EPAM Systems

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EPAM Systems
Type Private
Founded 1993
Headquarters Lawrenceville, NJ, USA
Key people Arkadiy Dobkin, CEO
Industry Software engineering
Employees over 4,000
Website www.epam.com

EPAM Systems is a US-based provider of offshore software engineering outsourcing services with software development centers located in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Hungary. The company maintains European headquarters in Budapest, Hungary, with support and delivery operations in London, UK and Frankfurt, Germany. EPAM provides software application development, re-engineering, implementation, maintenance and support services.

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[edit] Technology Focus

[edit] History

EPAM Systems was founded in 1993 in Princeton, NJ, by two school mates: Arkadiy Dobkin[1], who emigrated to the US in 1991 and Leo Lozner from Minsk, Belarus.

Originally, the company name was an acronym (EPAm) defined as "Effective Programming for America". With time, having expanded its reach beyond the US boundaries, the company adopted its present name - EPAM Systems.

In the early 90s Arkadiy Dobkin decided to employ the available software engineering pool from Eastern Europe, and Russia[2] in particular, known for their strong educational traditions especially in mathematics and science intensive fields, a legacy of the Soviet-era military and aerospace industries.[3][4] Thus Dobkin gradually went into building business relationships with US technology executives, while Lozner was in charge of the infrastructure development and management of the offshore software development teams.

In the making period the company was confronted with a number of obstacles:

  • In the beginning of 90s the business relations between the US and Russia as well as other former Soviet bloc countries were still shadowed by the political confrontation. The collaborative business environment was slow to materialize.
  • The India-based software companies had taken an early start[5], had a large amount of English speaking population and were supported with governmental programs [6] proactively, which enabled them to dominate the market[7]

The first major success came in 1995 when EPAM started to work on a sales force automation system development for Colgate. Further it was implemented in Colgate’s offices in 25 countries all over the world. The project was noticed by SAP AG and EPAM was contracted for development of a system prototype to be presented at the annual SAP conference in 1996. Later on EPAM was involved with SAP's Netweaver software while it was still in the process of development.[8]

As many other global IT companies, EPAM was adversely affected with the downturn of 2002 in U.S. technology stocks. The company had to work very hard to bring in new clients, but was able to accomplish that and replaced most of the lost business the next year.[9] [10]

In 2004 EPAM completed the merger deal with Fathom Technology, [11], a Budapest-based software engineering firm, and in 2006 with Vested Development Inc., a Russian offshore software development services provider.[12]

The launch of the new client facing locations in UK (2006), Germany (2006) and delivery centers across Ukraine (2005) and Russia (2004-2006) significantly accelerated the company's growth in staff and revenues[13] triggering its inclusion in major industry ratings.[14][15][16] [17]

Despite many analysts are common in their view that Eastern European IT services providers are unlikely to rival India in size, they express opinion that such companies may appeal to enterprises seeking specific IT skills and refer to the increasing market share of Central and Eastern Europe in offshore IT outsourcing services market.[18]

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