies open production offices in Belarus.

Personal

What does a typical working day of the CEO of a company with 5000 employees look like?

I am not sure you want to know that :). A boring story and, probably, a subject for another conversation.

How do you manage to cope with the frequent change of time zones?

Habit. Try changing time zones once or twice a month for 15 years in a row and you will understand that it is easy.

How do you relieve stress, how do you rest?

I sleep very well on planes.

Do you play golf? If yes, which golf clubs do you prefer and what advice can you give to a beginner golfer?

No. On principle. Because Tiger Woods promoted Accenture.

And what did you dream of or plan to become before the company EPAM Systems was founded? The times were completely different after all... What fields of activity, besides outsourcing, also attracted you (or attract you) at such a level that you would dedicate a substantial part of your life to them?

Before it was founded, I dreamed of founding it. I dreamed for about two years. I studied English in order to explain to clients what we would be doing.

And outsourcing (I will not again draw your attention to the details of stereotypes and our real business) did not attract me at all. Besides, in 1993, in my opinion, no one really knew yet what it was and what it was called. What attracted me was creating solutions for business, which I had been doing even before EPAM in my first company in Minsk, consisting of 20-25 people back in the late eighties (yes, yes, that long ago)))

Who were (and are) authorities for you throughout your career, whose opinions did you listen to? And in general, what internet resources do you visit, whose blogs do you read?

Well, this is more serious. Probably I would single out two people. Maybe not authorities, but in any case people who seriously influenced the further course of events.

Once, back in 1992, the book Decline & Fall of the American Programmer by Edward Yourdon fell into my hands (his books on structured programming were published in the USSR back in the early 80s, probably). It was a book about the future of the software industry and what needed to be done to survive the next 10 years, despite the fierce competition from India predicted by Yourdon himself (at that time only very far-sighted people saw it). Naturally, what interested me most was precisely the competition from India, and it made me treat my dreams more carefully. It was interesting to meet Yourdon face to face in Minsk several years ago. Who could have thought back in distant 1992 that this could ever happen.

In 1996 I had the chance to meet Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of SAP and still chairman of the company's supervisory board. Over the next few years I had the opportunity to meet him quite often. It was a very interesting and useful experience of communicating with a person who created a company such as SAP from scratch.

Internet resources are mostly Odnoklassniki and dev.by now, of course, before going to bed:).

Many successful leaders of large companies strive to summarise their experience in autobiographical books; do you have any such plans? I think this book would quickly become a bestseller among Belarusian IT people.

First, one has to wait until I finally become successful (remember - you cannot stop, or success will disappear), then I will get some sleep, and it will be possible to think about it. But, in general, Leonid Lozner (my partner, with whom we started the company in 1993) promised to do it earlier. So there is a chance:).