Arkady Dobkin is co-founder, president and chairman of the board of directors of EPAM Systems, the largest custom software developer in Central and Eastern Europe.

After graduating from the Belarusian National Technical University with a degree in electrical engineering, Arkady Dobkin began his career in Belarus. Until 1991, he worked for several local software companies, after which he immigrated to the United States.

In 1993, Arkady Dobkin became one of the founders of EPAM Systems. Under his leadership, the company has become one of the leading software developers, specializing in creating software products for market leaders and emerging software companies, as well as implementing mission-critical solutions for global corporations.
Today, EPAM's development centers in Central and Eastern Europe employ more than 7,000 software engineers, and the company has thousands of completed projects in North America and Europe. EPAM's software engineering expertise has been recognized by major clients such as Oracle, SAP, Google, IBM, UBS, Barclays Capital, Coca-Cola, Adidas, Expedia, Thomson Reuters, Viacom and many more.

In February 2012, along with other company executives, Arkady Dobkin struck a symbolic bell during the traditional opening ceremony of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. This event marked EPAM Systems' IPO on the NYSE: EPAM became the first publicly traded software company in Central and Eastern Europe to list on the world's largest stock exchange.

Winner of numerous awards, in June 2008, at a ceremony in New Jersey, Arkady Dobkin was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" in the "IT consulting" category by experts from the audit company Ernst & Young. In 2006, Consulting Magazine named Arkady Dobkin one of the 25 Most Influential Consultants of the Year. In 2004, along with the CEOs of Wipro Technologies and CGI Group, Arkady Dobkin was featured in a special issue of CRN - Top 25 Executives - as one of the most influential executives of IT companies in the "Foreign Relations" nomination.

Developing EPAM's expertise, Arkady Dobkin opened up a team of talented professionals from the countries of the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe to the global business community. He continues to actively share his development experience in this region, regularly delivering expert presentations at important international conferences for the IT industry, such as Gartner Outsourcing Summit, Forrester’s GigaWorld IT Forum Europe, Russian Outsourcing&Software Summit, SAP TechEd and others.

Report: Software development as a business - past, present, future

In his presentation, Arkady will talk about a process that can hardly be repeated, but which, on the other hand, was very “agile”. It's about transforming a startup he co-founded 20 years ago into the global public software company we have today. The process will be illustrated through a series of timelines, anecdotes, and happy (and sometimes not-so-happy) accidents, with a focus on the ever-changing technology landscape and trends that have enabled these experiences, as well as provide exciting new opportunities that EPAM plans to capitalize on in the future.

Dobkin Arkady Mikhailovich- President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of EPAM Systems since 1993. US citizen.

Biography, career

• Born in Minsk (Belarus). He studied at school number 50 with a mathematical bias, and also graduated from an art school in Minsk. Graduated from the Belarusian National Technical University with a degree in electrical engineering. He started his career in Belarus, working for several companies specializing in software development.

• In 1991, immediately after the completion of Gorbachev's perestroika, he emigrated to the United States, not knowing English (according to him, he could read relatively tolerably and write a little, since he had experience working with special English-language documentation, but practically did not understand the language by ear) and did not having a large livelihood (according to him, the money ran out immediately after buying a used car).

“I, for example, washed dishes in a restaurant for the first four months. But at the same time, he sent out about 400 resumes in search of work, one of which ended up in the right place. Probably, I successfully nodded in the right places during the interview - and I was offered a job in my specialty, although I still did not speak English.

• In 1992-1993 he worked as a programmer at Prudential.

• In 1993, he founded Epam Systems, an outsourcing company headquartered in New Jersey.

“I compiled a list of Minsk friends and started sending them faxes with a proposal to organize a company that would deal with programming for American clients. Fifth or sixth on the list was a classmate of mine who began to reply to my messages regularly. We started with him."

Arkady Dobkin decided to build an offshore programming business because, when he got to the USA, he saw the demand for such a model and because he really wanted to work with his friends again

"I dreamed of such a business, but I considered this idea somewhat naive, difficult to implement. In the early 1990s, groups of Indian programmers began to fulfill orders from American software companies. This gave me confidence to try a similar business in Belarus. Of course, in those years, doing remote work was much more difficult than today: the Internet practically did not exist, telephone communication was very expensive.And relations between the United States and the republics of the former USSR were not as favorable as business ties between America and India.But the desire to try was great, and Western forecasts analysts, who were already talking about the serious prospects of the offshore programming market, were encouraging."

• From April 1993 to November 1996, he worked as a consultant and leading technical specialist at Colgate Palmolive (in 1995, with a group of Minsk programmers who formed the basis of Epam Systems, he began working on creating a sales support system for Colgate, an analogue of SAP). During this period, Arkady Dobkin met Hasso Plattner, the founder of SAP AG, who entrusted his team with the development of the first SAP product prototype for the sales support system, which was to be presented at the annual SAP conference in 1996.

• In July 1999, he became Senior Vice President of Development at Firepond (a leading developer in the field of Sales Force Automation), remaining in this position until March 2001.

Arkady Dobkin was a member of the board of directors of the Russoft Association, which brings together the most influential software companies in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

• In 2004, he was named one of the three most influential executives in IT companies in the "Foreign Relations" category in the special issue "The Top 25 Executives" of CRN weekly.

• In 2006, Consulting Magazine recognized Arkady Dobkin as one of the 25 Most Influential Consultants of the Year.

• In 2012, Arkady Dobkin planned to earn $8.78 million - $9.88 million from Epam Systems' IPO, reducing his stake from 14.1% to 12.1%. According to the results of the placement, we can only say that the package that Dobkin had before the IPO was worth $65 million at the time of the placement.

Quotes, interviews

How to work with analysts

“I read the Gartner report, I can’t find us. I write directly to the author, send information about the company. You need to establish a personal relationship with them. Indeed, in the same Gartner, only 4 people are engaged in all global outsourcing. And therefore, whether Ian Merriot himself knows about your company will determine whether you get into the next study or not.

About your role in the business

Arkady describes his role in the management of Epam Systems as "the last resort" in internal conflicts, since he is not involved in production and sales, but manages the company's strategy. He believes that everyone can accidentally find a good client, accidentally make a good project, so the repeatability of results is the key to success in business. When hundreds of people work in a company, this is already a merit not of its leader, but of the whole team.

• Programmed result - interview to BusinessReview magazine
• An IT business legend from Belarus - an interview with Computer News

Other activities, hobbies

Hobbies - skiing and playing tennis, in the summer - football (mainly at corporate holidays held in Minsk).

A family

Arkady Dobkin has two daughters.

Links

• Epam Systems official website

Notes

1. Facebook drops EPAM's IPO valuation by $240 million
2. How to be friends with authorities

Meeting about business. with the participation of Arkady Dobkin, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of EPAM Systems, and Kirill Chikeyuk, co-founder of the Kino-mo startup, took place in the Congress Hall of the Victoria business center. More than 300 spectators came to listen to the speakers and ask them their questions.

The main topic of the meeting was business scaling. But as always, the speakers answered a variety of questions about business.

We publish the key thoughts of Arkady Dobkin.

About the Belarusian office

“I visit Minsk every month. The largest EPAM office is in Belarus and practically the very first one. There are already about 5,000 programmers here, there is a lot of our infrastructure, services, clients come here more often. Therefore, there are always reasons to visit Minsk.

Now we continue to grow in Belarus by 500-600 programmers a year. I think it will be quite difficult to grow even faster here. But it is quite possible to maintain the current growth rate, despite the growing competition for personnel.”

About markets and areas of interest to EPAM

“With our current size, the market in Western Europe, North America and the projects that we started in China and Asia give us the opportunity to grow quite quickly. Therefore, we do not specifically go to any new markets. Another thing is that our clients are large, global, and they lead us to other regions. In the same China, for example, we were brought by large investment banks.

In terms of sectors, we are now interested in those areas that are changing business models due to changes in technology, software. Financial sector, retail, media, medicine and healthcare, Life Science and others.

Everything related to services that can be done in a non-physical way, everything related to e-commerce, content, everything that is called the capacious word digital - this is interesting to us.”

About the PDS 2.0 concept

“It's pretty simple. We work in the software market for companies. Relatively large. This market has been around for a very long time. And 15-20 years ago, software helped to increase the efficiency of work within the customer company. We are talking about ERP, CRM - their goal was mainly to optimize the work of financial departments or supply departments, warehouses, sales departments.

Gradually, companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook emerged. And they did not seem to compete with already existing companies, but were aimed at all of us, so that we could communicate better, search better. And won our hearts and minds. And then it turned out that they "deceived" the software industry and began to intervene in all those segments in which Oracle, SAP were usually present ... And they began to do it in a completely different way.

And besides, given that they have won our hearts and minds, they have access to customers much wider than others. If earlier some retail company with a thousand stores thought that it was very strong just because its stores were located on Independence Avenue in Minsk or on Fifth Avenue in New York, then suddenly these companies realized that Amazon or eBay were selling better than them.

And retail companies are faced with a dilemma: what to do? The same applies to financial companies, media companies, travel industry - in all these segments, new technology businesses have appeared.

When retail companies turned to SAP, Oracle and others with a request to help, they seriously could not help them, because they were used to selling licenses and “boxes”. And the final solution is very different from the "box". And besides, this "box" is a product with a very high level of generalization so that customers can optimize their back-office. And here you need not to optimize the back-office, but to differentiate yourself for consumers. Standard packages did not fit.

And a market emerged, formed by the demand of financial companies, retailers, media. This request was: “Who will help us survive? We have never made software and we don't know how to make it. And we need software that will allow us to compete with such great companies as Google, Facebook, Amazon.”

This means that solutions must be very user-friendly, flexible, and scalable. We need solutions to help us survive. And this market is called PDS 2.0, as industry analysts call it.

PDS is such a strong combination of programming skills and understanding of the industry for which the software is made, understanding what modern design is, scalability, etc.

The concept of PDS 2.0 - does not involve products from the "box". It offers a unique solution. It may include products from the "box", "sub-box", frameworks, but it is aimed at creating a fairly unique solution in the end result that will allow our client to differentiate himself. Technology advances at such a rate that it is possible to invest in products that are generic enough for the business model we are trying to help, but by the time that generalization happens, the product will be so outdated that it can be thrown away. And from my point of view, this is a big problem for many large software companies today. I want to clarify that I'm talking about enterprise applications, the business that EPAM is in, not system software."

About competition in the PDS 2.0 market

“The PDS 2.0 market is very large. For comparison, I will give the offshore programming market.

The emergence of this market [offshore programming] became possible when modern means of communication, the Internet, appeared. This market arose when it became possible to program for America in India, or for America and Western Europe - in Minsk. And this market has been growing for 20 years, from zero to $40-50 billion. The PDS market, they say, will grow to $90 billion in the next five years. Because now more and more such software is required.

With this market size, the competition is huge.

Those companies that did not work in PDS 2.0 are trying to change themselves. Traditional software companies have begun to look at services and customization in a very different way. They realized that customers wouldn't buy their solutions unless they were customized, unless there was major differentiation.

Therefore, in this market we compete with large and small software companies, large and small IT consulting companies, and service companies.

In this market, companies such as Accenture and Deloitte, which are considered leaders in consulting, began building huge development centers around the world ten years ago: in India, China, and Europe.

Of course, it would be very immodest to say that today we are competitors of corporations that are ten or a hundred times larger than we are. But in specific projects, situations, today we compete with Accenture, and with IBM, Oracle, SAP - with everyone.

Why EPAM remains a startup

“A few months ago, when I spoke at a start-up conference in Minsk, while preparing at night, I decided to read what a startup is in order to understand. And I found a set of definitions on Wikipedia. One of the definitions was very simple. A startup is a company that is built to grow quickly. I like this definition. From this point of view, EPAM, I think, is an entrepreneurial company that is growing rapidly and constantly changing. When a company has more than 10 thousand employees, and it continues to grow by 25-30% per year, then this, in my opinion, is a fairly entrepreneurial company.

I'm really not flirting, but seriously saying that I never had the feeling that EPAM has ceased to be a startup and stands firmly on its feet. Today you stand on your feet because you know that you have orders for the next six months, and you know that even if something happens, you will be able to pay salaries to your employees for a year in advance. But still there is no feeling that you stand on your feet. Because every time you go up a little, you suddenly stop looking down - you look up. And there is always someone up there. And you think, no matter how this someone eats you, overcomes you. Or do you think how to get through there, upstairs.

And this state of dissatisfaction, the state of a startup - it is present. Maybe not 100%, but 10% of the company’s employees, a relatively small group.”

About supporting startups

“EPAM does not yet support startups in Belarus, as we are a company, not a venture fund. And so far there is no venture fund in the company. Another thing is that it may appear, but if it does, funding will be directed to those projects that coincide with the interests of EPAM.”

About management

“When there are 200-300 people in a company, something changes, you no longer know many employees by sight. I was very lucky in this regard: there were always people nearby who picked up something and did the things that needed to be done. We started very early, thanks to my partner, to build internal systems, which are extremely important if you scale largely due to human talent, because you really need to be able to manage it. It was probably lucky that the MBA was not received on time. So we would start to apply the right methods, and maybe people would run away quickly.

I think at some point there was more humanity.”

About business development

“If I knew anything special, I would already have several startups. But I have nothing but EPAM. How to do business - I think you can all read in books.

When EPAM started, no one thought it would be EPAM. Something started that was interesting, that brought pleasure and potentially some money to survive. And the satisfaction that the customers were happy.

Think for a second. Do you really think, for example, that when Facebook started, Mark Zuckerberg thought it would be Facebook?

I think not. What happened in development. Predicting what will be a huge business is very difficult. I think that even with today's stunning success of Uber, the creators did not expect that everything would be so fast.

When I started, the model was primitive. In Belarus, people earned many times less than in America, and the level of training at universities was about the same. And I knew there was something to it. Another thing is that many others did not understand this then. But no one imagined that this could be a serious business, which, moreover, would have to constantly change, because dozens, if not hundreds, of companies of the type like EPAM appeared.

We tried all the time to change something. We were interested. For example, they made an IPO just out of interest. It's also interesting how this happens. Now we're wondering if it's possible to really compete with Accenture, for example. Or even come up with something new.

About personal qualities

“Personal qualities, shortcomings, on the correction of which I worked or am working - there is none. But a lot gets in the way. Long list. Lack of assembly, disorganization ... Fortunately, I have assistants who are very organized.

The quality that helped to do what has been done is perseverance, the ability not to give up, to do things that are not interesting, but without which nothing will work. In any business, in any startup, you have to do a lot of very boring work. And if you disdain it, then nothing will work. A lot of talented people, unfortunately, cannot do this.”

About the time

“Do I have free time? Unfortunately, permanent employment is a disease that cannot be cured. This was before I started my first company in Minsk in 1987-1988 and worked for a government organization. Unfortunately, it was the same back then, the employment rate was just as high. This is such a curve, more precisely, a straight line of constant employment.

About the possibilities

“I have made a million mistakes in my career. And I think that the main advice in the bottom line is to dare and not give up. At the age of 31, I emigrated to America, where I had to survive, feed myself and loved ones. In my particular case, I was sure that with my English I would never be hired, so I had to come up with something else.

Everything is possible. A chain of accidents can lead to any result - if you have perseverance and a desire to achieve something. There are a lot of illustrations."

About drive

“What is driving me now? Hope to bring back that sense of drive that drives Kirill [Chikeyuk] today.”

Video meeting about business. Arkady Dobkin - Kirill Chikeyuk

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Arkady Dobkin, founder and president of EPAM Systems, the largest custom software developer in Central and Eastern Europe.

Trends and brands

The American and European economies have been in a fever this year. How has this affected your company and companies like yours?

For the past three years, the entire world economy has been in a fever. Russia and China are highly dependent on consumers of their resources and services in Europe and the United States, so everything is unstable. At the same time, the IT industry is in a more or less privileged position. And the industry of distributed development (global delivery) of software, performed in various offices (some - located near the client, others - in less "expensive" countries), feels quite well.

Over the past two years, we have grown by almost 50% per year. We grew naturally - by developing relationships with existing customers and gaining new ones. We grew significantly faster than the market, confirming that EPAM is not an ordinary company. I understand that this may cause a skeptical smile here, but the reputation of EPAM with customers is really very high. Today we are well known in different segments of the IT market. Our growth of 45-48% per year shows that we do many things much better than our competitors. Perhaps our growth is an indirect indicator of what is happening in the market, and it is very difficult to predict what will happen next year, but in general, the current global unpredictability has not yet had a strong impact on our sector.

- What tasks are you working on now? How do they differ from those that were 5-10 years ago?

Contrary to the general opinion that outsourcers always started with simple things and took cheap things, 10-15 years ago EPAM started with quite serious tasks. The company was small, but the team was very qualified, and we were able to start with interesting projects for serious clients. Another thing is that 15 years ago such a beginning was the exception rather than the rule. And building a serious business is turning exceptions into rules, accidents into a stable business, using the luck that smiled at you at some point into a repeatable and predictable state. So, 15 years ago we did quite interesting, complex projects. For example, the sales support system for Colgate-Palmolive has been operating in twenty countries. We started working with SAP from the design of their CRM product, doing warehouse tasks. These were complex systems, and not at all the typical outsourced tasks that many Indian companies performed at that time.

In 1999-2001, during the dot-com boom, companies like Amazon and eBay were start-ups even though they had already made their IPOs and had billion-dollar valuations on the stock exchange. However, 90% of their competitors died and weren't worth a dime. At that time, we were already making the first e-commerce systems around the world for Ford, Honda and many others, together with our partner. We then got a unique experience, but it could still be considered as an accident - a lucky lottery ticket. Today, ten years later, we continue to work with really big companies. We provide a full cycle of services in the field of software engineering, from design and development to testing and maintenance. We wanted to avoid having to re-sell our service or product every time. So that, having received a client once, we could find a job for ourselves for years. We have achieved repeatability to a large extent.

- Who is your favorite client?

Today, every month another potential multi-million dollar client comes to us. But SAP sounds special to me. Historically, this was the first company that noticed us and gave us a fairly serious job. It became a very big incentive and kept the mood in the company. We started doing something that is in demand on the world market. Yes, it was not our product, but it was one of the five largest software companies in the world that trusted us, and that was 15 years ago.

- But now you have clients like Google and Microsoft...

I looked at the Software 500 list, which also includes us. Of the ten largest software companies in the world, five are our clients. Moreover, these are clients for whom we have not just done something once: they work with us year after year.

- And besides e-commerce, what other new trends are there? What other systems are you working on?

In fact, a lot really revolves around e-commerce, but today we have four vertical directions.

First, we continue to work with 60-70 product companies. We help build, test, maintain and implement products with their customers. This is a very important segment for us, allowing us to be at the forefront of new technologies and IT solutions, including entry into many areas that we subsequently focused on.

The second direction is financial companies. We started doing it only 3-4 years ago, but today it makes up almost a quarter of our business. This includes major investment banks like UBS, Barclays Capital, Citigroup and others. This segment can be described as classical "outsourcing", and our main competitors in it are large service companies.

The third direction is everything related to the rapidly growing information segment: business information and the media industry. Thomson Reuters, MTV and others - all this is more related to the Internet, portals, content management, business intelligence and, of course, e-commerce, because it is natural that the sale and distribution of information is also e-commerce.

The fourth direction is related to the travel industry and solutions for serving individual consumers: again, these are Internet portals, e-commerce systems, business intelligence, data warehouses, mobile applications. Examples of the most famous clients are Expedia, Four Seasons, Coca-Cola, Adidas.

All these are our basic competencies, where we feel confident and can compete with world leaders. Of course, this does not mean that we compete globally with IBM, Accenture or Infosys with their billions of dollars in turnover. But this means that on a specific large multi-million dollar project we can win both against them and against leading highly specialized companies, and we do this quite regularly today.

From the point of view of horizontal directions - including those already noted earlier - these are mobile and cloud technologies, content management systems, business intelligence and data warehouses, SAP solutions, and some others. In these areas, we are forming centers of competence, and we train inside and look outside for specialists who will allow us to continue to compete at the highest level.

They are mostly used today - perhaps not very widely yet, but as usual, in a few years we will see that the breadth of application will expand significantly.

- How soon will we have cloud technologies?

- "Clouds" is a bit of a marketing term. In fact, they were, are and will continue to develop. Many redistributable software vendors, including Microsoft, are moving to this model. We ourselves will not notice how we come to it. It was exactly the same with the Internet, which did not exist and did not exist, and then everyone suddenly noticed that everyone was using it. All applications once ran in server rooms within companies - now they go outside. Judging by what is happening in the West and in Russia, everything is moving in this direction.

Why are we being bought

Is everything good with programming in the post-Soviet space? What is the margin for growth in salaries before equalizing with Western and other competitors? How dangerous is it?

To think that everything will be fine in Belarus or Russia only if salaries are lower, from my point of view, is wrong. Everything will be fine if there are specialists.

- That is, they buy us not only because of money?

Everyone is always bought for money! A very primitive, but honest position: everything is always determined by the ratio of quality and price. Yes, at first the Belarusians got the opportunity to gain practical experience in Western IT, largely because of the cheapness. But today the industry is developing due to the fact that there are not enough IT specialists in the world for any money, and there is a gradual leveling of prices. The prospect of specialists in Belarus lies in the gradual accumulation of experience and competencies. At the moment when salaries are aligned, these competencies will be in demand in the global market, regardless of where these specialists are located. In the end, the determining role will be played not by the price, but by the availability of specialists and infrastructure. India does this: for all the “buts”, there is a huge IT industry and a huge number of specialists who will be able to compete globally in the future, regardless of cost. China is trying to do the same today.

- How successful is Belarus doing this?

Ten years ago we thought that in Belarus it would be impossible to build a company that would employ a thousand people in our region. And now EPAM in Belarus employs about 3,000 people. In total, EPAM in Eastern Europe employs almost 7,000 people, including Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Hungary. Can we grow further at the same rate? I don't know, let's try. In Belarus, we are growing by 500-600 people a year. And almost half of the people come from our training centers.

- Do you lobby for your interests? How much do they hear IT people "from above"?

Lobbying is a very broad word. Of course, when the idea of ​​the HTP appeared, we talked and tried to convince the government using foreign examples that it makes sense for the republic.

When asked, we try to honestly express our opinion on how to improve the conditions in the republic for our business area. Speaking six months ago in your studio together with Mamonenko, Tsepkalo and Basko, we also lobbied our interests to some extent, because we tried to make sure that we were heard. But it is important to note that we are lobbying for the interests of the entire industry, and not just EPAM or some other company. The HTP has brought a lot of benefits to the industry, including all of our competitors.

Before the HTP, there were IBA, SAM Solutions, EPAM and several other notable companies. And there was a sea of ​​companies that no one had heard of. Today, the competitive environment has expanded dramatically. Russians and foreigners come here, Tieto, HTC have appeared, many Belarusian companies have grown strongly.

- Would EPAM be more successful or less successful without the Hi-Tech Park?

Without the HTP, there would not have been the growth that we have experienced. But the advantage of the park was that it was not created from scratch: there were already companies in the industry that employed hundreds of people. At that time, EPAM already had more than a thousand, and probably the same number in IBA. This is a chicken and egg problem: if there were no companies, most likely there would be no Hi-Tech Park. It was one of the most interesting and correct decisions that were made to support the IT industry. Until now, nothing similar has been done in other countries of the post-Soviet space, with the exception of Georgia, as far as I know. Ukraine and Russia are trying to introduce certain benefits.

Russia adopted the decrees at the same time as we did, but put so many restrictions on it that it is almost impossible to use it.

Russia is in other conditions, so it is not so important for it. The scale of the country is different, there is a significant domestic IT market. Belarus, on the other hand, needs to look for a niche in which to position itself in the global market. I quite actively read local resources in which people working around programming or IT hang out, I see different opinions. My opinion remains the same: HTP is one of the most interesting decisions that have been made in the republic. It, of course, quite seriously influenced the development of the industry, openness. This allows us to receive investments, develop, calmly look into the eyes of large customers about the transparency of our business.

Many Belarusians envy programmer salaries. Why do I also sit 8 hours a day, they say, but I earn 300 dollars, and a programmer can make 3000?

There is a shortage of people in programming today. It's simple: if you want to earn more - go into programming! It doesn't work - that's another question. And this picture is not only in Belarus. My daughter in America works as an architect and earns several times less than American programmers. She works a lot - apparently, family traits affect - but does not want to move into programmers or the IT industry. This is her decision.

Not everyone, however, knows that there is such a difference. Six months ago, the four of us sat together and discussed the "IT-country" program. One of the main points of my speech was that the promotion should be very wide, so that everyone knows that there is such a difference. There are a lot of people working as programmers in the world who have never studied them. Today we have about 200 open vacancies. And other companies have hundreds of open positions. Try.

- There are also vacancies for programmers on TUT.BY!

This is a challenge for the young! If you are 20-30 years old, it is not too late to rebuild if you wish.

- Especially if there are engineering brains.

IT is a very broad industry. There are quite complex areas in which it is impossible to work if you have not received a serious special education. But there are areas that require knowledge of only the basics of IT, at least in the beginning. There are specialties such as business analysts, testers, project managers who may not have a technical background, but must be very well organized and may have a certain industrial specialization. And a good IT project manager today will likely earn more than a good project manager in another industry.

There has been a devaluation. Programmers benefited from it, because their salaries are calculated in dollars, and their expenses are in rubles. But the cost of living has not tripled, because rents, public transportation, and so on have barely risen. However, this year they began to leave. Why is this happening? They haven't left since the early 2000s.

We all live in a global world from the information and emigration points of view. People working in the IT industry are even more globalized than any other. They live on the Internet and compare their situation not with the situation in Belarus, but with what they see on business trips or learn from friends working in other countries. They are interested in stability and predictability. Someone reacted to it with their feet. But over the past 30-60 days, stability and predictability have increased. I am glad that at least the predictability in relations between the dollar and the ruble has increased.

About corporate acquisitions

- What companies have you bought recently? Which ones are you planning to buy?

This year we did not buy companies at all. Last year, we were joined by one or two very small companies with a turnover in the region of a million dollars, which practically does not affect our result. We are looking at a number of companies specializing in certain areas, but we do not have any specific plans.

- What is the usual purpose of the purchase?

There are several clear goals. Firstly, obtaining new competencies and entering a new line of services. It may be a product company, but from the point of view of EPAM, it should allow opening a service line, because we are in the service business. Secondly, it is getting a client that is difficult to get in any other way. Large customers have complex procedures for adding new suppliers. Such a client for us can then grow many times, given our scale. Thirdly, if we think that we can get a sufficiently serious qualified team for our main offices in Belarus, Russia or Ukraine. As a rule, this rarely works from an economic point of view. We have not had such purchases for a long time.

- That is, roughly speaking, you buy labor, competencies or customers.

Everything is simple. Almost everyone does the same.

And what about classic reasons like cost savings when two companies merge in order to cost more together?

It's like stock speculation. The merger of two large companies is a serious problem. In such cases, we are talking about mergers of large companies like HP and Compaq, with an unfortunate result, by the way. Oracle buys customers or an additional product that is built into their product line. They buy fairly large companies, but in relative volume they are a fraction of the size of Oracle. Now Google has bought Motorola, probably because it wants to be more aggressive with mobile apps. We'll see if it works or not, because it's a completely different culture. Google has done this for the first time, and I think there will be many questions.

- But he bought YouTube.

YouTube is a product of Silicon Valley. It was not a big company in terms of corporate structure. They clearly understood how to integrate them, and culturally too. And Motorola is a big, relatively old American company with a completely different culture.

- Do you receive offers to sell the company?

Periodically, there are proposals or some interest is expressed. This has been happening in the last 5-6 years. But our strategy now is not based on the assumption that someone will buy us.

Business Tips

I wasn't going to help competitors today! In fact, I don't think I know anything unique. There are a lot of books written by experts. There is a lot of advice from entrepreneurs who started 4-5 businesses and saw common patterns that they shared.

It may sound strange, but for me and other leaders, EPAM remains a startup, because every time we do something that we have not done before. Once upon a time we started working for the West, when very few companies in Eastern Europe were doing it. Once upon a time, we started doing very complex projects, when no one else has done projects of this level in this model. We once made the first notable acquisition of another company in this region among IT companies. We bought a company based in Hungary, which was 80% controlled by investors. Once upon a time, we were the first to bring serious American investors to an IT company in Belarus. Many things we did for the first time. Therefore, in this sense, we are still a fast-growing startup today.

In Belarus, there are cases when programmers wrote a successful application for the iPhone and became millionaires in two days. They founded their own firms, give lectures, perform.

This is great! This means that the environment that was created by service companies is working. It will be possible to say that these businessmen have succeeded if they write another program, which will be sold for several million more, and will continue to do this constantly.

- How is Arkady Dobkin's day going?

I don’t even want to answer, because there are so many different small events that constantly happen and change the direction of your day! I will only say that when I am in America, I spend the whole morning working with Europe. A lot of things happen in different departments, with different clients, and you have to react to a lot of things. This takes half a day. The afternoon, when Europe falls asleep, is more predictable. There is still the third half of the day when America falls asleep. Then you can already think about something more long-term.

Does EPAM want to become Microsoft

- What markets will EPAM expand into next year?

Surprisingly, EPAM today is the world's largest software service company in its global delivery segment, except for 6-7 Indian companies. Last year, we overtook large Chinese companies that are already operating on the market and made an IPO last year and the year before. Compared to the Indians, our scale is medium, so we do not need new markets yet. We have three markets today: North America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union. We will continue to develop these three markets.

- Are you satisfied with the work of EPAM this year? What areas would you like to expand? Does the company have any weaknesses?

A sea of ​​flaws. I understand perfectly well that part of the audience that is watching us now is the employees of our company. You can't hide the truth, even if you wanted to. We have a lot of shortcomings, we see them. These are growth issues. Today we have more than 7 thousand employees. When the company was created, the people who created it had no experience. And today there are many people in the management of the company who are growing with it.

Given that we are the largest in the CIS in this market, it is not easy to find people who know exactly how to work with a company with so many software engineers. It is very difficult and not entirely correct to directly apply the methods that are used by companies of this size in the West, there are specifics.

- When will EPAM enter the grocery market?

Arguing over which is better, which model is more innovative, is a very serious conversation, which is best done with numbers in hand and well-founded positions, rather than slogans. What I sometimes see on blogs makes me smile at the way people interpret the information available to them. We work in the service model, and in the future it will remain the main model for us. In total, we receive $7-8 million for software products or replicated solutions, but this is a very small fraction of our business, and it plays a very specific role for us, serving to "open doors".

- That is, roughly speaking, EPAM will never release boxed software.

Boxed software, if you mean the same as Microsoft, we will not release. We look at areas that correlate well with our core business. Special platforms that allow for the efficient work of a large number of people. Frameworks that allow you to analyze, test or implement solutions more efficiently. These areas allow us to compete better in our service model. We do not plan to make other boxed products today.

- And tomorrow? After 5 years?

Don't know. 5 years ago, I would not have predicted that we would have 7,000 employees. And if you asked you 5 years ago what TUT.BY would look like, you would also find it difficult to answer exactly.

Prospects for the Belarusian IT industry

- Where is the ceiling for the growth of the IT industry in Belarus? Maybe it has already been reached, since all the programmers are already working at EPAM or somewhere else?

May be. I remember what we said to ourselves in 2000: we hoped that EPAM could really compete in the global market when we had a thousand people working and we were "big" enough. And when we talked about it in 2000, we could hardly believe that 1,000 people was an achievable goal. A few years ago it seemed that in Belarus one company could not grow by 200-300 people per year. Today we know that we can grow by 500-600 people.

You often meet with a dismissive attitude towards outsourcing - and you understand how far it is from building a real scalable business that works with the top 100 global companies or the top 50 leading global technology companies. If it were that easy, there would be plenty of companies today that would compete with us much more effectively than they do. It's about the service model. In addition, there are and will be companies operating in other models. There are also reserves in Belarus. I hope.

- What is missing in the Belarusian IT business?

Comparing Belarus with Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Russia, Belarus is a sin to complain about. In terms of conditions for IT companies, Belarus has taken unprecedented steps by adopting HTP legislation. Of course, there is a huge problem with education. How to increase the number of specialists in our field? Many companies are investing heavily in building learning processes, including helping universities. It works and helps. Of course, this process is not completely efficient. If the state helped to quickly reorient the education process towards the IT industry, it would be great.

This material is an adapted text version of the "Expertise" program with Yuri Zisser. Watch the video of the show

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Links

• whoiswho.dp.ru/cart/person/79867/
• infopark.by/arhive/main.aspx-uid=3282.htm?uid=3282
• ekonomika.by/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=21939Itemid=21987
• www.forbes.ru/dossier-forbes/26257-dobkin-arkadii-mihailovich
• www.forbes.ru/forbes/issue/2009-08/5435-tsifrovaya-pushcha

An excerpt characterizing Dobkin, Arkady Mikhailovich

Dolokhov slowly straightened his bent leg and straight, with his bright and insolent look, looked into the general's face.
Why the blue overcoat? Down with… Feldwebel! Change his clothes ... rubbish ... - He did not have time to finish.
“General, I am obliged to carry out orders, but I am not obliged to endure ...” Dolokhov said hastily.
- Do not talk in the front! ... Do not talk, do not talk! ...
“I am not obliged to endure insults,” Dolokhov finished loudly, sonorously.
The eyes of the general and the soldier met. The General fell silent, angrily pulling down his tight scarf.
“If you please, change your clothes, please,” he said, walking away.

- It's coming! shouted the machinist at that time.
The regimental commander blushed, ran up to the horse, with trembling hands took hold of the stirrup, flung the body over, recovered himself, drew his sword, and with a happy, resolute face, with his mouth open to one side, prepared to shout. The regiment started like a recovering bird and froze.
- Smir r r na! shouted the regimental commander in a soul-shattering voice, joyful for himself, strict in relation to the regiment and friendly in relation to the approaching chief.
Along a wide, tree-lined, high, highwayless road, with a slight rattle of springs, a tall blue Viennese carriage rode in a train at a fast trot. A retinue and a convoy of Croats galloped behind the carriage. Near Kutuzov sat an Austrian general in a strange, among black Russians, white uniform. The carriage stopped at the regiment. Kutuzov and the Austrian general were quietly talking about something, and Kutuzov smiled slightly, while, stepping heavily, he lowered his foot from the footboard, as if there weren’t those 2,000 people who were looking at him and the regimental commander without breathing .
There was a shout of the command, again the regiment, ringing, trembled, making guard. In the dead silence, the weak voice of the commander-in-chief was heard. The regiment bellowed: “We wish you good health, your lordship!” And again everything froze. At first, Kutuzov stood in one place while the regiment moved; then Kutuzov, next to the white general, on foot, accompanied by his retinue, began to walk through the ranks.
By the way the regimental commander saluted the commander-in-chief, glaring at him, stretching out and getting up, how, leaning forward, walked behind the generals along the ranks, barely keeping a trembling movement, how he jumped at every word and movement of the commander-in-chief, it was clear that he was fulfilling his duties subordinate with even greater pleasure than the duties of a boss. The regiment, thanks to the severity and diligence of the regimental commander, was in excellent condition compared to others who came at the same time to Braunau. There were only 217 retarded and sick people. Everything was fine, except for the shoes.
Kutuzov walked through the ranks, occasionally stopping and saying a few kind words to the officers, whom he knew from the Turkish war, and sometimes to the soldiers. Glancing at the shoes, he shook his head sadly several times and pointed at them to the Austrian general with such an expression that he seemed not to reproach anyone for this, but he could not help but see how bad it was. The regimental commander ran ahead each time, afraid to miss the word of the commander-in-chief regarding the regiment. Behind Kutuzov, at such a distance that any weakly spoken word could be heard, walked a man of 20 retinues. The gentlemen of the retinues talked among themselves and sometimes laughed. Closest behind the commander-in-chief was a handsome adjutant. It was Prince Bolkonsky. Beside him walked his comrade Nesvitsky, a tall staff officer, extremely stout, with a kind and smiling handsome face and moist eyes; Nesvitsky could hardly restrain himself from laughing, aroused by the blackish hussar officer walking beside him. The hussar officer, without smiling, without changing the expression of his fixed eyes, looked with a serious face at the back of the regimental commander and mimicked his every movement. Every time the regimental commander shuddered and leaned forward, in exactly the same way, exactly in exactly the same way, the hussar officer shuddered and leaned forward. Nesvitsky laughed and pushed the others to look at the funny man.