When Arkadiy Dobkin emigrated to the U.S. two decades ago, his first job was washing dishes. Now he employs 10,000 programmers in his native Belarus and elsewhere in eastern Europe, developing software for clients such as Barclays Plc and Expedia Inc.
Dobkin’s Epam Systems Inc. (EPAM) is among a slew of eastern European companies seeking a piece of the $48 billion global outsourcing market. The companies are building on engineering expertise grounded in the Soviet era to challenge Indian programming giants such as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS)
Epam, with headquarters in Newtown, Pennsylvania, but virtually all programming operations in eastern Europe, has almost tripled in U.S. trading since its initial public offering last year. Luxoft, with executive offices in Zug, Switzerland, is up 50 percent since its June IPO. Ciklum and other rivals such as SoftServe and Infopulse are closely held.
Dobkin moved to the U.S. in 1991 just as multinationals were starting to farm out information-technology work to Indian companies. With a degree in electrical engineering from Belarus, he worked various jobs while learning English before setting up his business in 1993.
“It was just me in New Jersey and my classmate in Minsk,” said Dobkin, 53. “We had neither money nor connections, so we started to differentiate ourselves by the complexity of the things we can do.” Read full article
Source: Bloomberg
For reference: EPAM is founded as a global software engineering service company with its headquarters in a suburban bedroom in New Jersey, USA and an Offshore Software Development Center in another bedroom across the ocean in downtown of Minsk, Belarus. Our focus then is on serving emerging software product companies that cannot afford anybody else. Read more