Good morning, everyone. For those who I've not met, my name is David Straube. I'm Head of Investor Relations for EPAM. Welcome today. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our 2022 Investor Analyst Day. It's been a while since we last met, November 2019. To say the least, we've been pretty busy. EPAM has evolved, and the team here today is to talk about that. We have a diverse selection of our leadership team joining us both in person and remotely. To help place faces with names, we have published a look book that's displayed here in the room and then also on our investor relations webcast section.
Our agenda covers several key areas, starting with Arkadiy, our CEO and President, will update you on our strategy. It's not a new strategy, but more of an acceleration of our existing strategy. Epi and our business unit leadership will talk about the drivers of demand through the lens of industry and technology. Kevin Labick and a few of our consulting leaders will provide an update on EPAM Continuum, our integrated consulting offering. Victor Dvorkin and leaders from our global delivery team will speak about EPAM's next generation delivery capability. Larry and team will talk about our focus on employees, specifically our support to our colleagues in Ukraine, in addition to EPAM's commitment to ESG, and an update on EPAM's nonstop focus on education and learning.
Finally, we're very fortunate to have customers from Bridgewater and Raintree with us today who will help bring to life the work that we're doing for them. Lastly, we have a Q&A session pocketed throughout the day, so I'd ask you to hold your questions till we get there. With that said, it's my pleasure to introduce Arkadiy.
Thank you. Thank you, David, and very good to see people in the room. Last time we did it like two and a half years ago. Thank you for coming, and let me start. I think like while we talking practically, we think that we're talking each quarter, sharing like our results and relatively short view of the situation. Sometimes it's annual. Today, I would like to give a little bit longer perspective. Also with understanding that there is a very big question in the room about current situation and what we're doing to ensure that we have really good longer perspective. Before this, I'll bring us to the point which we stopped two and a half years ago, and it could be update for some people who are new to EPAM.
When we're talking about EPAM, we're talking about our journey as a pure software engineering company to become much more end-to-end solution company. This is what we were sharing in more details last time in the same room. IPO was an important point for us. We also were talking about our digital ecosystem, which is very important components to empower all what we're doing. We were talking about changing the client base from our IPO days when we were working with companies which were giving us relatively small tickets to actually the client base which become Fortune 500 for 2000 type of companies. What wasn't changed during all of these years from 1993 to 2018, it was our engineering DNA. We were talking about it from day one, and we were repeating this practically on each earnings calls.
I think it's very important differentiation, which we would like to keep. IPO day was great event for us. Not so great IPO from financial returns, but from starting to build a brand for the company. I'm bringing the slides here specifically for one data point, 85% in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia 10 years ago. Also, we were sharing how we were transforming company since 2012 to 2019 when we went in three-year periods and putting on us very serious targets, how to transition from being just engineers to consulting to solution providers, what additional capabilities we need. This is like was our internal missions.
We definitely didn't share this ever as a guidance for three years, but internally, we were communicating to the company and putting pressure on ourselves to double company in just three years. We did twice in 2015 and 2018. In reality, we're transforming the company. We also established at this time our purpose, and the idea was how to enable our clients to be competitive and disruptive and helping them to navigate through very specific. Very often multiple technology ways. How to do it by making future real, not only for clients, but for e-commerce, for communities, through educational health platforms, and many other aspects of their life. Doing this also fast, acting as a startups, working with expert multidisciplinary teams. I know that usually this purpose is very market-driven.
We actually put a lot of thoughts in this, and it's proving to us right now that it's actually was very real. What's happened during this period from 2012 to 2018, we also experienced something new for us, which is the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which triggered for us the first effort to start diversification of our talent platform. That's when we entered India, APAC, and Latin America, exactly in 2015 after this. You can see decrease in share of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. What we also learn that it's not so easy to globalize. Like the first two years in India, bring us, and it was an acquisition of about 1,000 people. Decrease in headcount was 25%.
The next year we restored a little bit, but we understand that it's rather difficult to replicate exactly the same way like we did in different geographies. We got our lessons. At the end of presentation two and a half years ago, we shared our ambitions that having these new events, having understanding how much everything changing, seeing how our clients trying to adapt, we decided that we need to build EPAM as a very much adaptive enterprise as well to help clients doing the same. We said that we need to ensure that we adaptive if we build a company which can quickly responds to change. This is exactly the slide which we showed two and a half years ago.
Built and bring EPAM digital platform to make sure that people connected and working together, and extending leadership through integrated consulting and engineering, and open opportunities for everybody anywhere. These words were not just words, it was elements of platforms which we're planning to put together. If it's all successful, then we will be doubling company again. Back then it was our aspirational goal and not a guidance, it is very clearly pointing, pointed this out. We also understand that to become this adaptive enterprise, we will have to transform EPAM to one of the best innovation design company in consulting, and education, and social responsibility, but you have to keep this engineering DNA. That was very important point back then. To do this, we wanted to extend our platforms to cover three main aspects of our existence.
First of all, people in general, educational components, and productivity delivery. This was our focus. This bringing us exactly to the point when we stopped during our previous Investors' Day. EPAM 2021. Very challenging year. In November 2019, we didn't expect all this would be happening. COVID, social justice, and very specifically for EPAM, situation in Belarus, which probably not everybody even aware about. This all proved very quickly to us that constant change is really must, and being adaptive is really necessary. First of all, COVID proved that digital strategy is no longer optional. That become status quo. We very, very quickly starting to change ourself and remote by design become our practically slogan, how we working.
It was very good to see that Gartner kind of recognized it, and exactly in May 2020 during one of the conversations, they put it like, review of the top companies in IT services and highlighting Accenture and EPAM as the two best positioned for the COVID after COVID time. It was very nice to see the recognition of the efforts and specifically highlights, which very much in line with what we're highlighting as well, product engineering heritage and platforms enabling all of this. During this couple years, we also expanded our client base, but what's more important that we still were keeping this in these specific sectors. We're still doing product engineering work for software companies, which is extremely important. We're also expanding our digital-native companies and all of this experience which we're accumulating, we bring into industries.
Industries expanded, we started to advance in insurance, for example, in private equity sector. These two bottom lines is significant portion of our revenue. It's 35%-40%. Which keeping us very much on the cutting edge of what's happening in the world. We also expanded our capability map and consulting started to play a much more visible role, but it's also depth and breadth of offering allow us to cross-sell across the account. We will be talking about it more. Business will be highlighting very specific things, and our delivery leadership will be sharing as well. EPAM Continuum with our constant focus and clients starting to take a taste of what it means when one company can do end-to-end story. They were coming with us with very different challenges.
Again, we will be talking in more details, but just to highlight what's happened from 2018 to 2021, like, we started to show up on the maps, which we never were before. Like product development, digital product development together with BCG, for example, frog design or on customer experience strategy together with McKinsey and Bain and Accenture and Deloitte. We become one of the top 20 agency in the world. One of the latest from Forrester when they were analyzing customer experience strategy consulting practices, they highlighted nine largest one. You can see that EPAM among the Accenture, Bain, BCG and Deloitte and EY, IBM, McKinsey in very different competitor list. During this last three years, we were also focusing exactly what we said before, how to expand our digital platform and how to diversify our delivery.
First of all, we're often talking about our platforms and how much focus we're having on this, and we'd like to bring a little bit more tangible feel what it is. Being engineers, we're trying to do it very well. We have internal software lab. We're focusing on this, and this is very sophisticated set of applications which cover in practically all aspects of our lives, from demand to fintech to internal marketplaces to supply, bringing this individual environments and our crowd anywhere platforms and workforce operations and all related to productivity. Again, some more details we will be sharing, but the complexity and sophistication, and this is integrated through APIs and dashboards, is very high. Different view.
This is actually dozens and dozens of applications covering everything from people to education to staffing and all built in-house, which means that we can adapt very, very quickly. We don't need to wait for another release. We're having definitely a competitive advantage because it's a unique setting. Like all related to the education part of this and integrated with our people platforms. Communities which is the feed of our talent. We also support external communities through our digital platforms. Another angle of our growth and capability and these is actually acquisitions. It was pretty much nothing during 2020, but then during COVID, we did acquisitions even without meeting some companies.
Salesforce capability, cybersecurity company in Israel, Data in Netherlands, Core, our first acquisition of strategy consulting firm in Germany, seeds for accelerate, accelerating Latin America, Colombia specifically, some media consultancy and marketing e-commerce technology company. I just highlight a little bit on the largest one, which is Emakina Group, which is a network of marketing agency across Europe and Middle East, which bringing us additional capability, marketing type of agency which we didn't have before, but also strengthen the whole network of agencies around the world for EPAM and giving us seeds to start scaling up in countries which we are not present before, including Turkey, but many countries across Western Europe. We shared this competitive map last time with you as well, and we're still competing with global services companies a lot.
We're still competing with professional services from software companies, but we're seeing more and more change coming to agency conglomerates and consultants. It's interesting to see how we're dealing, and this is a Gartner data in category of live service providers with revenue between $1 billion and $5 billion. The extra large is PwC, even bigger than that. You see how different we are with our offerings and how much faster we were able to run. Like, I need to keep myself, like, running and we'll be running with current situation all the time, but that was 2021. Also, the end of the year was very fast. Third time in a row we were on the 100 fastest growing public and private company by Fortune. Number one IT services company on this list and accepted to S&P 500 in December.
We finished the year, to our surprise, after 2020 actually doubling company again, exactly like we promised. One more highlight, which I think was missed mostly. The situation in Belarus, which pro-democracy demonstration with 100,000 of people put the country in very different setting. From practically August 2020 and now continues, it's a different country. During these two years, we have to move over 2,000 people from Belarus, which at this point was the largest EPAM location. Which actually trigger another effort to rebalancing. This time we have to rebalance much, much quicker than last time. In three years, we went from over 70% to under 60% in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, but it's also allow us to seed new talent in new countries. Central Eastern Europe and Western Central Asia started to grow very fast.
You can see 2.5x and just in 2021, 75% growth in Central Eastern Europe and 2.5 times in Western Central Asia. Because we were bringing talent there, and we're able to change perspective for the local talent as well. We're able to mentor better, train better, and grow. Like we were growing centers from zero to 1,000 people in 12 months, which in relatively small countries. India was turn as well. In these three years, we grow the 4x and just over two times in 2021. Because we understand, we learned our lessons how to do it better, we started to bring the DNA education, which we were able to kind of export from our traditional places. In Latin America, same thing, 4x, 2.5 times. 2x speed rebalancing.
What we realized that we have to adjust as well, how purpose, because it's not only about technology ways. Actually, social change is much as important. We learn it in U.S., we learn it in Belarus big time. Which bringing us to 2022, which was very happy beginning of the year. We celebrated 10 years of IPO. We increased company by 10 times since IPO. One week later, we share it with you our guidance, which was probably the strongest guidance in our history. We couldn't understand how we can grow less than practically 40% in 2022. Just to find out one week later that something happened, which I was absolutely sure wouldn't be happening. We shared our position very quickly. We stand with Ukraine.
One week later, we announced that we will be exiting clients in Russia, and one month later after this, at the beginning of April, we said that we're closing Russia completely with the next several months. Bringing us to the third restructuring. This time, I will say it's 4x speed. Just in six months, this is still projected because we're not out of this mark six months yet. We're moving to under 40%, and we believe that by the end of the year, we will be under 30%. What's happening as well, Central and Eastern Europe growing 40%. This is in six months. Western Central Asia, 3x in six months. India growing 30% in six months. Latin America, 60%. We were prepared for this by all previous events. This is how very high-level map looking.
This is small, medium, large, small under 1,000, medium under 5,000, large over 5,000 dev centers at EPAM. What's happening is there is significant transition in all of these movements. Just to understand a little bit better, there is legends there, exit of declining growth, risk caution, business as usual, targeted growth. I think putting this on one page, and this is 4 regions where we're going to grow to do the transition. Clearly, the question in our minds, and I'm pretty sure the question in the room, how we're going to keep the quality, how we're going to scale, how we're going to keep the brand, the image which EPAM built during the last decades. Let's talk. EPAM Global Campus. We were talking about it a lot.
We will have some more details update today, but this is what we established in Eastern Europe, and this is what we were benefiting from. Now we're exporting all of this. During the last couple years, we also built a network of boot camps. As we speak, we've practically opened three universities in Central Asia, in Ukraine, which we announced before the war, and we're still going to do it, and in Central Europe. Talent ecosystem and communities expansion. This is a whole feed for talent pipeline. This is very important, and we building these communities very much globally. The main things still coming back to our engineering DNA, which we started this conversation today from. Engineering excellence culture and EPAM is the home of the modern engineer or modern cloud-aware engineers.
Kind of to prove, illustrate this, I selected the slides from our workshop for one of our largest clients, which after working with us almost for 15 years, finally came to us and said, "Help us to transition our internal IT. Help us to become technology company. Help us to..." This is like some slides which we are sharing with you to bring here that all this engineering excellence which we're talking about is not just the marketing components. There is a lot of very tangible things behind all this. Like, you can see how we're thinking about promoting engineering culture through boot camps, part of onboarding from company communication channels, engineering excellence community. Special products which we're developing constantly in our internal software lab. Also, this is. You can see badges recognition for EngX mentors, coding story author, EngX sensei, EngX experts.
We're doing constant assessments, and this is actually what we did in 2021, how to bring this culture to new countries. How make engineering culture self-driven. Very serious community focus, and how all of this actually impacting software delivery performance through EngX Value, Learning Journey, Continuous Improvement program, and recreational program. What's important, all of this supported by our digital ecosystem. All of these blue boxes, most of them, it's special applications integrated to create really strong engineering DNA inside of the company. If you look at our diagram, you can restructure this to make sure that it's actually reflecting engineering DNA architecture inside of EPAM. I just flip through some screens on special applications which we have across. This is like skills ML matching. It's a lot of details.
Again, we will talk more about it through our delivery and people sections. The second point, it's about how to empower talent with our digital platforms. Because the first point still coming to your question, like, when we transitioning thousand of EPAMers, we have opportunity to sit and scale exactly much faster, like we proved possible during the last two years when we had this challenge with moving thousands of people from Belarus. It allow us to grow faster, mentor, and bring our culture much broader. That's exactly opportunity on hand right now with closing Russia and still people moving from Belarus. Exporting the whole pieces of ecosystem which we built. EPAM organization is a platform. If you think our reaction on market, what's happening. We can think about our platforms which allowing us to address some unexpected things.
Having like pieces of the our platform, watching the events, bringing this to dashboard and decision panels, human-assisted decisions. When something like this happening, building automatically or semi-automatically some type of defense mechanism. That's how we're thinking for 2022 and beyond, how to develop what we built internally. In this case, this could be transition to different structure where all these components structuring to create this internal mechanism. That's a very important part of our adaptability, adaptiveness decision. It's reflecting the needs of individuals. If you're thinking about remote and hybrid work, productivity, well-being, teams, collaboration inside of this organization collaboration across the teams and social components, and specifically like geography, remote, unpredictable, incomparable impacts which we're actually experiencing right now. Obviously, it's all about adaptability and scale, which turning for the speed advantage.
Interesting enough, Forrester, with what we're doing, put us on the product list of innovation management platforms just recently. This is just May 2022. Because we're offering this to clients as well, and this is very much in line when we say we need to be adaptive enterprise itself to make sure that we're helping our clients to become more adaptive. This is exactly the story which I shared, like how company inviting us to help them to transform themselves, even from engineering excellence standpoint. How to scale business to 10 billion. First of all, on client side. Despite of all expectation of recession, at this point, we definitely believe that the market is pretty strong, and it's strong because of all the pandemic disruptions. Digital improving.
Digitally native and companies advancing and pushing the other traditional corporations to run faster. The war in Ukraine put a very specific pressure on the talent. Think about displacing from 300,000 to 400,000 potential talent across Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, which creating demand in some turn. Everything, what's happening with digital data and cloud ecosystem, which create a new platform, which give an advantage for some companies, so everybody has to run. This is a slide from last time about the Gartner data, $1 trillion. We were sharing this and we're saying that we're focusing on build part which is much, much faster moving part of the equation. $1.3 trillion in 2023, projection to 2026. Again, we're focusing on this subset, which is more demanding for capabilities and skills, and also fastest growth.
That's why we do believe the demand for us is there. Also, having the client base which we have, this is specifically to highlight number of clients in Forbes Global 2000 and Fortune 500. Even with our growing size, we still under-penetrated them a lot. You can see at the bottom of this, how many clients, very, very small. We have only 50 clients over $10 million on Forbes list and 20 on Fortune list. EPAM Continuum, very important component. What change you saw with analyst recognition. Also, the buyers changed during this last three years. Capability expansion and the right orchestration, increasing the check across our top 20 clients. Significantly in three years from $46 million to $70 million today, 20 top clients. Because we can cross-sell, we can do end-to-end solution and more, we can enter new areas.
When we were talking about competition kind of presented all these aspects of the IT services. The focus how to solve the challenge that you still need to do strategy and execution and implementation simultaneously. It is extremely important and nobody doing this well, and we have to put a lot of efforts to do it well as well. That's exactly our long vision, how to go from EPAM in 2009 to more EPAM Digital in 2012 and later in EPAM Continuum, and then how to put this exponential components of the enterprise through interfaces, dashboards, and experimentation and autonomy and social and staff and demand and community and crowd. All of this part of the ecosystem is very important to create this adaptiveness.
That's an opportunity how to deliver this end-to-end story and how to do strategy and implementation better than others, which could be huge benefit for the clients. If we're doing this right, then we will be able to grow again, and this is just a measure of our success and keep our startup roots and adapt EPAM and adapt clients and go to this level with the next very visible timeframe. Again, it's intention or aspiration, not a guidance. Engineering DNA, we know for sure we have to keep. What we don't know and whatever else would be happening. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised by anything happening. I think with this, I will pass to Fejes, our president of Europe and co-head of our global business to go into details on our clients with the team on the list. Thank you.
Ark, thank you very much. Good morning. I'm joining you from Budapest, and I'm sorry not being with you, but probably at this time, we got so used to doing this presentation remotely that nobody takes a notice of that. Joining me on presenting the global business update is Boris Shnayder and Sergey Yezhkov, who are also the co-heads of businesses for EPAM. Greg Killian, Dmytro Seredenko, and Regina Viadro, who are the co-head of business for North America. These different parts of the business. If you can get my next slide. I wanted to start with a little bit reflecting on what Ark just shared a couple of minutes ago. Clearly, the demand, we feel the demand is strong, right?
The demand is driven, the core demand is driven by digital transformation, which continues to be a very strong driver for change and actually for the need to adapt and transform the enterprise. People understand due to the pandemic and, especially due to the geopolitical changes, that business strategy is no longer possible without really focusing on your digital strategy. The need for an integrated business and technology change is there, right? People are executing these changes on a wholesale scale. To do that, we are focusing on advisory-led business technology transformation. This way we can drive larger engagements, and we can drive end-to-end engagements across the whole enterprise.
This brings us opportunities not just to execute point solutions, but actually to drive through whole organizational transformations where we bring new capabilities to bear. Also building new types of experiences, physical and also metaverse capabilities, because people realize today that this is a differentiator. That's how you can differentiate yourself from the competitors. Also, as we are building this, we are now building it on cloud-native technologies, helping companies to transform, move from on-prem to the cloud, engineer solutions on the cloud, and scale it across multiple and diverse technology landscape. At the core for all these transformations, the platforms which we're building has become the data, and we're helping organizations and going to helping organizations to develop end-to-end data platforms and products and also deploy them globally.
Clearly, deployment these days is not about going around and deploying it country by country, but actually taking in the requirements, designing it around it, understanding and the different culture aspects, different user journey needs of our customers and creating a global solutions. As people are transforming and actually driving transformation, there's a need for transforming the organizations to be more agile, more nimble to be a learning organizations. The entry point for us is an assessment methodology which we developed and worked on, and we provided technology and tooling around it, which we call ways of working, which we utilize to drive organizations adaptation to cloud technologies and bring on new capabilities.
Bring in Bain and deploy our educational assessment, and we could call talent management tooling, because people throughout this journey, they recognize that there are worsening talent shortages. You need to increase in software and upskilling of talent, and you need to bring in different capabilities which EPAM mastered throughout this period. Now our clients are very much in need to build this out. Also, we're experimenting and continuing to roll out new types of engagement models or commercial models, engineering or testing as a service. Because people realize that to run large engineering organizations or testing organizations are not just about recruiting people, but actually providing the necessary tooling around it and delivering in a successful way and keeping the delivery healthy. It's not gonna be as easy as people claim to be.
This is a new world. This is a new way of engaging, and we're starting to deliver these services in a different commercial models. Let me pass the word to Greg, who will update us on a couple of case studies of which just proves some of the points what we executed in the last three years.
Very good. Thanks, Epi. Just do a quick introduction here as well. I'm Greg Killian, business unit head, primarily responsible for life sciences and healthcare. I've been with EPAM about three and a half years now. In fact, I'm based in our Newtown headquarters. I was there back in 2019 when we had this last event in Boston. This week, however, apologies for being in remote. I happen to be in Europe this week, so coming in remote. As Epi mentioned, I wanted to take, you know, kind of bring some of this to life here with a couple of case studies. Really as we've been, you know, seeing an absolute increasing amount of business coming with both advisory and consulting-led engagements before engineering starts, wanted to share two examples of those.
Really focus in on some trends, you know. I think one thing we see in both life sciences and healthcare, these are industries which are often not leading innovation and copied by other industries, but what we often do here, especially because of the regulatory nature of it, are often, you know, followers. Innovation in these industries happens by taking learnings from others and then quickly adopting them and moving them into this environment. That's a key theme you'll see here, both with consumerism and personalization. Starting with Walgreens, which you see here on the screen, some of you may know of this, some of you may have participated in what really is a massive business transformation for Walgreens.
They're moving from being a pharmacy and retail store really to becoming a part of the healthcare ecosystem. You know, what we're seeing is that in our own home lives, is this decentralization of healthcare away from what are typically very expensive and very inconvenient environments to something which is much more accessible and friendly and you know, at the corner. These expectations have changed too, right? As Walgreens has moved down this journey, we got involved with them very early into this transformation, which has you know, begun and is continuing today. Part of this was you know, looking at the interactions you know, and especially in their focus has been in chronic care management. You know, things which
Conditions which people have for life, but also have to be managed on a daily or very regular basis, and that's the niche and the focus Walgreens is focused on. As in partnering with EPAM here, what we have done is really focused on that user experience, making sure that their digital experience. COVID has certainly driven a lot of the remote involvement of how we all manage our healthcare and brought that together with what is the retail, what is the in-store experience and having the whole experience, whether they're on the phone, whether they're online, or in the store, making sure there's a really unified digital experience with, again, those expectations. People have different expectations when they're in Walgreens dealing with their healthcare as opposed to in an acute care hospital.
This also, you know, following along the themes Epi mentioned, before any developers started developing anything, we worked with Walgreens, you know, healthcare domain experts, people who are clinicians, nurses, and others who have managed patients for decades of their lives, helping them with what is that experience. What is the consumer experience? Learning from our partners on the consumer, which you'll hear about in a little bit. You know, really first making sure, working with the client, making sure we're building the right thing, and then of course, to the roots of what that is, then building it right. They've now launched. This has launched live in both California and New Jersey. Continuing expansions are happening and, you know, jump into the App Store and the Walgreens Health App is there.
These are all assets which EPAM has developed in partnership with Walgreens, and you know, a really exciting part of our business. If you could move to the next slide, I'll give another example from the life sciences. You know, here, there's also these same trends, you know, consumerism and especially personalization are key themes that we're seeing. You know, back. If you look back a decade plus ago, therapeutics and drugs were very focused around blockbusters and these big medications which would handle an entire population. Things are. As patients, we're now expecting things to be much more personalized. Novartis actually has a very industry innovative and a pretty well-known program called Data42.
In fact, if I look back at Novartis, their CEO has quotes saying that Novartis really is a data science company. What they did is put together a platform, you know, taking 25 years of data, really from across the organization, from research, drug development, clinical trials, post-market launch, real-world evidence, and brought all of this together into a data platform, which you heard as well has really been a key part of, you know, data-led transformation as part of digital. That personalization comes in in the fact that there's also genetic and genomic information, which is massive upon massive amounts of data which get blended with those other sources I mentioned, and really what has been an industry-changing initiative.
Again, common theme here, EPAM was working with the client several years ago as this was being envisioned, and using this genetic information to help them discover and develop personalized medications. Beyond the development of those personalized and precision medications, it's also the scientists, right? Scientists are consumers too, and when they're going into these stores of data, when they're building machine learning models, they wanna make sure that data is searchable. They wanna find it in ways in which they have become too used to searching and accessing data now. All of these consumer type of experiences are really coming to some rather technical environments in you know situations like this. With that is actually kind of a nice transition of a learning. I'll go back to a learning life sciences had from gaming.
In fact, the first processing of genetic sequencing was actually only made scalable by taking gaming processors, right? It was gaming processor used for sequencing 'cause nothing else could perform it. Just like that, we learned, you know, some technical connections. Now it's that immersive gaming, immersive experience and design, in fact, that we're learning from gaming and now applying in medical technologies. I'm gonna send it back to the room there in Boston, and, Dima, over to you.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Dmytro Seredenko, [in the U.S. West Coast] , part of North American business out of Los Angeles, California. I celebrate 13 years with the company this year, and quite a few of those I spent working with media team and companies out of the west. Media entertainment industry is changing with unprecedented speed. The pandemic and geopolitical challenges that Ark and AB spoke about obviously contributing to that. Even if you don't run media or telco enterprise, you can see the change out of your living room. A lot of people consuming more and more content. They're spending more time consuming various type of contents like social media and gaming. As they try to discover those, they face a lot of challenges because that content is actually distributed across fragmented catalogs.
We think that new ways to search and discover that content across all those catalogs will be actually a differentiator for the companies coming up to the market. As the competition in the space grows, consumers expect premium quality application experiences. The challenge is amplified by the ever-growing number of smart devices that we use to consume our content. We see that a lot of new entrants to the market coming up as digital natives, digital-born companies. They possess a risk to established enterprises like telcos and media companies that usually sit on legacy stacks, and they push them to enable agile development and decrease the time for products coming out to the market. We see a lot of agile transformational programs coming and actually starting and going across those enterprises.
For decades, telcos used to be the kind of super aggregators or aggregators of broadcast content, right? Like that's how we used our TVs. As number of streaming services or as we call it OTT, over-the-top services growing up, there's clearly a need of like super aggregator. Some of the consumer device manufacturers done a good job. Like Apple TV and Roku, I'm sure many of you use those, but the journey is not over yet. There will be more devices and there are more challenges actually how to aggregate content better and allow you to consume it in a very smooth, ubiquitous way across whatever screens and devices you have. As video platform delivery and video platforms technology is stabilized, we have actually a good set of competitive solutions for competitive choices for point solutions.
There is another challenge coming out of it because now you need to integrate that. That comes with the complexity and the challenges while we need to keep the operational costs down. Those are type of the projects that we see coming up with some of our customers. Probably it wouldn't be a proper ending for a trend session if I wouldn't mention Metaverse. I mean, it's a buzzword. Everybody speaks about that. Metaverse is in very early stage right now, right? Some of the companies looking for new business strategies while trying to reuse either built-in infrastructure or participants in the Metaverse. They're researching new business opportunities and new business models, actually how to monetize that.
EPAM has unique capabilities that would help them to structure that research and to structure that Metaverse discovery work, and actually try to bring some viable solutions to life. As we stay on the Metaverse topic, I would like to highlight one of our one of the very unique players actually in this space, the company called Epic Games. It's our beloved customer since 2015, and we help them across a number of products and services that people know them well. Epic Games is a very special place because a lot of people know them as the creator of the widely popular Fortnite game. They're also known to the gaming industry as a gaming ecosystem creator.
If you think of it, the Unreal Engine is actually used to create those like almost photorealistic experiences and bring game creators' ideas to life. The game studios engineering teams use Epic Online Services to power their creations while they reach worldwide players community through publishing their games on Epic Games Store. We call it online store. EPAM is very excited to help them in that journey and we continue to work with them in that space. If you look at the bottom of the slide, develop, service, publish, play vision is very unique in a way and has applications outside of gaming world. We do believe that Epic Games has all the necessary components to create their own Metaverse solutions and bring third parties into it and adopt it.
A Fortnite-based world that we actually saw hosting very popular virtual events filled with photorealistic human avatars created in MetaHuman Creator tool. Then if you add a robust set of services on top like e-commerce or social, then you probably get an experience like never seen before. We actually very happy to partner them on that journey. At the same time, we continue our investment in the EPAM IT and R&D initiatives around Metaverse. With that being said, I wanna pass the mic to my colleague from the east, Regina.
Do you talk here?
Yep.
Hi, everyone. My name is Regina Viadro, and I'm very excited to be here today. I'm the co-head of North American business for, and I lead our, consumer and retail vertical for North America. I've been with the company for over 17 years, and I'm based in New York City area. Today, I would like to talk to you about the trends that we have been seeing, in the consumer industry. An industry that was forced to transform, more aggressively as a result, of the pandemic than it likely would have happened. We continue to see companies invest into technology-enabled consumer experiences, and we continue to see investment in innovative solutions, and many of our clients are bringing EPAM to help across the entire life cycle.
We see continued vertical integration happening between manufacturers and retailers as manufacturers are launching into direct-to-consumer models and retailers are creating their brands. Retailers are prioritizing supply chain investments post-pandemic while still focusing on innovation. Businesses have an imperative need to make real-time decisions about pricing, inventory and fulfillment and data platforms and solutions and products are paramount in allowing companies to make those decisions. Consumer enterprises require a full mix of experience, data, and advisory services with demand emerging for go-to innovation and execution partners that are able to play across the entire spectrum with the goal of minimizing the number of handoffs and transitions between different phases of the ideation and execution cycle.
I would like to share with you one customer story as I work with this great global brand called Estée Lauder well represents the trends that we just discussed, as what started with a simple engagement has quickly transformed into a true strategic partnership for both of our organizations. We partner across a spectrum of different services, but there are three that stand out that I'd like to highlight. These are innovation, data, and advisory services. An example of innovation could be a multi-brand platform for virtual try-on solution that allows you to try various shades and makeup virtually using the advanced capabilities of computer vision or reimagining what a store of tomorrow could look like for a manufacturer.
When it comes to data and data-driven decisions and underpin all business functions right now, we work together on data platforms and tap into cloud-native functionality of those to understand consumers, dynamics, and supply chain and future buying behaviors. When I mention advisory services, our work involves strategic assessment of new products and new business lines. As we just covered a couple of customer stories, this is a good point to introduce my longtime colleague, Kevin Labick, who will talk about integrated consulting, which is often a key enabler of our strategic partnerships with our clients. Kevin?
Thanks, Regina. My name is Kevin Labick, and I co-head our digital engagement practice. I've been with EPAM 10 years. I came by way of acquisition. I was the CEO and co-founder of Empathy Lab, which was EPAM's first foray into digital strategy and experience consulting. Back in 2019, when we last had this event, we announced the launch of our integrated consulting offering, and it was designed to help our clients successfully build, evolve, and operate digital businesses. We're gonna house it under the service brand, EPAM Continuum. As we explained, EPAM Continuum would be where we would combine our growing business experience and technology consulting capabilities and then seamlessly integrate them with our global delivery so that we could make real even the most ambitious or complex program, product or experience.
The focus was on driving business growth as well as infusing organizations with operational agility. What's happened? Here's the update. Back when we made the announcement, our strategy and our innovation practitioners, even the ones, some of which were housed in the studio here, were actually largely decoupled from each other and from the execution power of EPAM. Since then, we've integrated these skills, and we've scaled them. This has enabled us to make a significant pivot to a business transformation-led proposition. We've doubled down on our belief that even the most technology complex solution and technology-sophisticated solution really requires a deep understanding of the human beings involved, our clients' customers, their partners, and all of the key constituents within the business ecosystem.
We strengthened our industry talent, and we created advisory boards focused on key verticals and horizontals that give our practitioners as well as our clients access to outside luminaries. We also expanded our consulting offerings to represent a much more transformational capability, and this combined with our vertical and business domains and also our critical new skills, allowed us and allows us to provide strategy and execution simultaneously. You've been hearing a little bit about the investments into our digital platform, our ecosystem. Well, for EPAM Continuum, our platforms are providing really valuable tools that enables to look at our population of 60,000 and identify and then onboard highly curated teams. They also, like in the screenshot here, provide training learning modules, interactive learning modules that train our cross-discipline consultants on a common method and approach.
You know, Ark mentioned some of the external validation that we've been receiving from industry analysts, some of which are focused on, you know, the capabilities of integrated consulting and the EPAM Continuum proposition. Well, you know, to a degree, this is a very good qualitative measurement for us, so we can kind of track how we're progressing. Quantitative matters a lot to us as well. In the past two years, EPAM Continuum is in market globally and has over $1 billion of attributed revenue. This has come from a significant expansion of business within our existing client portfolio. EPAM Continuum has given us brand permission to treat with very different stakeholders on very different types of challenges within our clients.
These are clients that include those who have been with us well over 15 years and previously thought of us only as an execution player, but now are seeing us as a strategic transformation partner. The growth is also coming from new logos that are seeking us out specifically because of this ability to do strategy and execution in parallel. The capability has also led to the creation of a new vertical at EPAM, which is M&A services, and Frank Burkitt is gonna touch upon that a little later. We wanna now bring more of this to life through customer stories. I would have talked to you happily about Estée Lauder or Walgreens, but Regina and Greg Killian beat me to it. These are great examples of EPAM Continuum at work.
At this point, I'm gonna introduce Albert Rees, who's gonna talk to us a little bit about one of his clients.
Good morning. Am I working? Good morning. Albert Rees, I'm the head of North America Business Consulting for EPAM. I've been here about five years now. Live down in Atlanta. Back in 2019, I had an opportunity to meet with you and share with you the profound impact we were having on a top five global insurer. We were doing work in their North America claim organization, and we introduced some very interesting digital technologies which they've since then expanded into all their major geographies, claim, the claim organizations throughout the world. Since that time, we've actually led their transformation efforts in EMEA and in Latin America. As oftentimes happens, we have clients leave those organizations and go elsewhere.
Most recently, one of our key clients and stakeholders within that top insurer left and most recently joined HomeServe, and you can see HomeServe on the left side there. He's now, I think, the digital head of claims for HomeServe. He went into the role, got a call very early on, and he expressed, "Okay, I probably need some of the things you did for us at that other top insurer, but not sure yet. I gotta figure out what our existing capabilities are around digital. I have to figure out what our capacity is to drive change and really understand why I'm here, what they thought was important about digital claim and what they're looking for me to do." Back in January, I got the call back again, and he said, "Yes, we'll definitely need some help.
We wanna start a digital journey, but it's a little ambiguous at this point. We're not sure where to start, what we need to focus on." I suggested, "Why don't we bring in a couple of folks, sit down with your leadership team, and start to hash out really where you can have the biggest impact?" As you can see, after a couple of meetings, we started with elevated future, focusing on claims experience for customers, for employees, and for contractors. We brought forward a team, a very small team of experience consulting, transformation consulting, and an industry expert. Through this activity, we focused on the experience, and when you talk about the experience, their reaction, the leadership team's reaction was, "What is that interaction point?
What is the interaction point a customer, an employee, or a contractor has with our organization?" Of course, it stopped right there. We had to spend time with them just to get them to recognize the experience may start with that interaction point, but if you don't have the processes and business architecture and systems behind it to keep enabling those interactions all the way through your systems, the system fails. Through a number of conversations with them, we were able to demonstrate that today we're now working with them through identifying all the digital systems that they need from the interaction point all the way through their entire enterprise to enable a better claim experience and also to optimize and take costs out of their operations.
With that, I'm gonna hand it over to Eli Feldman, who's gonna talk about a leading auto dealer.
Thank you, Albert. Good morning. We want to bring another example of work that we have done, and this is something that I guess touched pretty much every one of us at some point in our life. You know, you come to a dealership, classic dealership. I'm not talking about like the Teslas of the world, and you have salesperson, and then you have the contract person, and then you have the finance person, and then they hand you these papers, so you know, like the ones that are printed on line printers that you actually have no idea. You have never seen it anywhere other than these places. Now, for them it worked. I mean, there is not much competition. Yeah, there's startups and stuff like that, but for them, it worked very well for many, many years. Why change? Why change?
Why digital is such a necessity? Well, the pandemic happened. The pandemic happened, and obviously dealerships closed, and the interactions were very hard and all of that stuff, and people were expecting some form of a normal experience on how they can buy a car. Enter this program that we have been running essentially since the beginning of the pandemic. It's a five-year program that we started. For us, the technical components of that were a given. The architecture, the design, sort of around cloud native, around data-driven architecture and all of that stuff, that was given. That's a modern marketplace that needs to serve like experience, provide a very good experience to customers online, offline. With all of that transition, cloud native makes sense, data-driven makes sense, no-brainer.
That was one vector of the work that we were actually doing with this customer. We very quickly realized that that mode of operations for a company like that, where in dealership essentially all of the software is record-keeping software. It's systems of record, nothing else. They don't interact with anyone other than the dealers that are actually entering data into the systems. All of a sudden, they need to transition to customer-centric, dynamic, hyper-automated sort of experiences across the customer engagement layer all the way to backend integration across financial systems, across lenders, across all of that stuff.
We very quickly realized that a classic sort of program approach or project approach to an effort like that, jointly realized, is not going to work, and we need to do more to essentially enable this organization to shift to this new modus operandi. One of the areas where we focused extensively is what that new experience, what that new, approach to developing these capabilities is. Project to product transformation was a cornerstone for enabling that capability, essentially shifting them from thinking this is five-year program and this is like set of projects within this program, to this is set of products that are going to enable certain function. They will continuously evolve, continuously enable the customer experience, the dealer experience, the lender experience and all that, all of that stuff.
All of a sudden, it's not a five-year program anymore, it's actually something that's continuous, altogether. The other thing that we realized, record software is being released once 12 months, once every 18 months or whatever that is. This is not the case with experience systems. The experience releases have to be continuous, they have to be quality, and they require Engineering Excellence. We worked extensively on actually transitioning the engineering capabilities within the organization, from mundane stuff of how actually to deliver software to cultural stuff, to operating model around the IT organization and stuff like that. We realized that, again, jointly, that even that is not enough.
Both the technology and the product capabilities actually need to transform to connect better the technology with the business within this organization as well, to be able to continuously evolve and release this customer cutting-edge capabilities to the customer on a continuous basis. Overall, we're year two into the program. We are already released this capability into the hands of the customer. The joint teams within EPAM and the customer did an amazing job at the initial releases, and it's being adopted at scale across dealerships in the U.S. It's providing online marketplace experiences, providing much better sales capabilities, and also continuously changing the business. As I mentioned before, the capabilities, all of the product mindset will continue this program for some time to come. Thank you.
With that, I will transition the virtual microphone to Frank Burkitt to speak about M&A services. Thank you.
Thank you, Eli. Good morning. I'm Frank Burkitt. I joined EPAM in the last year to lead our global business and strategy advisory services. I'm based out of New York. I'm speaking to you today from Amsterdam, and I'd like to highlight one of our advisory services today, M&A. M&A is a rapidly growing capability for EPAM, where we're focused on serving both private equity and corporate M&A activity. It's interesting because it's an opportunity to look at companies holistically at a point of significant change. One of these offerings, product, tech, and IT M&A, includes due diligence, pre- and post-close integration, and value optimization. This is a natural extension of EPAM's technical capabilities. It's an offering that can be leveraged for both target acquisitions and to assess current portfolio assets.
For example, we're working with a global private equity firm with about $25 billion of assets under management, and they invest in middle-market growth companies that operate in financial services, health, technology-related markets. We recently conducted a rapid assessment of an underperforming portfolio company. Their goal was to make this a fully cloud-enabled enterprise, but the operating partners were concerned that the company was under-delivering on its potential. Leveraging our due diligence methodology, we conducted a holistic assessment of their use of cloud for enabling products and services. We assessed their infrastructure, their application architecture, cyber, dev practices, data and analytics, business functions, organization, governance.
To conduct this diligence, we combined our industry and tech expertise that was relevant to that specific asset's profile, which included EPAM SMEs from our cloud practice, our platform modernization, advanced tech, agile, cyber, data practices, and we identified product, process, and organizational improvements needed to achieve the cloud enhancement goals. We're jointly planning a transformation program with them to address these deficiencies and optimization opportunities. In moving from diligence to implementation, this pulls through our core delivery capabilities, like our cloud platform build-out, compute, storage, and network enhancements that this asset needs, infrastructure improvements, and optimization of their use of cloud services in their services. This PE firm has now asked EPAM to support the due diligence on two target acquisitions and to conduct cybersecurity review of another asset. This is a pattern that is emerging across a growing number of PE firms that we are serving.
They are repeat clients for holistic assessments of companies, and there's a long tail of value optimization opportunities that come after that diligence activity. Our market-leading engineering DNA provides a highly differentiated capability to provide deep insights that go beyond what other providers can provide. We're currently expanding these offerings to include operational M&A services, and again, due diligence through value realization. This is a service that we are also investing in digital platforms and tools to support a consistent and scalable offering on a global basis. Kevin?
All right. I think it's becoming clear these are multidimensional client challenges. We thought we'd just round out this section. We thought you might be interested to just meet some of the people who are leading the EPAM Continuum charge. Chris and Holger, do you want to just come up and say hi? You can stand in front of the podium.
I think this is live. Yeah. Great. Hi, everyone. Chris Michaud. Joined EPAM about four years ago through the acquisition of Continuum, which was one of the original human-centered design innovation firms. I operate out of Boston, actually, out of this office, which used to be the headquarters of Continuum. Now that I'm part of EPAM, my job here is really to help our clients navigate digital transformation by bringing a very keen focus on how to use technology to better serve your existing customers, as well as open up new business whitespace opportunities. I do that in the role of heading up our experience and innovation consulting team, and we work across all the industries that you've heard us talk about today. That's a little bit about me. I'll hand things over.
Many thanks. My name is Holger Friedrich. It's great to be here in Boston, but take a look at Berlin. I'm the managing director of CORE SE. CORE SE is a technology think tank, and we support our clients with IT strategies, IT architecture management, and sometimes we help to survive in complex technology transformation programs. We are located in Zurich, Switzerland, in Berlin, Germany, and in London, U.K. Since 15 years, I was a proud client of EPAM because EPAM was one of our preferred engineering partner when we start this complex transformation project. One and a half year ago, we got an invitation to be a part of the EPAM family, and that's why I'm working since one year, since summer last year, as managing director at EPAM.
I'm very proud to work with this fine gentleman and some ladies because it's a world-class management team. If I took a look from the perspective as a software engineer and in the management position. I hope it helps for the moment to get an impression. Thank you.
Thanks, Holger. I think we're gonna go virtual, and Anatoly will say hi first. All right. Well, Anatoly is a man of few words, so why don't we jump to the next piece? I'd love to introduce my close colleague and my favorite tormentor, Victor Dvorkin.
Hi. Victor Dvorkin, Head of Delivery with EPAM. Some of you know me. I'm with EPAM for 25 years this year, kind of celebrating. I'm here today to actually introduce my truly global delivery team. We'll start with people here. Ethan, welcome.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Ethan Matyas. I've been with EPAM for about three years as well. In fact, I started the same week as Greg Killian, so it was a good onboarding class. Prior to EPAM, I was actually a customer of EPAM, about three and a half miles that way in Cambridge. I'm responsible for delivery across Americas. That includes all of our customers in North America, along with our delivery centers in Latin America. Good morning.
Pavel?
Hello. I'm Pavel Veller. I am the CTO of our Digital Engagement Practice, and I'm the chief technologist driving the next evolution of our own digital platform with out of Atlanta and almost 20 years with EPAM.
Olga didn't make it here, couldn't make it today, and so I will introduce her myself. Olga joined us in Belarus eight years ago. She very quickly became a head of Belarus, which was at that time the largest location for EPAM, expanded the responsibility across the region. Last year, she moved with selected members of her team into Poland and continued leading the region, as well as expanded her responsibility into Central Europe, where she's co-leading it with Yuriy. Yuriy, he's virtual today.
Good morning, everyone. I am Yuriy Antoniuk, co-head of Central Eastern European delivery for EPAM. My team is another 15,000 people distributed across the region, mostly in such countries like Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Spain, and so on. I joined EPAM more than 20 years ago in Minsk as well, at that time. Around 15 years, I developed delivery organization in Ukraine, and now currently I'm located in Zurich, Switzerland. I pass to Amit.
Hello. My name is Amit Singhal. I'm the global head of delivery for our European and Middle East customers. Today I'm in Dubai, but otherwise based in London. I've been with EPAM for seven years. Let me tell you, there has not been a single dull day. Good to meet you all. I'm gonna pass over to Srinivas, who's for several years now has been working really hard to build a different kind of EPAM in India. Srini.
Okay. Thank you, Amit. Hi, good morning. My name is Srinivas Reddy, and I head the India delivery center for EPAM. I'm based of-
Okay. While Srinivas is fixing the mic, maybe quick summary on India. We brought in India as part of an acquisition. Ark spoke about our first learning. Now effectively 6,000 people are doubled in the last two years and growing extremely successfully across multiple locations in the region. I will pass to Ethan to talk a bit about Latin America.
We've been working in Latin America for about seven years now, starting first in Mexico, and growing rapidly. Given the events over the last couple of years, decided to diversify further. We entered Colombia and other countries in Latin America around mid-summer of last year, both organically through growth, and then through a mid-sized acquisition. Actually have already grown Colombia and some of the neighboring countries to nearly 2,000 people. Given support that we have between teams in North America, and US and Canada working really closely with our teams in Latin America, we're really confident about our ability to scale there to more than 5,000 people this year.
As you can see, we are actually growing the existing locations very fast. We are developing new locations. We are also very much focused on relocating our people across. With all of this, it's actually not enough. The important point here is to actually, with all of this complexity, to preserve and develop engineering DNA in existing new locations. I would like to introduce Sam virtually, who is a passionate engineer, and he will talk about this evolution and how we are making our development even more agile and secure. Sam?
Thanks, Vic. Hi, everybody. I'm Sam. I'm EPAM's Global CISO. I've been in the software and security space for over 35 years and where I honestly just introduce myself often just as the software engineer that doesn't wanna grow old, to be frank with you, because that's true. Now, I have to admit, I have a whole zoo of animals here, so if you hear anything howling or any weird noise, it's my animals. I'm safe. Don't worry about it. This is a topic that I'm really, really passionate about. In fact, it's a treat for me to talk about engineering and security today. In many ways, you know, if you look at this slide, this really truly speaks to who we are.
Our obsession in engineering and solving large scale, complex problem rooted early in the beginning of our company, where we started out working with some of the pioneers and innovators and, you know, later on, disruptors in the software industry space. You can imagine years of collaboration like that shaped our thinking and how we appreciate and respect great engineering and product development. Attract the like-minded technologists. I mean, honestly, great engineers wanna work with great engineers. That's just a fact. To be very honest with you, that's why I'm here. We naturally started to raise the bar ourselves in how we work, how we foster, and how we bring up a lot of our teammates together in new talents. You know, who we hired, how we hired, and constantly elevated our standards to what we consider great software.
In many ways, that shaped our engineering culture. You can feel it, you can taste it when you talk to people inside the company. As we expand our horizon and work with more and more clients, different verticals, different stages in their software, digital and cloud journey, we naturally bring the product-centric and engineering approach, which is who we really are, to our customer. That seems to be very impactful for them and start to help them and extract most of the value from the existing software and help them innovate as well. Now, everything we talked about from our engineering culture, advisory-led end-to-end solution, how we adapt, how we evolve, how we innovate, all that's only possible because of everybody in the company working relentlessly and especially in solving real challenges.
I just wanna take one second. If I may to thank everybody in the company from the bottom of my heart, it's really. They're really the ones that shape the company and just great people. Next slide, please. This is a build. If you can go on one more slide, I appreciate it. Now, this engineering DNA in building great products and solution while collaborating with our clients is, you know, why I think a big part of the reason why we're unique in this space. Our product thinking approach to solve strategic and technical problems allow us to both be thinkers and practical developers, so that ideas don't just stay as ideas.
Unfortunately, a lot of that happens that way, but we allow them, we can actually help them to actually realize these ideas together with them and turn them into real, functional, operating software and systems and continue to evolve. Evolve is what every organization needs. We at EPAM constantly try to evolve and improve ourselves as Ark talked about. This allowed us to truly help our clients with practical and real ways to become adaptive and agile. Not just preach, but really think together, discover together, and execute together. From our own journey, we see the power of connecting people. We see that we can provide value to each other, amplifying and accelerating creation process, while reducing a lot of the risk of failure because of rigid process and misunderstanding. This is why we foster value creation through our organic network of great people.
Our teams extending to clients alike frictions. I've talked a lot about our fascinating experience towards complex and large problems, you know, scaled problems. That's really who we are. That is a big part of how we work, which is we love tackling those problems. Last but not least, approaching the problem crystallized over an agile yet secure platform is critical so that our team can innovate in an environment. People need to feel safe to be able to innovate and create. Where there is support, consistent, scalable, and secure platforms in an environment, that is amazing possibility. Now, if you could go to the next slide, please. As you have heard from everybody, all that amazing work, innovation, collaboration, tremendous, you know, value and clearly is worth protecting. This is why we treat, you know, software very, very and security very, very seriously.
As part of our evolution, we continue to weave strategic tactical measure into how we work from our IT controls, hardened services, security training, and how we collaborate with our clients. Our guiding principle is what we believe in this practical and pervasive security. Understanding and aligning and mapping all these policies, embracing our zero trust model, as well as unifying our IAM and building this platform that's secure with, you know, all the software around it that's weaved into security is what we call security by design. All that lines up to our standard certification compliance work on our clients, customers, of course. Now, with that said, obviously all this work really is fostering the speed and productivity that, you know, we're talking about, and I can't think of anybody else better than Ethan to talk about this. Ethan, can I hand this to you?
Sure, Sam. Thank you. The point here is that speed kills, especially when you don't have it. We're then working with our customers day in and day out to make sure that we're giving them the disruptive tools that they need to compete. It really starts with a core team that work day in and day out with our customers. This includes account managers, delivery managers, business consultants and more that spend all of their time with our customers to understand where they're going to make sure we're aligned with them, proactively addressing issues, addressing opportunities and more. Of course, we look at revenue growth, at customer growth, but of course customer satisfaction as well, constantly getting feedback from them to understand how we're doing and looking for opportunities to improve day in and day out.
I'm a bit of a visual person and so I wanted to talk about just a specific example. This is an actual customer, and Ark had earlier given an overview of what we looked geographically before the war. This is a picture for a specific customer in late February. Obviously the war is not something that we expected to happen, but something that we had to respond to very quickly. These dedicated account teams worked with this customer, worked with our teams and measured really in hours and days, moved delivery. This is moving people, this is moving knowledge, transitioning work and more. The important point is not just to have people working in new locations, it's actually people delivering in new locations, hitting commitments that we have for those customers.
The feedback was specifically that where they expected a disruption to their business from the issue, we actually hit all of the delivery commitments that we had made and more. I'll keep going just to talk about how we actually engage with our customers. While we have a number of different models, one of them that we're most keen, if you will, is our digital factory model. If you can think of one of our customers, and Ark had earlier talked about kind of the average size of our top customers, this isn't about doing one project for a customer. This is actually about doing N projects, working across N products at that customer.
To deal with that scale, to deal with that complexity, we actually need a repeatable model that we can actually deploy where there's consistency around engineering quality, around governance, around solution architecture, support and more. Seeing this model in action gives customers the comfort that we're actually watching over the projects and they can trust us to handle more complexity and more work. With that, I'll give another example. This is actually a customer that we started working with at the beginning of COVID, which seems like decades ago, but I'm told is only a couple years ago. This is actually a customer where our first meeting was virtual. The entire ramp-up was virtual. This is a customer in the healthcare technology space, and they had a massive modernization push.
On top of that, new regulations being pushed down. On top of that, new requirements that they had not planned due to COVID. They came to us and really had a major push and said, "Can you help?" We went in the span of 90 days focused on architecture, solution, and UX and experience. In the span of 90 days, we're then ramping up a team of nearly 600 people globally brought together in product squads to address a huge modernization push. We've not only delivered for them and their customers, but we've actually grown at that account. If you fast-forward another couple years, still fully virtual, still remote by design, then the war broke out. The customer really understood what was going on. They stood with Ukraine, of course, as well.
They were actually surprised is how quickly we were able to mobilize, to move our people, to move delivery and more, and to not only retain the customer, to not only get rave reviews from them about how well we had handled the situation, but they actually came back and confirmed their commitment to us going forward. This is a top 20 customer because they were so pleased with the quality of work, quality of delivery that they had experienced with us. How do we do this? We've talked a lot about systems, about applications. I think Ark touched on it earlier, but I'll spend a little bit of time just talking about some of the systems that we use specifically around delivery, specifically for our customers.
This is not just about marking things as red or amber or green with kind of silly colors. This is actually true transparency so that we actually understand what's going on, whether we're zooming out at the account level or down to the individual level. One of those core applications is our delivery health monitor. Again, to be clear, this isn't just about reporting. This isn't just about saying what's going on. This is actually to create alignment, to proactively manage issues and risks. It's also a way for us to engage not only our teams, but our customers, to make sure we have a shared vision on what's going on, where we're headed, and what issues we need to be focused on.
I'll move on to our Teams application, and our Teams application is for us to understand the various skills that we have deployed on a project on an account to actually group them together. We had actually built some functionality, not so recently before the war, actually focused on succession planning. That functionality went from maybe we need to rotate someone six or 12 or 18 months out to actually understanding who had not only the skills but the knowledge in a specific domain, in a specific vertical, in a specific account, so we could actually understand the type of person that could take responsibility if someone was unable to do work. Another application that we use constantly is perf or performance. This is actually bringing metrics into delivery.
Again, rather than just painting things with the color, we actually want to understand the velocity of our teams, the quality of work that we're doing, the status of CICD and more, and to give a single pane of glass to both our delivery managers and our customers, so that we can actually understand what's going on, zoomed out at the account level, zoomed into the individual, and the ability to look at teams and products in the middle. I'll talk a little bit about our productivity coach, and this is something that we're trying right now. This actually then gives feedback both to individuals and managers about how they're spending their time, their ability to focus. It actually allows them to connect with other individuals if they need help.
It allows us to really not only understand effort, but the actual output for that effort. These are new things that we're trying through our application portfolio. As crazy as it is, I gave a tour of four, maybe four and a half applications out of, at last count, 189. By this morning, it might be 190, I'm not sure. But it really speaks to not just our digital platform, but the connectivity between them that really allows us to deliver for our customers. With that, maybe I'll turn it back to Pavel, who can talk a little bit about where we're headed next.
Thank you, Ethan. I did say that I am the chief technologist behind the new evolution of our digital platform. With Sam being remote, I may be the only person in this room who still writes code and ships code to production every day. If not, raise your hand, please. That's how I and my colleagues, the technical leaders of digital platform that powers EPAM, drive innovation. We do it by example and from within. Eli talked about the global automotive company, and he mentioned cloud-native and data-driven table stakes. That's the architectures we build today. What we build today is modern, cloud-native, serverless, event-driven, elastic, and distributed. Our data-driven analytics is powered by near real-time data lake house. Our APIs and applications, the new one we built, run with four nines availability. They designed for performance.
The team that builds it, my team, it's the team that runs it. We don't have scheduled releases anymore. We practice continuous delivery. Sam talked about it too. Internally, in the product-led engineering, we practice what we call demos over deadlines. I call ourselves a highly performing team, but surprisingly, we do nothing different from what we recommend our clients to do. That's exactly that. Not all of the 189 applications are like that. Just like we help our clients disrupt their industries and themselves, we disrupt ourselves through new ways of working, through new technological enablement. My team right now, I have an R&D team, works on something we have a secret name for, which we call programmable EPAM. When we next time meet on an event like this, hope a year from today, I'll tell you more about it. Okay?
Now Larry Solomon will tell you all about our people.
Thank you, Pavel. Thank you, Ethan. And thank you all. It's great to see you here. I was also here in 2019, and it's great to see some familiar faces. Larry Solomon, Chief People Officer. Been here about five and a half years now, and I work out of our Newtown, Pennsylvania, headquarters office. I arrived by train Tuesday night, and I got into an Uber with a pretty chatty driver. I asked him where he's from after a few minutes, and he said, "I'm from Algeria." After a couple of minutes more of talking, he says to me, "I bet you're from New York City, I can tell." I said, "Yep, bingo. You're exactly right.
I am born and raised in New York City." Then he said to me after a couple more minutes, he said, "I bet you're Italian." I said, "Well, that's one of the two common guesses, but that's not correct." I don't know how he missed that one, but it wasn't correct. We got into talking and he said to me, he said, "You know, people come into my car, and they only talk about three things here in Boston, sports, money, and politics." We spoke about all three for a few minutes, and I'm not gonna get into politics here, that's for sure. As far as money goes, we have our CFO here. He's a rock star. You can pepper him with all the questions about money after this. Sports is pretty safe and innocent, right?
For those of you that follow sports and the New York-Boston rivalry. The Bruins had a pretty good run this year. The Celtics are in the playoffs. Unfortunately, the Red Sox are in last place right now. My team, the New York Yankees, are in first place. He said something to me very interesting.
He said, "You know, there's something about the winning teams that regardless of the things that change year after year after year, there's a few things that you can see in the winning teams that remain constant year after year." I thought that was a good tie-in to what I'm gonna talk about, because as you'll see on your agendas, the theme of my session here today is that the more things that have changed, and there's been a lot of changes, there are a few things, few core things that remain the same, and it's true about our people. This was the setup for 2022. Those of you that follow us know this. This is pre-war expected revenue growth. We had a line of sight. We felt really good.
We were gonna hit $5 billion in revenue, and we were planning to have an overall net production headcount increase of 15,000 people, production people, with an attrition target of 17%. At that point, before the war, we anticipated, we projected that about 50% of our delivery capability would be outside of the three largest countries, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Boom. Terrible, terrible war initiated by the Russian government. Unsubstantiated, unprovoked, flat out wrong. Our response. Obviously, the war is very, very personal to our leadership team, to our employees, to our company, and to our customers. We mobilized very, very quickly. Financial resources, human resources, technology resources, logistical resources. In the first week, we announced a one hundred million dollar commitment from EPAM to support our employees and their families.
85 days and counting to the day, 24/7 support from our entire EPAM population. 10,000 EPAM volunteers. We didn't have to ask a single person to volunteer. Everybody stepped up. At this point, $500,000 of individual donations from our employees. This is just an example of how we mobilized into action quickly. I can go on and on about some of the things that we did. By the way, on this topic, if you haven't already seen to the left of the reception area on the, on the wall, there's a digital playing of some of the outstanding things that we have done to help and support the people of Ukraine. Before you leave here today, I would ask you to spend a minute or two.
I can't require you to do anything, but I can encourage you and ask you, please spend a minute or two in front of that wall and just look at the scrolling of how we've supported our people in Ukraine. In the first one, they're securing Internet access. Those are the Starlink satellite systems. I have an employee who is working for me, who got drafted into the military, and he told me that his chore for that day was to paint these systems in camouflage colors so that they can be deployed out in the combat zone and not easily detected. What changed? It's somewhat obvious for us what changed, and Ark mentioned this. We've been through a lot of disruptions. COVID was a big disruption, and yet another disruption now, the war.
A center of gravity, a major geographic shifting from the countries in Eastern Europe to other parts of our delivery network that Ark and Ethan covered. The pace of our operational response and our mobility efforts, it went from fast to faster to super fast. We had no choice. A rapid deployment of leadership from countries in certain parts of Eastern Europe and elsewhere, to other parts of the world where we were growing. We had a head start. We could take people, senior people, we could take assets, we could take training programs, and quickly mobilize them into the new areas. What was the impact? This is a page out of one of our systems that we use to manage the employee life cycle. As it relates to this, the great relocation.
Our mobility efforts exponentially increased on a daily, weekly basis, and we can tell step by step in real-time how many people are moving from where to where and what part of the mobility process they're in. Visa status, immigration status, whether they're traveling, whether they've been approved, what their new offer is in the new country, et cetera. This is a real-time picture from one of our systems that we use on a daily basis. Utilization. Anyone that follows the services industry and services companies knows utilization is one of the most important ways to manage supply and demand, right? At its simplest form, and then it's a percentage equation. In the numerator is the number of billable hours, chargeable hours, paid for hours, and in the denominator is available hours, and it produces a percentage.
If it's too high, that's no good because your people are burned out, you're running too hot. If it's too low, you're in some trouble. The remarkable stability of the Ukraine utilization, as you can see, and that red dot on the right side there is when the war started. You can see that the dip in utilization when the war began is less than the seasonal dip that occurred in December. The dip from the war and Ukraine utilization was less than our normal year after year seasonal dips. The same is true with our overall EPAM utilization. Remarkably steady, remarkably predictable. The fact that we are running about where we expected to be, plus or minus a point here or there, is just evidence of the strength and the resilience of our people.
We had people in the first two weeks of the war in Ukraine, this is a true story, of course, sitting in a bomb shelter, processing payroll with their laptops, trying to get any internet connection that they could grab to make sure that our 15,000 people in EPAM in Ukraine could get paid on a timely basis. They were processing payroll sitting in bomb shelters. Our ability to rapidly scale. This just goes back a few years. Our recruiting capabilities, talent acquisition, and you can see the green line, continued headcount growth. This is the net headcount additions in the blue. If you take a look at 2019, and you compare the size of those bars to 2021, in two short years, it's been a doubling, approximately a doubling of our net headcount adds.
You can discount the COVID year in between, 2020, because it was a somewhat unusual or atypical year. Our ability to scale TA recruiting. One of the more important points of this page is if you go back and look at our Q1 activity in 2020, and then look at Q1 in 2021 when we were full boat recruiting in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. In Q1 of 2022, we stopped midway through. No activity in Russia, very minimal activity in Ukraine, very minimal activity in Belarus. Yet we were still able to hire people. We pivoted quickly, and we have been hiring people outside of the region and in the new regions that we spoke about today, Latin America, other parts of Asia, other parts of Europe.
Through it all, coming back to the little discussion that the friendly Uber driver and I had, we are a winning team, and you're gonna hear more from my colleagues, Neil and Kate and Sandra in a few minutes here. A resilient team. There are a few things that relate to our people that have remained constant throughout the adversity, throughout the disruptions. Our ability to pivot and scale with quality, talent acquisition, mobility, delivery that you heard about. Our underlying digital people ecosystem, which Neil's gonna talk about. Our commitment to community and ESG. Our focus on learning and education, which Sandra will take us through. All in all, at the end of the day, our engineering DNA and our culture of the tagline that we're very proud of, results relentlessly. Or just simply put, we're just doing what we do best.
It's just EPAM being EPAM. We're just doing what we do. We're doing what you expect of us. I'm gonna turn it over to Neil now to talk more about our digital ecosystem.
Thank you, Larry. I'm Neil, I'm based in Boston, and I actually joined EPAM through an acquisition way back. It's been 20-plus years now. Ark and the rest of the team have been talking about our digital platform. We have hundreds of people working on our digital platform, and we invest millions of dollars into it every year. The reason we do that is so we can run at the speed of our business, not at anyone else's. We don't have any dependencies on external enterprise software vendors. When the events in Ukraine unfolded, we were able to, in a matter of days, get the status of our people and their well-being using our digital platform.
We also piggyback on top of our IT infrastructure to be able to provide hotlines so our people could call in and also enable our volunteer support teams. Our digital platform also gives us near real-time access to data about our people, and this enabled us to quickly make decisions based on the changing ground conditions. I think I didn't change the slide. Anyway. This is a screenshot of Telescope. Hopefully, some of you have heard about Telescope. It's our flagship application, and this is what we use to gather information about status for people, and we have real-time dashboards. Using our digital platform, we actually built EPAM-specific versions of Uber, so a carpooling application that helped us to move people from the east side of Ukraine to the west and beyond as well.
We also built an Airbnb-type application for sheltering people, for sheltering EPAMers and their families. We also built a relocation application because as Larry mentioned, we had a great relocation. It's like immigration in general is very complex. We enabled our people through an application to figure out where they could go next, what kind of documents they need, and things like that. Larry also mentioned that we had over 10,000 EPAMers donating their time to help out with the consequences of the war in Ukraine. We used our crowdsourcing application called EPAM Plus to actually channel all of these volunteering efforts. I'm really proud of the team that we have that has helped develop these focused applications and pivoted very quickly to react to the situation at hand.
With that, I'll turn it over to Kate, who will talk about ESG.
Hi, everyone. Excited to be here today. My name is Kate, and I've been with EPAM for the last 10 years. I'm going to talk a bit about our ESG pillars. That's the wrong slide, but okay, that's the right one. Neil was talking about the digital platform and that this is our secret sauce, something that helps us run our business. The same talented teams are getting together not only to come up with the solutions for our clients and for ourselves as a company, but they are also getting together to contribute back to the society and to come up with the solutions to support our communities and the environment.
There are a few examples that I've highlighted on this slide, but the one that I want to talk about, called the carbon footprint calculator, and that's a grassroots effort by the team who are passionate about environment. They wanted to come up with the tool to help all of us to calculate our own footprint and to get in a very interactive way some tips on how to reduce it. It's been scaled today to be used internally in all of our locations to get information from our offices, from our travel systems, about our corporate footprint to champion the environmental responsibility in our operations. Talking about that, we do really believe that IT industry will play a vital role in helping to transition to a low-carbon economy.
We have, as a company, committed to the SBTI, like so-called science-based targets, to make sure that everything that we do, all of the program that's run and our emissions are in line with the latest climate science and the Paris Agreement objectives. We also keep educating our employees, our communities, and kids around the world about the environmental issues. We do have a really long track of programs and even more partnerships, that are focused specifically on educating kids. On the previous events like that, Larry was sharing the details about our eKids program. What I wanted to highlight today, and you can see like the recent examples of what we were focusing on some of them during the previous year.
What I wanted to highlight today is that we use the same ecosystem, the same learning tool that Ark was talking about to run and scale these programs for kids. As an example, just in a month, since we've started rapidly growing our operations in Turkey, we already launched a few classes for kids. We already are looking forward to starting a few partnerships with the local schools and universities, just in a few months. More about our capabilities in learning and education will be shared by Sandra, a colleague of mine. Will pass it over to you. Thank you so much.
It's lovely to see you again. You look fantastic. Thank you for coming out this morning. I'm Sandra Loughlin. I joined EPAM four years ago from a career as a learning scientist and org psychologist. My role is to coordinate our education activities around the world, internally and externally, and to ensure that they are of the highest quality, and this is very important, deeply aligned to our business strategy. I'm talking today about education, but really it's about EPAM's resiliency and our ability to scale and our ability to maintain quality as we do that. I'm based in the D.C. area and love coming to Boston. I love coming anywhere at this point in the pandemic. As Ark has said for years, EPAM is an education company.
As you've heard this morning, we approach education not as a check-the-box activity or as a nice to have, but as fundamental to our business strategy. We use it to drive growth, quality, and results, both for ourselves and for our clients. Our business depends on growth, and that means we need to have an ever-extending and expanding talent pipeline. If you know EPAM, you know and if you've listening this morning, you know that we are known for our quality engineering and our unusually highly skilled talent. Many people attribute this to the fact that a large number of our people come from Eastern Europe and the region's historically strong science and math focus. That's true, but only partially so. What we learned a long time ago is that great engineers, great technologists can't be hired. You can't hire an EPAMer.
You can only grow them, and that growth begins before they come into our doors on day one. In Eastern Europe, we are an employer of choice for the best talent. We achieved this distinction in large part by engaging with prospective employees before they were in the community. They wanted to join EPAM, and they were still in their universities or in other careers. These bridge programs, which are proprietary, we call them Elevate, have been part of our talent strategy for about 18 years, and they currently include 163 university partners in 12 countries. Whenever we enter a new geography, Elevate leads the way, because we know it is instrumental to our ability to attract and hire uncommonly skilled talent.
In the last year, .lmost 98% of our entry-level technologists came in through Elevate, and we recently expanded this to career switchers, who now comprise almost 60% of our learners. As we continue to grow headcounts and enter new geographies, we will keep using Elevate and other education activities to maintain our engineering expertise and our expectations of outputs for clients. In the next couple of years, we anticipate creating at least 50 new university partnerships in 20 countries, including Mexico, India, and Turkey. We've also launched programs to teach university professors in computer science and technology fields how to better educate the students so that when they come to us, they are even closer to what we need them to be on day one. Last but not least at all, Arkadiy mentioned you saw the EPAM Global Campus initiatives.
We are moving and expanding on this already pretty impressive effort by creating entire degree programs, bachelor's degree programs in our core areas, and establishing boot camps all over the world. Education also drives EPAM quality. It's not just before they get here, but when they get here, that the EPAMer is created. It allows us to continually attract, develop, and retain best-in-class talent. After compensation, of course, research shows that the number one reason technologists leave companies is because they can't grow, because they are not being invested in by their companies, or they don't see clear progression pathways for their careers.
We know this, and for the past 30 years have invested in creating the environment that not only supports people to grow but helps them be motivated and have the tools to do it effectively. We have more than 17,000 unique learning programs in our portfolio. I think Ark mentioned a couple of them that are under our EngX suite. There are thousands and thousands more. We have recently certified 9,000 engineers in emerging areas, particularly in the cloud and especially. I'm a learning person, and that means that I know that just because you offer training to people doesn't mean it creates any impact. As a company, we have gone far beyond offering education to our people. We actively break down silos within our organization to combine talent development and talent management.
In other words, education and motivation, so that our people are constantly growing and on the cutting edge of knowledge. The result is that a person in a role, regardless of where they are in the world, have the same skills, capabilities that are demonstrated by authentic assessments and verified with our people systems. Our approach makes our career progression transparent for our employees and helps them feel confident in their ability to grow. As a result, we have received a number of awards very recently. Historically, this is literally a sampling. There are so many, we wouldn't fit it on the slide. Our people around the world recognize the value that we create for them, and they come back and create that value for us and talk about us in their geographies.
Education also drives results. As we grow our EPAM Continuum brand, our integrated consulting offering, EPAM remains committed to delivering high-quality results for clients. Education has become a very powerful tool in that effort. Clients, especially executives and senior leaders, are hungry for a partner to help them truly understand and manage complex transformations, digital platform data, the whole nine yards. By augmenting our advisory and delivery capabilities with education, we help clients understand where they need to go, and very importantly, see us as a trusted partner to help them get there. Since its founding a couple of years ago, our learning practices educated over 300,000 of our customer employees. We have built a number of learning programs, including several that are specifically for executives and senior leaders.
We have a number of thought leadership pieces that are emerging in this space. We have also driven tens of millions of dollars in revenue toward EPAM and opened several new accounts and logos for the company. We are gonna continue to invest in our activities, continue to lead the way and share with our clients and industries, the truly leading-edge platforms and approaches that have driven our success as an organization to help our clients achieve that same success for themselves and their customers. I'll turn this back over to Larry to finish it up.
Thank you, Sandra. To conclude this topic, I wanna come back to the same five things that despite the changes we've been through, some of these changes will change our company forever. Despite all the things that we've been through, these five things from a people perspective have remained constant with us. They're core differentiators for us, and they will remain constant going forward. Our ability to rapidly pivot and scale, our digital ecosystem that Neil summarized for us and Ark discussed, our focus on learning and education, which is clearly one of the things that we're most proud of and one of the most important differentiators that we have from a people perspective. Our culture of engineering DNA and our results relentlessly tagline, and we live it and breathe it every day.
Last, but certainly not least, our commitment to the communities in which we work and live and the overall ESG umbrella. We're a humble company, and I hope you've taken a little bit of that away today, and we're not overconfident, but we're confident. We've got this. We can manage through this. We are managing through it, and we're going to continue. I'm just gonna conclude with the same line that I used in 2019 here in Boston and the same one before that in New York City. We've been dealt a hand of cards, and all the cards aren't the best ones, but I wouldn't trade my hand in for anything with what we've got. We're gonna now go into Q&A, so I would ask the leadership team to come up here and join me.
Anybody else who wants to come up and answer questions with us, you're more than welcome to. Wow, that's some leadership team.
We open up for Q&A.
All right.
Hi, Bryan Bergin from Cowen. Thank you very much for doing this, and very impressive with what you've had to deal with here. My question, it's clear you have obviously the internal methods, the tools, the IP here to train talent. You've done a great job retaining the current base of talent too. Can you just speak more about that funnel of talent, though, over the next couple of years, you know, to replicate that center of gravity that you've had in Eastern and Central Europe. Just how long do you think that will take? Do you have to do things differently in a more dispersed base?
I think, you know, do you have to kinda open up the funnel a bit more as it relates to the skill sets you go after, going after earlier prospect, you know, prospects, things like that? Can you just dig in a bit more on the talent?
You want me? I can take it. You want me?
Go ahead.
Ark is emceeing the Q&A.
You can have my mic on.
How long is it gonna take? We've already started. It's already happening through a combination of the relocations that we're doing, not only relocations at the lower levels, but we've also been seeding our new countries with leadership from other countries, EPAM veterans that have been with the company 10, 15, 20 years and know how to get started rapidly. We don't have a waiting period of three or six months. Through a combination of our the great relocation and our rapid mobilization efforts, as well as our TA capability, where nowadays you don't have to have recruiters on the ground necessarily locally on day one in order to scale up. We've been able to lift and drop many of our assets into the new locations, into Latin America, into other parts of Eastern and Central Asia.
If you reflect back on that line, on that recruiting line that I showed, our Q1 recruiting activity, without the benefit of heavy activity in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, has already exceeded Q1 activity from the prior year when we were recruiting heavily. That just shows our ability to pivot and rapidly scale up in the countries outside of Eastern Europe.
I think I just add, like, because Larry was showing the slide with the net addition. Net addition, clearly Q1 was dropping a lot, but because we stopped hiring in three countries. It's not actually exactly interpretation of what's happening. We cannot do it practically in this quarter because of this happening. Right now, exactly reshuffling happening, and we will be starting growing in other locations. Which we don't know we will compensate right away 100% or 60% or 70%, but we will compensate. Also experience which we received during the situation in Belarus. We have experience where we were moving 20, 50 people in very small countries, simultaneously rolling out like our educational programs through local universities. We're building like development center close to or over a 1,000-person in 12, 18 months.
That's experience which we had already during the Belarusian stuff. Now we have much more broader geography to focus and many more talent coming from our scale ecosystem and education and TA to target multiple locations.
Thanks.
Hi. Sorry, some of you can't see me. I'm behind the pillar. First of all, tremendous job, tremendous execution. I echo everyone's sentiments in this room. As you think about hiring over the next, call it five years from 60,000 to, you know, hundreds of thousands. Do you have a plan where some of your core competencies in countries like Ukraine and Belarus, you could continue to hire people out of those two geographies and then move them over to the adjacent friendly countries? In other words, as you think about hiring, do you have this framework where you would continue to source talent and then just relocate them proactively? Thank you.
Let me try to answer, and then colleagues will correct me. When you're asking about five years and plans, it's almost unrealistic question, because what was happening during the last three or four years, it was completely unexpected. That's why we're talking about adaptability and being adaptive so often because it's impossible to make a plan for five years, period. We will be exploring right now clearly new locations for ourselves, and we'll be watching real-time what's happening. Okay. We do believe that with what we learned during the last 20 years, it will be possible to reapply and adjust to new talent pool. From relocation as well, I don't know, like people from Ukraine not necessarily want to relocate if war will be finished.
We've even seen right now 2,500 people moved from Ukraine and probably 30% already moved back as soon as the Kyiv was moved. We still don't know what would happen. We don't know how situation will end up in Russia. We hope that situation in Belarus will be stabilized, okay? We know what specific groups like in any big companies like corporate career, like advance, you can select very small number of people which will be making the biggest impact. It's not about quantity anymore. We need like to build local talent in any case. Yeah.
Just quickly, the only thing I would add. We have a capability within the recruiting organization hire to relocate. We have a sizable number of recruiters that are actually working to relocate to hire people from one country, and immediately they never join that particular country, but they relocate with our assistance. We have a whole process supported by the technology that you saw here to land in another country, and it's a very effective recruiting channel for us.
Maybe a quick comment. We are already targeting specific key skill sets and specific kind of rules of relocation, how we can accelerate specific selected places, for example, in Latin America or in Turkey, et cetera.
Darrin.
Hey, thanks. Thanks for all this info. It's been very helpful. I just want to dive in. It's Darrin Peller, by the way, from Wolfe Research. I just wanna dive in a little bit more on when we think about the geographies you're now moving into to diversify your workforce, the quality of those engineering talent, and how that compares to what you're very, very used to, whether it's Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and then the cost to really not only keep them, you know, hired and the wages in those markets, but the onboarding costs there, given that I'm not sure the EPAM brand is just quite as well known in those markets as it is in some of the core markets you were before. Thanks again, guys.
I think what we're learning that development of our brand was advancing a lot during the last years. We already touched multiple markets, and we see that our brand actually opening doors in the government to talk very, very quickly, and the same on the markets. We do believe that this part is handled by this time because we have a number one digital engineering brand in the world right now. All other questions, we kind of shared what instruments we have, okay? We will be applying. That's why we don't know exactly the secret sauce, how to handle this. We will have to do it like quarter by quarter and then redirecting our investments. What I can tell you also, like, kind of it's all questions on the same topic. For example, we did acquisition in Colombia about a year ago, less.
From the time we signed term sheet to the time we actually signed the final documents, three to four months, we started recruiting there. What we recruited for EPAM was bigger than the company which we bought. Without infrastructure. We have actually a lot of system support how to do it very differently than we did it like four or five years ago. Everything else, like, it's a long answer which we try to answer. I don't think we can answer any simple on top of this if we know something we didn't share.
Jamie?
Hi. Thanks, David. It's Jamie from Susquehanna. You know that slide that Ethan had put up which showed the before and after of delivery case study? Just to kinda bridge how investors think and what they fear about that slide, do the clients ever ask you where your delivery is coming from? How often, if at all, do you have that conversation? Do they care? What's going on in their minds? Thank you.
Ethan, do you want to? Where is Ethan?
No reason.
How about you?
I can.
Oh, did you hear the question? Okay.
Yeah.
You wanna say it again?
The question was, how often client ask about the location strategy and how often they thinking about specific locations.
Do clients care about where?
I think the short answer is that some clients of course do. Clients that are focused on secure perimeters and more want to understand where the people are, but more than that, what we're doing to secure the environments. Our approach has been to be very proactive, to explain how we're doing everything from background checks, onboarding, security, and more, and to also explain how we're setting up infusing kind of EPAM DNA into the new locations. Once we have those conversations, they're very supportive of it.
Oh, sorry. I think also a little bit different view on this question because it is important, think about our history. Think about 10 years ago, 85% of the countries is Belarus was much bigger. Think about Belarus as a country default for Western clients to go doing work. The answer is not. The answer also, where is the best engineering talent coming? Not from country in general. Like some clients always will be saying, "We're not going to work in Colombia or not going to work in Belarus, Russia clearly right now," or something like that. It always will be some clients which will be working in this whatever country because the talent is so huge demand. You have to prove that you can deliver. The location is still secondary.
While a lot of clients will create preferences, but as soon as the demand generally available, then you will be able to direct where you can bring actually the solution correctly.
Two questions. First one is for Larry Solomon. In the numbers you discussed earlier about net hiring for the Q1 of 2022, the 2,500 net hires, you can infer from that because of the war, hiring slowed down, and in the month of March you might have hired net 500 people versus a year ago, five thousand or one thousand per month. If that's true, your hiring temporarily slowed to about 50% below the prior year. What I'm trying to understand is when would you expect to get back to the ability to be bringing on net 5,000 employees on a quarterly basis, as you had done in the December 2021 timeframe?
Those numbers were net hires and they include the attrition that's happening in Russia and Belarus. Interestingly enough, if you exclude the attrition that's happening in Russia, because of what we've discussed, our attrition is running within a point up or down of what it's historically run quarter by quarter. We expect our hiring capacity to exceed what it was in the prior two years. I can't get into specific numbers 'cause it's a little forward-looking, but we're already running at that capacity for Q2 and the forecast for Q3 as well, but I can't get more specific than that.
The second question is just for Arkadiy. You know, this whole war is a terrible disaster. But my question is about Belarus. When you look at the possibility of another problem happening there because somehow Russia forces Belarus to get involved and the world basically sanctions them, what do you think is the likelihood of that negative event happening? What's your sense on the likelihood of it not happening? And if it does, how do you think you can react more effectively this time in Belarus versus what you've done in Russia?
I think Larry was talking about not being overconfident. I think before war started, I was very confident that this war never going to start. With this, I don't have any prediction what will be happening with Belarus, is it will become part of this or not. At the same time, when you're talking about preparedness, then think about like all this relocation strategies which we're talking, they related to both countries. We have very extensive relocation already in Belarus. People mentally were much more ready for this because they were trained for the previous two years. In Russia, it was too sudden happening. We have a significant portion of the talent from Belarus which is already on the move. We hope that we would not need to exit the country right now.
We hope that the government will be able to navigate and not become active part of the war. In general, we ready for this as much as we can manage because, like, clearly next question will be what would happen if Ukraine. Anything can happen as well. That's what we say, and we don't know when war ends, if we don't know what will be. That's why we need, like, to watch and see what's happening.
We have time for one more question. Jason?
Hi, Jason Kupferberg from Bank of America. Follow-up on Latin America and your build out there. It sounds like Mexico and Brazil specifically are a big focus, and just wanted to understand the dynamics in terms of the war for talent in that part of the world, 'cause as we know, there's a lot of other digital IT services companies that continue to expand and are kinda more native to the region. What are you encountering in LatAm specifically? Thanks.
Certainly it's a competitive market, but we've actually found people to be very receptive. I'll start by saying our focus originally was Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, now Dominican Republic, and now some other locations that we talked about a bit earlier. What we've actually seen is going into some of these new markets, both the type of projects, the type of customers, the type of work that we have, the type of opportunities for growth, for learning and development, the type of projects that we do, the type of talent that they can work with, actually, they've been very receptive. In fact, we just held a conference in Medellín this past weekend, Bogotá coming up this next weekend.
We actually had hundreds of people showing up really excited about the work that we do, about the opportunities that they would have for us. No doubt it's competitive, but right now it's been at least receptive to start. Larry, anything you want to add?
Mexico and Colombia, we've already started to scale aggressively. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, some other surrounding countries, we're having active discussions. We've already started to seed some of those countries with talent. Ethan's right. I mean, so far so good, I would say. Once again, not overconfident, but people seem to be receptive to, you know, the value proposition that we offer, which is, you know, you get the most, the best of both worlds with EPAM. You get a large, stable public company, but you get a company that's entrepreneurial and growing quickly and still scrappy and gets into the details, and it resonates with with a lot of people there and, you know, knock wood, so far so good. We're gonna continue it.
Maybe just a quick addition. We're also very excited about the talent in Latin America. They are ready for modern engineering. They require not too much retraining, and we believe this is a great place to scale. Thank you.
Okay. Why don't we take a 10-minute break, and then we've got two of our clients that are gonna present. We do have some time during those presentations to ask questions, and then we'll conclude the day with another Q&A session with the management team. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please find your way back to your seats. We will resume our presentation in approximately one minute. Thank you.
Welcome back. Those of you who were with us in 2019, in our investor day, we updated you what we're doing for the financial services industry vertical. We talked about what we're doing for capital markets, for payments, asset and wealth management, and also what we were doing for neobanks. After our introduction and deep dive, we introduced you Igor Tsyganskiy, that time the CTO of Bridgewater Associates, and we a little bit dived in what EPAM was delivering for Bridgewater. We asked Igor to come back three years later to make sure that he updates you about what we're doing, how things are changed, and what was the progress of EPAM since 2019.
Now I would like you to welcome, Igor, who at this point of time, is the president of Bridgewater Associates. Igor, stage is yours.
Hi, everyone. Can you switch over to a presentation, please? Oh, here we go. Hi, everyone. EPAM has asked me to come back and give you an update on how our relationship is progressing. Just to set a little bit of the context for you, out of all of our vendors, I would say we have three strategic partners. We like to call them partners versus vendors. One of them is Microsoft, another one is EPAM, and the third one is AWS. We have a second tier of vendors that we procure from, but the strategic relationship is pretty much on a different level. We've started working with EPAM back in 2016. Since 2016, and these numbers include projections of us spending money this year a little bit.
We've increased our spend 16x since 2016 and 2.5x since 2019. Resources staffed from EPAM is 3x by the end of the year in 2022. The number of projects and areas covered grew from 12 to 19 in three years. Since the beginning of the relationship, it has grown from nine to 19. Every year for the past six years, including this year, we're gonna grow at the rate of no less than 35% per year, regardless of what is happening geopolitically with EPAM. Why am I saying regardless of what happens with geopolitically with EPAM? Because our partnership with EPAM has never been based on building resources in Eastern Europe.
We have most of our resources that are EPAM-based are in United States and in Spain. We had some of the resources, I would say about 10% of resources were in Ukraine prior to the conflict. Right before the conflict, we've partnered with EPAM to move some of the resources out to Spain. Right now we maintain. You know, we're very committed to Ukraine and our staff there. We work together with EPAM to make sure that our employees, the people who work for us and for EPAM, that they're well taken care of, as well as their families who are both inside of Ukraine and outside of Ukraine. For us, and then all the other countries, we have minor folks there, all over the world.
We are basically focused on United States and on Spain, strategically speaking. The rest of Europe is gonna grow a little bit. Coming back to these numbers, when we think about the relationship that we have, we are focused on building solutions. If you think about Bridgewater, not only we are the largest hedge fund in the world, but we do everything via software. We are the largest hedge fund in the world that happens to be a software company. When we think about critical areas, pretty much EPAM is now, although they have not been fully in 2019, in every single critical area of our business, whether it's core trading, core research technology, as well as the strategic service that we've been building together called Data Factory.
We are now proceeding in building next generation of analytical services for Bridgewater called Analytics Factory that is focused on summarizing macroeconomic events all over the world. With that, what I thought I would do is, instead of giving you a long lecture, I would rather open it up for Q&A and finish by saying that we're mostly committed to EPAM through, you know, ups and downs. We have a pretty long strategic relationship. The way I look at EPAM is the same way as I look. You know, you've heard the backend story of how they scale people, so forth and so on. I am mostly ignorant of that, right? I look at EPAM, it's the same way as when I procure from Microsoft or when I procure from AWS. I think about software as a service.
I look at EPAM as labor as a service, right? Basically I have dynamic labor needs. Sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down, sometimes they need to shift, and I say, "Where do I need labor? What class of labor do I need? And when do I need it?" Then I have long-term contracts as well as NDA agreements and security agreements to layer all over that request, which is very similar as what I have with AWS and computing infrastructure, right? I say, what computing infrastructure do I need? Same thing with Azure. Where do I need it? When do I need it? And here's my long-term contract with you. With that, I'd like to open it up for Q&A, which might be more useful to you.
Do you have an internal IT team?
Yes.
If so, what kind of resource growth has it had compared to the 35% each year for the last six years?
Well, it's funny that you say that because EPAM has almost no presence in my IT team. Basically, at Bridgewater, I run all the development, so meaning all of the corporate systems. We used to have data centers, we're now mostly in the cloud, and all the IT. EPAM has almost no presence in IT. Mostly, their growth has been in all of our core development areas, right? If I rephrase your question and ask a question of where are we growing more at EPAM or inside, I would say that it's in line between the two. We're basically growing at 35% clip rate.
By core development, you mean the business units within?
For example, core trading systems.
Okay.
Okay? Or core research analytics. Like, we model the world, and by modeling the world and understanding the world, we decide on where to invest in every single most of the markets in the world and most of the asset classes in the world. All that is driven by timeless and universal economic rules, powered by a platform of systems that basically we build, and we use a lot of EPAM staff to co-build that with us.
If you had to highlight sort of your top three metrics that you sort of measure success, is it quality? Is it, you know, speed?
Yep.
You know, what are you?
In different areas, it's different things. We started with, why don't you just get us the capacity that we need, right? We just basically need the flow of people in certain areas, and we measure success by having the right people at the right time, right? Basically not needing to worry, almost like the cloud. In essence, I don't need to think about anything other than having the right resources at the right time. That's what we started with. 2019, I spoke to you about something we're building together called Data Factory, which is a fully managed service. That service has by and large been built and gone in production, which is a fully managed service that EPAM has built and now managing. On a 24/7 basis, right?
In there we have very strict SLAs on what it means to deliver data to us at the right time. Where EPAM focuses a lot more on the labor. Like our involvement in labor is mostly, you know, this is Ukraine was Data Factory. We were doing it in Ukraine, so our involvement is risk mitigation. Our involvement is being good partners and making sure that the people who are involved with our projects are safe and sound, right? We're supportive of their families and loved ones. Other than that, the SLAs there are very different, meaning data delivered on time. For example, we need to generate signals couple of times per day. Data needs to be delivered prior to that. Therefore we have very strict SLAs on when data needs to be delivered.
How it gets delivered really is up to EPAM, and so we've built that capacity together. We own the service, but they operate it for us.
Thank you.
You're welcome. Other questions?
I know you mentioned, obviously EPAM's a strategic vendor to you, but when you look at the services and the products that they're working on for you, is everything mission-critical or are there baskets of discretionary activity that, you know, in a sharp downturn you pull back on? How do you think about that?
Yeah. Let me think of how I want to publicly answer that question. There's obviously discretionary activities. That's why it's elastic in nature. Given the fact that we're growing, certain things might be going down, certain other things might be growing. You know, when COVID hit, for example, right? We went in. Like, I called Arkadiy. When was it? It was 2020, let's say February, right? There was this big spike. Market crashed. Capacity appeared. I went out and bought 18 months worth of capacity really quickly and committed the spend. Now how that spend was blended, we definitely have some discretionary things. We definitely slow some things down because we're also a business, right? Certain things can go up and down, but I know the baseline of spending and what do we need to do.
Now Bridgewater is involved, where historically we have been a macro fund, and we're now involved in basically building our next generation of capabilities, which is focused on reconciling micro events all over the world into macro signals. Doing that requires a lot more data, a lot more platforms. We're platforming pretty much everything we do. That's a lot more strategic in nature and so that's not dynamic. There are other parts of the business that may be dynamic, but that's mostly of how do you manage the baseline spending. You know, when I say 35%, that includes all of that stuff. Kind of the same way as when I manage my AWS compute.
There's definitely things that go up and down, and there are things that I know that I'm just growing at and I'm willing to commit capital on. When I say 35% per year, that's capital commitment. Think about it this way, right? I commit capital and then how I use the resources is really up to me.
Hi, Ramsey El-Assal from Barclays. You mentioned redeploying, needing to redeploy about 10% of the Ukraine workforce to other, another jurisdiction. Talk about that process. Was it seamless? Did the project slow down? Did you have to look outside to other vendors to backfill temporarily? Or how was that?
Well-
How did that go?
We started that process in October of last year and November of last year. Basically the process for us was mostly seamless because we mostly did it before the crisis started, right? Basically the process was that I allocated a certain amount of contingency towards conflicts. There was a possibility of conflict. When you're running a mission-critical business, possibility of a conflict means conflict, so you don't want to wait until the conflict starts. We by and large moved the people out that are necessary for mission-critical work by when? By then of January. Then we offered to anyone who wanted to go, to go. In that sense, it was seamless because it all started prior to that. Then we had contingency plans of what would happen inside of the country if there would be war.
We offered everyone who wanted to leave Ukraine prior to the middle of February to leave. Certain people took up on that offer and left. Many people didn't believe anything would happen and they stayed. Those people who have stayed because of the contingency planning, and we've started our contingency planning back in, I would say back a year prior to that. When we started the contingency planning, most of the people moved towards different part of Ukraine. Most of us, you know, Lviv and like basically border of Poland, but I can't even tell you where they are right now. Sometimes they get on the phone. The important thing is, even during the worst parts of the crisis, we were operating at 75% capacity, meaning it never went down below 75% capacity for our service.
Right now we're operating at about 80%-85% capacity, given the fact that some of the people got drafted into the service. We now, I think the number of female to male on that project is like the largest anywhere at Bridgewater. There were definitely bumps. It was completely insane. You get on a phone call, they're all working. I say, "I'm sorry, we have to disconnect because there's bombs flying." To say that, you know, it's completely surreal. Because we moved the mission-critical stuff over, then everything else you can mitigate. It was a tough couple of weeks, but that's all it was. Now everyone kind of settled down in that mode, and we are actually continuing to hire in Ukraine. I'm still approving net new hires in Ukraine.
This is an impossible question follow-up to answer, but do you think your experience was a typical experience, or are most shops just based on industry knowledge? I know this is specific to Bridgewater, you know, as broadly as you can.
I'm not gonna answer that. Because you guys are public analysts, so no, I have no idea what other people are doing.
Well, congratulations on your foresight.
Basically that's the gist of it is that's how we treat all of our mission-critical stuff. We have a very standard approach of what it means to be mission-critical. That's the way I would think about it, the same way as you have multiple data centers. If the tornado is coming, do you wait? Or you know when you have multiple availability zones in AWS, you know when do you decide to shift workloads? That's why I'm equating those two things, labor as a service and software as a service. The amount of automation at EPAM from what it means to move labor is insane, right? I have not seen that anywhere else.
One more last question.
Is there anything that you wish you could have that EPAM would do better or differently or a bit more of?
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. The number one thing for me is capacity. I would say that 35% can easily be 50% if they would be able to fulfill that, which I don't think they can, and it would not be responsible to do so. Right now, that's my biggest issue. My biggest issue is basically growing the right personnel. You know, when I say 35%, that's 35% that they're committing to grow by. Which right now someone asked me, like, given all these things that are going on with stock market, everything else, like, what's the state of the labor? And I would say the state of the labor is extremely volatile. In certain areas, it's really, really strong. In certain areas, you can start finding labor. Like, volatile is worse than short of labor, right?
For me, 35% is what I am committing to grow by. That's how I'm planning the projects. What most of our discussions are on is, can you find me better people in the areas that I need to, more people sooner? That's my number one issue right now. That's it. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello again. EPAM has always had a special place in the heart for startups, companies that are looking to change quickly and become disruptors and they often become disruptors in their industry. They often need different kind of partners, technology partners to take them there. It is my pleasure to introduce a relatively new client for EPAM and ask Matthew Bianchi, CEO, and Jerry Little, Founder and Chairman, to come to the stage and tell us about their venture, Raintree Global Holdings. Welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Regina. On behalf of Raintree, I also wanna take this opportunity to say thank you for the invite and the opportunity to be here today. As Regina mentioned, we are a startup, and having a forum like this to share what we're doing is incredibly appreciative. Thank you to Ark and the EPAM team for allowing us to be here today. Raintree Global Holdings. My name is Matthew Bianchi, the CEO. Just a little bit of background, as was mentioned, it is a startup. We're piecing our team together now and getting and ramping ourselves up. EPAM is a big part of that. My background, lawyer by education, mostly land use, government law, was involved in several startups.
Also spent over 20 years with a large residential master plan real estate development company, both on the front end, land acquisition, titling, processing, government work, negotiating public-private documents that last decades. In addition to that, the area that we're gonna be discussing is something that in that world, at least in California, where I'm from, has been going on for over 25 years and has been just a flat-out cost of doing business. That is mitigating the offsets and the impacts of the real estate industry and development in particular. What we're gonna discuss with Raintree is how that is now evolving into every industry in the world and having to address their direct and indirect impacts on our environment. Where does my international involvement come in?
I've also been involved one of my partners created a nonprofit over 20 years ago, so I've been dealing with a lot of international philanthropic efforts through an organization called The Wheelchair Foundation. Most of the countries that Raintree is starting to work with and will move into here very shortly are countries where I've had some pretty good extensive experience with government officials and, at times, heads of state in those countries. Getting a chance to meet Jerry quite a while ago and learning of his vision, he asked me to come on board recently, and for me, it was a no-brainer. This is where the world is going. As Regina mentioned, Raintree is definitely on a path to be that disruptor and hopefully that leader of it.
No better person than Jerry Little , who's our chairman and founder. I'd like to introduce him and he can walk through his vision. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, we're pretty honored to be here today. Introduced to EPAM less than six months ago, but it's been a very interesting journey. They're helping us really fill an important niche in terms of where we're trying to take this business. As you can see on the slide, we believe we're a transformative and first-to-market carbon offset business. We are in the climate tech space. We have an ambition to make a difference in the climate challenge that the world faces today. I'm from Canada, product of the forest industry in Canada, where as some of you may know, Canada is the largest forest products industry in the world.
We've as an industry grow and plant about 1 billion trees a year and have developed technology for growing and planting trees in regard to environmental projects. The underpinning of our business model is the development of technology for growing large areas of trees and reforestation in developing countries mostly. Our business model is connected to the Paris Agreement and provisions within the agreement that allow large corporations to offset their emissions through investing in reforestation projects in a large scale.
Our basic business model is to provide a bridge between the corporate community in the world today, which is making commitments to decarbonize and reduce their emissions and the developing countries in the world and regions of the world where deforestation has caused a significant problem in terms of climate and other issues related to sustainability. As Matt may have mentioned, the market for carbon offsets is expected to hit $100 billion a year by 2030, and our business model is based on filling that need through the contracts with developing nations that are signatories to the Paris Agreement. Restoring forests is viewed as very critical to climate change.
The UN has a governing scientific body called the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has concluded that by restoring forests around the world, we could actually impact as much as 40-45% of the impact of climate change by restoring forests. In the developing world, the missing link is infrastructure in terms of ability to do that. Our business model is to bring from Canada and the developing world advanced technologies for achieving that goal. I and Matt and the rest of our team are part of a network of people in the science and business of horticulture and greenhouse production, policy in terms of the climate markets and corporate governance.
Our track records include growing and planting up to a billion trees. This is what we call a bio center, which is a large scale greenhouse-type facility which uses an array of technology, very common in the vegetable greenhouse sector today. Across various markets, greenhouses have grown significantly in terms of use around the world. EPAM is helping us in all aspects of our business development and have helped us really fill an important niche in terms of how we're advancing the business, including what we refer to as our digital ecosystem, which is really the delivery of an array of software solutions across the business spectrum, as well as helping to develop the enterprise management system within the company.
The software needs within the business are very complex, and EPAM is really helping us bridge that capability across a lot of very important aspects of the digital world. EPAM's also very focused on helping us build consumer engagement programs, the Continuum group, which we think are rock stars in terms of the delivery of these type of solutions. Matt, I think you're gonna touch on this one.
Yeah. You know, the relationship that we've started with EPAM is critical for us, and it's allowed us to not just look at EPAM and Continuum as a consulting company. They're a strategic business partner for us.
On the front end, we're starting small. We've got certain tasks we have to complete to get ourselves in a position to do what we need to do to build the bricks-and-mortar bio centers and so forth on the front end. The software and the future components of actually executing it and managing the carbon credits both for our corporate buyers, which ultimately we believe will also transcend down into the consumer. This is not a philanthropic effort. The philanthropy side of this is a phenomenal effort by those that are doing it right now, but it's not enough, and it's just not even putting a dent in the need.
All of us are reading the papers and reading online all the various corporate commitments and the dollars tied to it, and they're massive and significant as you all know. A lot of these companies I'm sure you guys analyze. It's not a feel good, do good anymore. It's a business requirement. It's gonna be an industry standard across every single sector, just like in what was a relatively small world of real estate development. It was a cost, a line item for us and part of doing business regardless of whether the market was good or bad. That's what you're gonna see going forward in all these other industry sectors. Some are already doing it now. The scale is massive, and it takes a lot to manage that.
Not only, as I mentioned, the software side of the sale of the credit, but also the management of the trees and the property off-site, and also the insurance backing those credits to make sure that those corporate buyers can be assured and guaranteed that those credits are real, legitimate, marketable, and secure. EPAM, we see going forward all the way through that process and beyond. This is a long-term relationship that we're very excited to have started and look forward to continuing well into the future. Thank you. I guess lastly, there's a, I'll make one quick little plug. On the bottom corner, you notice the Wheelchair Foundation. That's the philanthropic effort I mentioned earlier that I've been involved in for over 20 years.
In light of what has gone on in Ukraine, we're in the process of delivering wheelchairs to those in need into Ukraine these coming months, thankfully. Any questions?
Hi. Thank you for that. Really enjoy what you're doing, the work that you're up to. One thing I was wondering if you use EPAM to support is the biodiversity that you do when you actually create trees and plant them, so that it's not just a tree farm, but you have the biodiversity to be able to produce what had been there. Creating a healthy forest that has the necessary balance across biology that used to belong. You know, you can't replace old growth forest, but you can at least begin to do that. I don't know if EPAM has helped you develop those sorts of tools or-
Mm-hmm.
If there's, you know, AI that you could use to replicate that.
Yeah. Happy to address that. Under the Paris Agreement, there are now very strict rules in terms of the types of projects that can be developed. There is a requirement that at least 50% of what is done on a large-scale basis is biodiversity restoration. The reclamation of everything from mountain forests to coastal regions is a critically important part of it. The other 50% can be agroforestry or commercial applications, but they have to meet very rigid requirements in terms of restoration that's related to. It's gotta be sustainable, permanent, and additional. Those are the underpinnings. The carbon credit and forest market has been evolving over the last 15 years.
There has been questionable practices in terms of the standards and the quality of projects, the legitimacy of projects. Our initiative is really based on a very important monitoring and verification of that, which was actually what led us to EPAM because it's a very data-intensive requirement globally and working with partners like, for example, Google Earth, and other agencies that can manage vast amounts of data. A lot of it's satellite remote sensing data collection and management. EPAM had the capabilities. In fact, there were really few other potential vendors in the world that could do what EPAM could do in terms of helping to pull together all of those technologies and needs.
The project that we're developing, the underpinning of the business is what we hope in the next 12 months will be more than 20 countries across the world that'll be involved in the project and collectively representing what we think will be the largest forest restoration project on earth. Frankly, without EPAM, I don't think we could do it. It's a really important relationship. They're helping us bridge so many different areas. We have the technology in terms of how to grow trees. We have the market relationships in terms of the developing countries. The financing from the corporate community is there, but the real missing link is the software and really to be able to manage all of that data and to bring it to market.
We think that carbon offsets that are legitimate and important in the world need also to be branded and brought into consumer markets. That's something that EPAM, especially the Continuum group, is uniquely positioned to help us do.
I think to add to that.
That the infrastructure that EPAM has, especially for a startup, is significant. There's skill sets, not only just locally but internationally, that EPAM has that we don't have to go hire and expand our business in that way too fast and earlier than we would otherwise need to. You know, on an interim basis, and who knows how long that interim basis is gonna go on, it could go on for a long, long time, EPAM's capabilities of being as large as they are, as sophisticated as they are and the breadth internationally, we couldn't replace that. That's why they're truly a strategic partner of ours and really helping us with our business development. It's been fantastic.
Any more questions? All right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Guys, thank you very much.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you.
In the balance of time, I'd like to have the management team come back up, and we'll just finish the day with a session of Q&A and then go from there. Yep. Arvind.
Hey, thanks. This is Arvind Ramnani from Piper Sandler. I had two questions. One is, you know, if you can talk about any sort of client attrition you've had, because of this, you know, because of the war. I mean, clearly, like I think some of the new logos sign-ups may have been slow, but have you had any actual clients who have kind of basically kind of terminated their relationship with EPAM?
So yeah, I didn't get the que-
Uh-
Who are you talking? I'm sorry.
This is Arvind Ramnani at Piper Sandler.
Okay. I'm sorry.
Piper Sandler.
Okay.
Yeah. I'll repeat the question. I just wanted to get a sense on, have you had any client attrition because of this war? Like, have any existing clients said they no longer wanna work with EPAM because of this war?
We practically didn't experience anything like this. It was one client which started and then stopped at the very, very beginning of the war. It was some clients which put on hold and then came a couple weeks later and starting to work again. In general, impression was very similar to what we were experiencing in Q2 2020 when COVID hit. Shorter because during the COVID it was longer period like this. Definitely some clients like holding the extension of the program. You see that, our guidance for Q2 practically flat. Probably some new clients who are thinking, but we're still starting. We're getting new clients as we speak right now. There is concern, but this is back to what we were sharing. The demand is very strong.
There are multiple attributes which are driving demand, and even the impact on the region, which we mentioned, different calculation from 300 to 400 thousand people impact actually creating still high demand. A lot of clients very committed actually and saying to us that they will be staying with us and will be growing and looking for some relocation of the people and as we mentioned, significant number of people relocating. Already we're having in new locations, people working in kind of hybrid teams with the same clients. It's all happening. There is no really stories like guys like where we have clients dropping at all.
Terrific. Just a follow-up question on that. You know, I know 70% of your headcount will be outside Ukraine, Belarus and Russia by end of the year. Of that 70%, how many of them are like nationals from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia? Is it...
We will tell you when it's happened.
Perfect. Thank you.
As we mentioned, we don't know exactly the numbers. This is all guesswork. I think in Q3, Q4, we will be able to share how many people actually relocated and how big this seat component. It's going to be in thousands of people. How many thousands of seats will happen, we will let you know later.
Thanks. I was wondering if you could talk about kind of the decision framework for reallocating people from those three countries to other countries. I imagine there's a lot of, like, personal factors, maybe some regulatory ones, and then also commercial ones. Just how you all go about making those reallocation decisions. Then to the extent that there were kind of cross-geography team-teaming, if there was that before the outbreak of this war, how you're kind of factoring that into where people move to. I guess the last thing as a follow-up is, do you think there's actually any kind of like opportunistic room for improvement at this?
Obviously, it's a very difficult moment now, but is there an opportunity to kind of like bring the best leadership and the best talent to new geographies and accelerate kind of the cumulative learning curve in these new centers where you're trying to scale?
Definitely opportunity, but we will be talking about.
Relocation is a very serious focus on daily basis. As we showed in the systems, we actually have real-time trackers on the numbers, and we understand exactly the plan practically for every individual. If this person is moving or staying, what is their preferences in terms of countries, what we would like to have in terms of relocations versus she or he would like in terms of relocations. It's absolutely a huge opportunity from point of view of targeting specific talent for us. We would be able to disperse. This is unique in a way because we would be able to disperse talent, ideally, again, if you find a mutual agreement to countries like Latin America, to Turkey, to Serbia, to other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, to India, potentially. From this point of view, see the engineering DNA.
We exactly looking at this very algorithm.
Questions on that side? If not, Maggie, did you have a question? What you guys.
Thank you. Hi, Maggie Nolan from William Blair. I'm wondering if you can talk about some of the challenges with the education program as the delivery footprint has shifted so significantly and any specific changes there as a result of the shift.
Who else? Sandra.
I think somebody actually asked this earlier. The challenges are around rapidly making the university connections, getting the local footprint in place, and then delivering on it. Our approach that we have taken historically is not changed. You know, our mechanisms, our programs, how we are attracting talent and getting them into our pipeline hasn't changed. Each location is a little bit unique. We are partnering with our, you know, local people who are there, who know the region, who know the players, who know the culture. We are kind of asking them for guidance on, like, how do we do these things? Here's our goal, here's our mechanisms, how do we do this the best way? We're getting that feedback from them.
You know, it's like, I don't know, Larry said it, the more things change, like our locations change, but our approach hasn't.
I think I would add that, like, really the change started to happen even before COVID, when online component and asynchronous learning started to develop very quickly. When COVID hit, it's accelerated all of this very, very quickly because in-class education kind of started to disappear very quickly. Right now we have much more flexible ecosystem to deliver in locations through expert network of our mentors and people who create content and people who delivering online content. The proportion of in-class versus online is completely different than what it was like three, four years ago. That's why like for us it's a pretty good kind of opportunity to scale. While still what Sandra saying, local universities, connection to local universities is still important and some personnel moving to locations from our educational ecosystem which making this connection easier.
Maybe just addition on mentors. Again, post-COVID, we have a lot of cross-border mentoring, and we will be leveraging even more cross-border mentoring as well. This accelerates and scale the educational program that Sandra mentioned.
This is all about systems which we're showing because it's cross-border mentoring, cross-border interviewing, cross-border like assessment. All of this really supported like in what we called. We started anyway as an experiment. Now the whole EPAM becoming driven by this model.
Thank you. Maybe one for Jason. Can you talk about the difference between assigned employees versus revenue-generating employees and how that may impact the model? Any anticipated structural changes there as you get to $5 billion, $10 billion?
When you say assigned, are you talking about the BCP or the shadow resources we talked about?
That's right.
Kinda, yeah.
That's right.
You know, to be really clear on that, we have taken certain resources, and we have kind of shadowed or twinned them on accounts, and it's to make certain that clients are comfortable with delivery, particularly when there have obviously been challenges in Ukraine and even some other geographies. Okay. Then it's also just for us to make sure that we can continue to deliver. These resources would be on an account, they would be charged from an expense standpoint, what I do for a living, but then we would not be billing for those clients. Now, for the purpose of the adjusted income from operations that we talk about, we have excluded the cost of those resources.
They're showing up in effectively the GAAP financials, but not in the adjusted financials. As you see in, you know, Epi is focused on this, Boris is focused on this, which is now beginning to take those resources and convert them to revenue driving. Now that we're not totally past, but increasingly comfortable with our ability to deliver. Those would show up within generally an acceleration of revenue growth, okay, but not just a massive sort of profitability expansion because their costs have been excluded from adjusted IFO. That's generally how I'd kinda think about that. You know, oftentimes they're probably in geographies where rates are a little higher, so there probably is some uptick there. I would say a little bit of improvement for profitability, but mostly kind of you'll see further revenue growth.
I don't know what we'll do over time in terms of, you know, to what extent those will become part of the model. To the extent, you know, I think what it really just speaks to is EPAM will do whatever it takes to make sure that we can continue to deliver, and we continue to be the company that gets the complex projects done, gets them on time and with assured quality. That's what has kinda, you know, gotten us to this point in time, and obviously it's what we hope will continue to propel us to the $10 billion revenue target that EPAM has talked about and Ark specifically talked about this morning.
Hey, Jonathan Lee, Morgan Stanley. Appreciate the depth and the breadth of color today. Given the sort of ongoing supply constraints, I wanna ask about delivery and headcount. Can you talk through the process of how you identify new delivery geographies or pools of talent where you're currently not operating in?
You know, to be honest, some of it is planned and supported by a lot of data and a lot of analysis on labor rates and graduation rates of, you know, engineers. Some of it is opportunistic, both organic and inorganic, and some of it is a bit of luck also. It's, you know, right now it's very, as Vic mentioned, the whole mobility area. I mean, we have to look very carefully at where our people can go, where we can open up quickly, what the tax rates are in certain countries, what the immigration laws are in certain countries, what the educational capabilities are in certain countries, and also where our people are gonna be comfortable.
When we're moving people around the world, especially from some of the countries that we're talking about here, we have to make sure that our people can land and be comfortable and work, you know, productively.
I will maybe make one example to make it kind of land. Take Turkey, for example. This is 85 million people country, near 60,000 graduates per year, so we can clearly deploy our educational ecosystem. We test it, and we can organically grow in the region. That sounds kind of as a good choice.
Thanks for that. Just to follow up, how?
Yeah, I do just wanna add just on the finance side is that in addition to all the things we talked about in terms of immigration and you know and where people would like to go. Like everything else we've talked about today, we run a full database of costs on all these different countries, right? What the salaries are, what the net pay is in the countries, what the incremental cost to us are, what the opportunities for various sort of you know tax opportunities with the local governments. Then we assess each of the geographies based on their attractiveness, not only to the employees, but also the cost effectiveness of those. We've got a full-blown database across a whole range of different countries that we use to make these decisions.
Very helpful, Jason. How much of EPAM Anywhere is factored into your current sort of outlook and delivery strategy?
It's a part which proved working for us. Again, we started this initiative way before COVID. COVID accelerated it. Right now, that's exactly what we're saying. It's changing how EPAM operates, and eventually, a lot of practices which we test in there will be applying to the whole EPAM because it's about efficiency, managing people in very different distributed setup. It's part of the plan, definitely.
I have a question on utilization and pricing. On utilization, you talked about the shadow, you know, BCP type resources. But conversely, are there resources that are doing, you know, double shift like a BPO type where they're working 12, 15, 16 hours a day? And more importantly, is that a material portion of your headcount that's doing it right now? That's on utilization. Then on pricing, we've heard other vendors talk about rate increases at a greater frequency. If typically they go once a year, they're actually able to request and extract 2-3 times per year in price increase. Would that be something you guys would be experiencing as well?
Yeah. Just in terms of the, I guess, the question around people working 15 or 16 hours a day, there definitely were examples of, let's say, people who might work for their client during the day and then do some work for, let's say, a Ukrainian resource that had to be moving from Kharkiv to Western Ukraine or something, to make certain that, again, we could have this sort of continuity delivery. But that wouldn't have shown up in a, you know, in a benefit to margin or something, if that's kinda what you're trying to understand. But a lot of heroic activity to make sure that we could continue to deliver at quality. But again, that would just make certain that we maintain the customers, and we talked about our ability to retain customers.
From a pricing standpoint, you know, while all of this is going on, clearly there's a whole lot of conversations around different price points and different geographies and all that, and the environment that you are referring to, which is that, you know, there is more openness to sort of accepting price increases just because of the tightness of the market. Yeah, that is facilitating all the things that we're doing. That's why we're talking about continuing to improve profitability throughout the year and to get back to something closer to what we, you know, have traditionally talked about as we enter next year. Yes, price is definitely an opportunity. As we, you know, undertake all this geographic transitioning, you know, those pricing conversations are occurring. They're occurring today. They'll be occurring in Q3.
you know, we continue to have discussions, of course, about price in the traditional geographies, even when there isn't movement.
Time for one more. One last question.
Yeah.
Hey, it's Tarul from Lone Pine here. So just two-part question. The first is just in this environment where demand is incredibly strong, can you just talk about how you prioritize new clients, right? Because, you know, I think the Bridgewater example would be an ideal case where they started with you small and have grown whatever the numbers were, 6x, 15x. Not every client is gonna do that. So how do you guys prioritize the new demand that you are seeing? And then the second part of the question is, no one knows if we're gonna go into a recession or if demand slows, but to the extent certain of your clients do pull back, right, or there's some more discretionary stuff, what's the process of reallocating, you know, those resources that come free? Is there a kind of a process?
Is there a priority list already within the company? Like, just talk about how that process kinda works.
I think it's a simple question to ask, and there is no simple answer or single answer to this. That's why we were showing and kind of trying to convince you that we have enough dashboards and real-time information, and we're monitoring what's happening because, like, this priority is changing. Like, during the earnings call when we described, like, phase one, phase two, phase three, it's different priorities, and this timing of this changing, okay? Definitely we can easily sometimes make decision based on profitability or ability to scale in specific location. Bridgewater, very specific account, large account, growing very fast, but with very specific demands. That's why, like, there is no answer to the question, single answer. It depends. We have all instrumentation to make as much as possible effective decisions in specific time and environment. At least we hope so.
Yeah. I just think to address the second part of your question, you know, our ability to work through the unexpected, the ups and downs. You know, if you look at the team on this stage here as well as those that were on video, despite the youthfulness of the faces, there's a lot of experience of, you know, seeing that movie before. Managing through ups and downs, managing through disruptions, wars, COVID, et cetera, not only within EPAM but outside of EPAM also. So it's a unique leadership team that's tough to find elsewhere. You know, as I said before, we're pretty confident that, we're ready for just about anything.
All right. I think that wraps up our day. Ark, did you wanna give a few closing remarks?
Yeah, sure. First of all, clearly thank you. First of all, thank you actually for opportunity for us to get together. That's already worth it. I think would be very good to meet, like, in two and two and a half years and tell you the same continuation of the story which we did today. That would be very, very nice. Unfortunately, somebody asked me today what I'm thinking right now. Well, actually, Kevin, I think. I said, "I'm thinking about last slide from my deck with a question mark. What will be happening?" That's what we don't know. This is an uncertainty of unknown in front of us. The only thing we can convince you that we prepared hopefully a little bit better than our other companies on the market, okay? That's what we hope and that's what we're targeting.
Again, thank you, and hopefully we will meet sooner than two and a half years from now and with similar presentation. Thank you for the team because, like, you see how changing the faces, like two and a half years ago, we have teams here. There are a lot of new faces actually here as well who already was in the company. There are a lot of new faces in this booklet with issues here. I think those of you who are watching us for a long time see how we're changing, like, very, very visibly and how transformation happening. That's why with all this unknown, still there is a very, very strong hope, without overconfidence. Thank you.