A few required comments. Some of the matters that we will discuss during today's call may constitute forward-looking statements, subject to both known and unknown risk and uncertainties as disclosed in our safe harbor commentary located in our public filings. EPAM assumes no responsibility for updating today's comments, so just please be aware of that. With that, let me turn the floor over to Ark.
Thank you. It works? Great. Thank you for joining us. I think it's always a challenge to speak to this audience. From one point of view, you know a lot. From another point of view, some of you know a lot from different periods of our life. That's why, on top of this, you're hearing so many of these types of presentations that, I guess it's too difficult to distinguish one company from another, especially from the strategy point of view, high-level point of view, what they're going to do point of view, and all of this. That's why we're starting from the story to try to at least convince you that we have some differentiation points and try to convince you that we actually have some advantages to go where everybody else says they're going.
It's very difficult to differentiate on strategy, but I think it's more practical to differentiate on the story and execution. Not going 25 years ago, let's start from 15 years ago. 15 years ago, we started to work with clients which were product software companies. Over all these years, we built portfolio for over 200 software companies in different areas, from ERP to search, to collaboration, to productivity. Why I'm talking about it, because that's how EPAM DNA was built up and how our people were trained, and what quality standards these clients were establishing for us. That we actually built product engineering services company at the level which we do think differentiate us very strongly. That's 15 years ago, it was practically almost 100% of our clients. It was 80%, and then 70%, and so on.
Because of these engineering skills which we built, about 10 years ago, we started to work with another layer of clients, which you can call digital native companies. We entered this almost by accident because they needed a couple of good engineers, and we were saying they're never going to work with us on anything more tangible, more strategic. Then 10 years back, it's probably 15, 20% of our business. We work practically with all major digital native brands in the world. We improve our skills and capabilities with understanding not just how to build traditional software products, but how to build scalable digital platforms.
Then six, seven years ago, practically during our IPO time, we started to see that we enter in the new wave of clients, which is traditional corporations, which were looking for partners who can help them to compete with digitally born companies, utilizing the component of their traditional product companies. When they were coming to their traditional services vendor, they couldn't find the right partners with the right skills because now you need to build very different software. We started to see that they're coming to us. Also six, seven years ago, at IPO time, just a reminder, EPAM was a strictly engineering company with 98% sitting in our development centers in Eastern Europe, and only 2% of EPAM employees were in the market.
Because, again, the focus was how to engineer, not how to design, not how to consult, not what to do, but how to do. Also, when we went IPO, even having 6,000-7,000 people, we didn't have global marketing function, we didn't have global HR function. We have rudimentary other functions, and was a 6,000-7,000 startup. Between these 6-7 years and today, what happens is that almost 60% of our clients now represent more traditional corporations. We're working with top investment banks, with top life science companies, with top travel hospitality companies, energy companies, and we're helping them to build this digital platform and compete not only among themselves, but against the new type of enterprises. Very, I think, visual illustration, what happened from IPO in 2012 and today. Seven years ago, we have only nine clients with $10 million+ revenue.
Today, we have 60, including $2020 million-plus, and six $50 million-plus, and two over $100 million. That's how we changed in seven years, and how portfolio changed. Also, just recent report from Forrester selecting the, what they call digital experience agencies, companies which can help actually with this digital transformation initiative, whatever it means. We now included in top 10 global vendors in this category. We also become one of the top global agencies globally, one of the top 50, which is huge difference between what it is today and what it was seven years ago, where we have only 2% of our headcount in the market. One interesting point, with all these companies which included in this digital agencies or global big ratings on services category.
On this list of open source contributors, and we thinking about it as a measurement of our Engineering Excellence, there is no one from our competitors on this list. We are among the top software and technology companies of the world there. The next slide, I think it's a part of our standard investor deck, so don't need to talk about this. Just pointed out 35 sequential quarters where we're growing organically over 20%. Very quickly about market and how we see in the market for ourself. The enterprise landscape becoming very complex because all of this technology change. I'm not going to spend time here. You know it probably better than me. I just reminding how difficult the enterprise landscape, and how difficult to satisfy needs for this.
Because of this, because it requires different speed of execution to compete with digitally-born companies and compete with those guys who know how to transform, this is what's happening with S&P 500, and this is information from Forrester report. The lifespan is dramatically shortening. Mostly because of challenges which they meeting of these enterprises, which should become adaptive, and we're picking up again on Forrester reports published during the last couple years. Because of market adaptiveness, because of technology adaptiveness, because of organizational adaptiveness, you need like to solve the speed challenge. With all this technology complexity, that's extremely difficult challenge, which from our point of view, creates very interesting, fast-growing segment of the global IT market. This is where we play, and this is where we would like to play.
If you look to the global IT services market, this is a $1 trillion-plus market with these components from infrastructure management services to hardware, to traditional outsourcing, BPO, and then consulting solutions build and everything new which related to new type of infrastructure and cloud. 5% growth. EPAM doesn't work here at all. We're focusing on the second part of the pie. What's happened, you can look at this as a consulting or solution-built implementation, IaaS infrastructure, or you can look at a little bit differently and we're using, we're trying to size the market utilizing different sources of data from Gartner to Forrester to IDC. This is IDC recent report and category product engineering services, which is growing practically 13%, and that's part of our market. Today, it's about $50 billion-$60 billion market.
We're looking what's happening with traditional corporations, and this is Forrester view that 76% of them looking for external vendors to help in different categories from technology services to business consultancy to agencies to help with these digital transformation challenges. Gartner saying that 75% of newly built systems new digital transformation platform should be actually built because all of these guys need to differentiate each other. They cannot pick up standard ERP packages, standard CRM, or standard e-commerce. Even if they're taking these components, usually it is 75% customization, and somebody need to do it with the quality of best software product companies. Between these two views and some data, there is a support that approximately $100 billion market of this digital platform engineering service is growing 30%, plus product engineering, 5% of this pie. This is where we're focusing.
Basically, for us, it's a focus of $150 billion, growing on average probably over 20%. Because it's so global market from the traditional guys, including software companies, which building up their solution basis, partner ecosystem, and agency companies, as you know, obviously, growing in segment data points what the because we don't outsourcing looks like this. Because of this period, 2% in. We need to set, okay, we would like development and we need to build this, and we would like to be a leader and 15. Then we become one of the top platform engineering company again. It doesn't mean that a few challenges like everybody else and maybe even more, because if you think level of talent here and what its market conversation with client in systems, it's also in broad about capability and customer challenge. How to find the risk doing things simpler?
How our dollar us we can respond customer challenge wise or perspective, to expect. Critical challenge for some, for us today, even for us, and should be worth a huge spikes and specific opportunity headcount and dynamic challenge different dynamically and organizations the way not only this is how to do all other stuff because of challenges. Try to focusing on company because it and a lot of why we have to run day to day when we talk innovation. We need the extensions to the locations where we didn't find before. We need to find different talents in the location which we exist. That's why we building community platforms as an extension of our enterprise systems.
This is big effort for us, and we focusing on this for some time, and we will be focusing how to organize meetups and events, and we're running 1,000 events per year and all of this, and again, we will talk about it in our people piece. EPAM Consulting. This is clearly customer challenge. How to communicate right, how not to oversell with a consulting which nobody needs or with a consulting which produce paper versus actually almost interactively starting to do stuff. We will talk about consulting today. We, couple of months ago, announced new brands inside of for go-to-market called the EPAM Continuum, and we'll talk about it right after. Acquisitions. You often asking about our strategy, what type of companies we buying, and this is very important component for us, how to shape our muscles, and sometimes skeleton as well.
Just examples of the last acquisitions like Sync, digital consultancy agency because we build pretty strong digital consultancy practice in United States, North America. Now we're doing the same in Europe. Purposely done there. test IO, we talked about communities. This is crowdsourcing testing platform. We experimenting with this. Competentum, educational focus. We need to train a lot of people. We need to train now, not only our people, but many others, and we will talk about it later. NAYA Technologies, modernization data, modernization upgrades to clouds, all of this very important competency, which will actually extend what we have today. Continuum Innovation, that's actually the office of company we bought 18 months ago. It was for us big step to go to some areas which we didn't play before.
For example, behind of this wall over there is a pretty big mechanical electrical shop which can design product, real physical products, and we think with IoT and with all this physical, digital harmonization. It's very important capabilities to have in-house for experimentation and sometimes much beyond all this, and we already experiencing very big impact on EPAM, and a little bit more will be shared later. One of the most important, EPAM organization as a platform from organization of the way of to control production to actually enabling and sustaining interaction. If you think how unproductive EPAM and how unproductive most of the companies in our segment and in your segment and in all segments, because there is silos, because there is little communication, how to break this. There are ton of literature and books how to do it.
There are so little examples that it's done well. That's a challenge which we're putting for ourselves, we think that we have at least a better shot than many others to do it right. The platforms, digital platforms, is a very important component of this, we not started to do it yesterday. We actually started to invest in our own digital platforms when company was under 200 people. For all this years, we were building this, right now we have pretty strong dedicated organization to do it because that's a speed advantage which given to us. In short, we would like to turn EPAM to adaptive organization itself to help our clients to become more adaptive.
For this, we need to become best innovation design company, best consulting company, educational company, social responsibility, and stay or actually try to get even bigger advantage in engineering. With this, our aspirational goal for EPAM 2021, because we internally live in three-year cycles. Very seriously, it's not a guidance. We would like to become leading partner for clients who would like to turn themself in adaptive enterprises. For this, we need adapt people and platform and processes to respond quickly. Focus on EPAM digital platform, extend leadership across integrated consulting and engineering. Very important not to have separate organization, not even to have separate goals of this, because the goal should be highly integrated value to the client, actually, to delivery system. Open opportunities across locations. In this case, we can do something like that continuously.
If I were to question which, if I imagine that it's not you guys, ladies sitting here, but our employees, and I will see a bunch of sarcastic smiles on their faces, similar like we saw them 10 years ago and 20 years ago, and they will ask, "Is it possible?" The only point I can go and use with them, and probably with us, with you, going back to 2003 when Gartner ran report and the first time in the history at this point put couple Eastern European companies on the list. This is exactly a slide from Gartner report in 2003. EPAM was mentioned there, and we were extremely proud, and our revenue was $15 million. For the reference, TCS revenue was $2 billion at this point, approximately.
We said to our audience that we will jump from this place somewhere closer to Accenture and Deloitte, and it was a lot of laugh in the room. What we can say that we're now on the list of fastest growing Fortune 500 company, and we're the only company on this list which is information services company with 30% other technology companies there. One more anecdote because I was talking to one of Gartner analyst a couple of months ago, and we know each other exactly from this 2003. She asked, "What's your strategy?" I was trying to say, "Don't think about strategy, think about story." We have some specific steps that I don't want to share. She said, "You know what? If you can do it, you shouldn't be scared to share this." I thought that is probably right.
The anecdote come into 2007, 2008, when we first time were thinking about our IPO, and one of the biggest investment banks was trying to convince that they're better than others, and all of them were bringing us to their IT shops. We were $100 plus million, and me and FB both got a meeting. The global CEO of this investment bank was extremely unhappy to meet with us because she was kind of forced. During the meeting, we started to share how we managing people, how we growing people, and how we can have quick visibility to any piece of what's happening. She jumped and said, "Okay, that's interesting. When I can have it?" We got scared because we understand that it's not about software.
It's about that we started when we had 200 people, and having 2,000 or 10,000 technology guys and turning them to this would be almost impossible. It's not end of anecdote. The end of anecdote happened probably seven years later when, a different position, we were coming to the client, and she was there again. She didn't remember us at all. We started to share how we're managing people, and she jumped and said, "Oh, it's you guys. I remember you now." As always, when I can have it, and it still was almost impossible because this big company were growing very differently. That's why we're not so much afraid that somebody will copy us because they will need to start today from 200 people, and to replicate this in 20 years, we will be doing something else, hopefully.
That's why the answer if it's possible is maybe. Okay. That's our story, and now we bring some more facts to make you judge. Thank you.
Yeah. I think it's on. Does it work? Come on.
Come on over.
Hi, everyone. My name is Elaina Shekhter. I lead marketing, and as many of us do, wear a bunch of other hats within EPAM. I've been with the company for almost 20 years, and this has been one of our most exciting years. My partner, Chris, and I, we're going to talk to you about what we're planning to do with consulting, specifically with EPAM Continuum. Chris will tell you a little bit more about himself in a minute. First, what we thought we would do, is instead of telling you about what our consulting does, is share with you a little bit about the conversations that we're having with our clients, most of whom are going through some type of transformation. A lot of it is deemed to be digital transformation.
The conversations we're having often start with this idea of explaining or at least having a conversation with senior leaders, in our clients about what a digital organization is. We've been doing a lot of thinking about what that is, and these conversations are actually really constructive in not only helping our clients think through their challenges, but in helping us to hone in on the types of consulting services that we can bring to them, and value that ultimately EPAM can bring to the market. We thought we would share this with you. Digital enterprise from our standpoint is any organization that uses technology in order to achieve a competitive advantage. It might seem simple to you, but a lot of transformation programs are not based around technology.
We're most excited about those that are technology-enabled, where the capability is built through some type of an integrated technology program. The second question is, what do digital businesses do? This may seem like a simple question, but it would be surprising for you to learn how many customers don't really know what a digital business does. We've been trying to shape that conversation by explaining that in our view, a digital enterprise should be thinking about creating new value through new experiences and also through proper digital processes that introduce less, not more friction. Seems simple, but it's not. They should be doing it in order to achieve a competitive advantage in their markets against their peers. It's interesting because Ark was talking sort of about challenges. This is also challenges for us.
What we're realizing is that our challenges are also our customers' challenges. Another question is, if we invest $100 million in a technology transformation programs, are we going to win? The answer is not necessarily. Not all digital businesses win because just the use of technology is not an assurance of success. What we're starting to realize is that not only EPAM has to become an adaptive company, but we need to teach our customers how to become adaptive themselves. What does that mean? It means that we have to be able to get better at responding to not only challenges today, but opportunities tomorrow in the market, in the technology landscape, which is very quickly changing, and also within the organizations themselves.
The last question before we get to what we actually do about all this stuff is really, is all transformation digital? The answer could be maybe, just like Ark's answer. We know for a fact that in order to be transformative, if there's a technology initiative involved, we have to be able to connect a very valuable and very straightforward customer strategy with some thinking and doing around creating less friction in production processes. You hear a lot of this talk about digitization and companies investing in moving their manual processes into digital processes. That's not the answer. The answer is to actually re-engineer those into less friction and more value from an experience standpoint. What does this all mean?
I'll take that. I want to key in one of the things that Elaina said in that last page is a straightforward customer strategy, like a clear understanding of you're going through transformation. How are you going to evolve your business to better serve your customers? In today's world, doing that is incredibly complicated. It's more than technology. It means rethinking your operating model. It means rethinking how you go to market. Oftentimes, it means rethinking fundamentally your products and services. It's complicated. It needs to happen at speed, as Arkadiy was talking about. That's really the focus. Oh, did I hit the wrong button?
Did you hit the wrong button?
I might have. There we go. That's really the focus and at the heart of what we're doing with EPAM Continuum, is we see our jobs is to partner with our clients to help drive and orchestrate transformation, and to do it within the reality of the world that we live in today, which is a really dynamic and rapidly evolving world. We're going to talk a little bit about how we're doing that. Before, I want to introduce myself and share a little bit about my journey. I joined EPAM about a year and a half ago, came to the company through acquisition, when Continuum was acquired.
The last year has been an incredibly exciting year because been working with this leadership team to think about how the market's changing, how the world is changing, and how EPAM needs to change in response to that. A lot of what you're going to hear today is a direct response to that challenge of how do we help our clients manage complexity and change and transform, not just digitally, but transform the business so they can compete and win in the marketplace. Digital is a key enabler, but it's not the only part of it. How do we stand up a consulting practice that can do that? I want to hit on one of the things that Arkady was talking about. You can't stand up a consulting practice to tackle those things if that consulting practice is fundamentally set up in silos.
The challenges that the world face today, specialized teams working inside of silos can't solve those problems. That's true for our clients, it's true for us, and it's what we're embracing and leaning into. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the challenges that come in with embracing and leaning into that. If you want to be changing the world and helping clients compete in the next market, you need to embrace this. We fundamentally believe that. What does that look like?
Yeah. What does that look like? Again, we're trying to move things into much more simple focus areas for us. Really, there are three things we know are important for EPAM to do in order to be truly different than all of the other competitors in the market. Number one, stand up the right consulting. From our standpoint, it's important to know what we're not going to do as much as it is important for us to understand what we are going to do. From our standpoint, in order to influence the types of transformations that we believe matter, we need three things. We need experience consulting, we need business consulting, and we need to blow out our technology consulting practice, which is built on the base of 25 years of product engineering experience.
You may wonder why there's not an innovation consultancy, especially given where EPAM is standing and the acquisition of Continuum Innovation. In our thinking, we have determined that innovation exists in the intersection of all those three circles. In fact, everything we do is innovation consulting. Number 1, stand up the right type of consulting. Number 2, integrate consulting, because if you're not integrating those practices, you're missing opportunities to innovate for ourselves, but more importantly for our clients. Number 3, and probably the most critical step for us is integrate consulting, which has already integrated itself with our scale and our capability in engineering.
If we do all of those things, which we think we have a fairly good shot at, we think we're going to be able to create not only a valuable consulting brand for EPAM, but to actually elevate EPAM into a really adaptive company ourselves, helping other companies who want to be adaptive themselves. I'll advance it for you.
Thank you. As we stand up this consulting offer, I'd like to talk about what are the two fundamental challenges that we're helping our clients tackle. We can really simplify it to two things. One is on the growth side of things and helping clients grow. We fundamentally believe that if you want to help a client grow in the marketplace today, you have to focus on how to better serve the customer. That's one side of the equation. On the other side of the equation, as you're growing a business within the marketplace, how do you optimize it and set it up so it can be agile? That's where really intelligent technology application is so critical.
We're doing both sides of that curve together, looking at how do we drive the top line, how do we optimize the bottom line, but we're also doing it with the understanding that it needs to be agile because the world's not stopping. Transformation is an interesting word. It implies that we're going from A to B. The reality is transformation is going to be an ongoing journey. Change is the only constant. We have to anticipate that and help our clients plan for that. A little bit more of what that really looks like and means on the CX-driven growth side of the equation. The things that we're doing with our clients is fundamentally rethinking the offerings. As you're going through transformation, how do you serve your market? How do you serve your customer?
Sometimes rethinking the offering starts with the core business and evolving the core business. Sometimes it means standing up brand new businesses, doing white space design. While we're doing that, we're figuring out what's the right offering. You have to embrace and understand that as you redesign the offering, you probably need to redesign the business a little bit, at least. At least a little bit. How the business operates, what the technologies are that provide that agility we're talking about, that's all critical to thinking through how to transform. The last piece that we're helping our clients with is as you're evolving your offering or standing up new offerings, you got to make sure the market's aware of it. You have to drive awareness. Helping with digital marketing primarily to drive awareness and engagement so you continue to grow on that S curve.
On the other side of the curve.
We have to be able to deliver. Really, that's what EPAM's always been about. Delivery looks different today than it looked three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, for sure. Tech-enabled optimization is a fancy word for being able to really lift seriously large and complex data and analytics programs because it isn't enough today to have just insights. You need to be able to make them actionable. Increasingly, those actions are being taken by machines themselves. Secondly, we need to be able to not only deliver automation, and we'll hear a little bit more later today about this, you have to be able to deliver intelligence into the enterprise. That doesn't come without scale and technology. Finally, being able to do all of these things absolutely requires that you have a sound cloud strategy.
The fundamentals of building platforms in the cloud are difficult and EPAM is expert at delivering those. Then back to experiences, it's not just mobile first, it's omni-channel. It isn't just omni-channel commerce, it's omni-channel everything. It's experiences for customers, experiences for partners, experiences for employees. Again, we'll hear a little bit more when we hear about technology consulting. From our standpoint, optimization isn't just a consultancy. It must be integrated with engineering delivery at scale.
Hopefully that sounds like a good story and there's some pretty pictures up there of the different domains that we're doing it and the different verticals we're doing it. I actually want to show the messiness a little bit of it and try to express the messiness of it because working across silos and doing this kind of transformation work is messy and it is hard. I'm going to try to express this by sharing a typical engagement starting point. It's not uncommon for a client to come to us and say, "Can you help us think about our digital strategy, evolve that, and create the right experience design for that work?" Not an uncommon starting point. To do our jobs well, we can't just stay inside that silo.
As soon as we get into that work, we have to start thinking about, well, let's get into the data. When I say data and data analytics, I mean both the quantitative data and the qualitative data, both what's going on and why it's happening. We have to get into that. We also probably quickly need to understand the technology strategy for the organization. If we're going to do our jobs well, we have to get into the details on there. As we get into the details of thinking about the digital strategy and how to make the experience better for the consumer, we probably start thinking about some ways that the service design, the service experience needs to evolve as well. As soon as we enter into that domain within a client organization, we're really talking about employee experience.
Once we get into that domain, we start touching on ops and processes. From there, going further into thinking about what's the right experience, at a minimum, we need to understand what the product line strategy is for the offering, and most likely, it needs to influence the experience we're creating, and we need to influence the strategy around products. Same can be said for the spaces in which those products and services are provided. We need to think about what's the right environment to deliver the next version of the business. Most often in the world that we live in today, we also have to start thinking about how the brand either evolves or in some instances, new brand is needed.
As we get closer to launching, we'd have to start thinking about what the content strategy is, what the marketing strategy is, and all that together, in my world, I'd say, that's CX work. That's thinking about how to shape the customer experience of the future so our clients win. There's a lot of silos there. Our job is to work across those, and that's not the end of it. Reality is, if we're really doing our jobs well, as we think about what the future CX experience is to help our clients compete and win, we're probably rethinking some of the business fundamentals themselves, how we make money, how the client makes money. We're also probably thinking about potentially different partnerships. To develop and deliver that future CX, we probably have to broaden our views and think about different partnerships.
We might need to think about different channels of distribution and touch upon that. If we're going to have a chance of doing all of this, we're going to have to do a lot of good work on change management. All that together is what in our worlds we would call systems design, and you have to try to work across all those different silos and hold them all in your head at the same time. The reality is, at least not yet, we don't have clients coming to us and saying, "Can you do systems design for us?" They'll come to us with the initial starting point.
Our job, we don't have to fill and do all the different activities that are in all those circles. Our job is to be aware of all those different activities, provide service and support in the ones that need it. Connect them together through more of a networked team approach. You need to have awareness and visibility to the whole system to do your jobs well. With that in mind, we've designed seven offerings that are entry points for our clients to engage with us. These are different things like workforce optimization. They're like business ops transformation, white space design. They're kind of disparate, different avenues depending on what a client is looking to do. Internally and externally, what we're saying is, come through any one of these doorways and start working with us.
Our job is to understand once we start digging into workforce, we're most likely going to start needing to connect with other parts of the business, because at some point, it's going to have an effect on your customer's experience. At some point, it's going to have an effect on your technology strategy. Again, we don't necessarily have to do it all, but we have to be aware of it all. Where we can provide added services, obviously, we want to take advantage of that.
Right. Again, back to this one, two, three, just to make things simple. If we are even able to do all of the different aspects of consulting, if it isn't tightly integrated right from the very beginning with our ability to build and scale technology, we think we're not doing it right. To do it right, we need to be able to establish the right direction through all different types of capabilities in consulting and deliver it at speed and scale, back to the speed challenges. Which is why EPAM Continuum isn't just integrated consulting, it's integrated consulting and engineering. One of the reasons we think we can do this is because we understand engineering probably better than anybody else out there, and the integration of consulting is not a simple task.
If you think about a typical engagement today in any significantly scaled transformation program, you're likely to have an agency of record, you're likely to have a consulting partner, a strategic consulting partner, a less strategic consulting partner. You're likely to have somebody doing your experience design and user journey mapping work and any number of other things. You'll probably have a training company, a change management company. You've got people running around trying to influence your transformation piecemeal. What normally happens, or at least traditionally happens for EPAM, is we walk in behind this upfront effort and look at the plan and say, "We can't do that, and you shouldn't do that," in terms of building it out.
Which is why we think that if we can create the strategy, influence the experience, build the design, and then build the platform, we can get there faster in a much more valuable, much more coherent way for our clients. EPAM Continuum is integrated consulting and engineering.
In closing, I want to connect to something Elaina just said. Doing this work is not easy. It's actually, to be candid, it's a lot easier to do work within your silo, to work on a piece of the puzzle. I talk about this with our clients. I talk about it with the leadership team. I talk about it with the team that I'm responsible for. It's easier to work inside your silo, but it's not what the world requires. It's not what our clients require to stay competitive. Why is it worth doing the harder work to make sure you're understanding the full puzzle you're working on and it's all connected? Fundamentally, we believe it's because if you do that and you do that well, you can simplify the complexity that's happening in the world today.
Simplifying complexity is a beautiful thing in my world, and it's something that the market will respond to extremely well and help drive growth and longevity for our clients. That's why it's worth doing. I'm incredibly happy to be able to do it with this team, and appreciate the chance to share a little bit about it.
Thanks.
I think I'll invite [Elio].
Good morning. I'm going to share a little bit about technology consulting, quite briefly. Essentially, Eli Feldman joined EPAM through acquisition in 2010, about nine years with the company. He has been through many roles in technology leadership before that and at EPAM. As Ark mentioned before, Elaina just mentioned, Chris mentioned as well, we're anchoring technology consulting capability as part of a comprehensive offering on one side. On the other side, fundamentally, connected to EPAM DNA, to engineering DNA that we have been working on for quite a few years. Many of the capabilities are very much integral and drawing on the capabilities that we have been building throughout the years. Not only that, the talent that is used in many cases in this technology consulting capabilities and the work that we're doing with clients is drawing from that network of EPAM.
Referencing back to what Arkady said in terms of adaptive organization, connected organization, communities, essentially taking all of that superset of experience, superset of capabilities and bringing that up and packaging that as technology consulting. The offering is essentially focused on helping our organizations transform from an organizational technology, organizational perspective. Methodologies, all of the superset of offerings that we call Engineering Excellence 360, which we apply internally and learn and we'll share about internal applications of Engineering Excellence 360 a little bit later. Also packaging that and delivering that to clients to help them transform through their journey into adaptive organizations, into excellent engineering organizations, et cetera. Then supplementing that with all of the technical focuses that we're bringing to the market, again, drawing on our experience. Digital platforms, digital business capabilities, cloud migration and modernization capabilities.
Anything that has to do with cybersecurity, anything that has to do with professional services around specific packages of products, but fundamentally also about data. Data is an anchor of a modern business, and therefore, we believe that we need to very much front and center feature the capabilities of next generation data platforms and how they enable everything that is powered by the organization. A quick example, this is very much consistent with the messaging before. We are focusing on practical, measurable results from all of the consulting experiences. It's not about coming in and creating some form of a higher level strategy, a piece of paper that will tell the customer how great they are going to be in three, five, seven years from now. That's completely irrelevant because who knows what they actually need to be tackling in seven years from now.
Rather starting small, tactical, proving that a modern capability, in this case, in oil and gas with a data platform around core data platform and analytics capability, how that can translate into measurable results for the business. Starting proving that within an individual team or an individual division, creating several well-defined, delivered products, working products that people experience, proving value from that, and then scaling it from there from the individual division to multiple division to, in this case, entire organization platform for core data and data analytics. All of that journey is essentially going through iterations. Initially starting, as mentioned, small, very tactical, delivering the result, then abstracting a little bit further, looking at bigger organization challenge, solving that, abstracting further and solving the next level of challenge until we get to a practical platform that can deliver real value to the organization.
Which in this case has been proven well beyond expectations, both from an ROI perspective on all of the strategy and implementation of the platform, as well as from actual business results that the company is now getting through better understanding their landscape, their business, their data, and anything that happens in the organization. Thank you. introduction Albert.
Thank you. Good morning. I'm Albert Rees, and I head up business consulting for EPAM. I've been with EPAM for about two and a half years now. I've been in management consulting for about a little over 20 years now at firms like Accenture and North Highland. I'll talk about business consulting for a moment from two different dimensions. One, where does business consulting fit into EPAM Continuum's overall play within the consulting space? Secondly, I think we have a boat leaving, huh? How has business consulting helped drive value with our clients through integration with our very capable and large engineering organization? First of all, why does business consulting exist within EPAM? What are we here to do? Three primary things.
We needed to have credibility and experience and relationships to be able to have new conversations with clients we've not spoken with in the past. Different parts of the business outside of the IT organization, outside of the CMO organization, for example, and being able to get into the C-suite and have more conversations like that further along in the value chain for EPAM so we can drive new opportunities into the business. We want to start looking for large-scale transformation programs. The business consulting organization can both help identify those and help deliver those. Finally, we need more go-to-market solutions that will drive engineering services and consulting. It's more solutions, more offerings into the market space that we can help identify. Here's how we're doing this today. We've created domains.
You can think of domains either as industries or functions, where again, we're developing deep expertise across domains and functions where we can now go talk to C-level clients and have conversations around some of their biggest challenges. Secondly, we have technology enablement. We'll talk about in just a moment here something called automation. I'm sure you guys have heard it. What it means, I'll probably get 80 different answers if I ask around the room now. If you think about things like automation, how does automation really help solve our clients' biggest problems, and what is EPAM doing in that space? On the platform side as well, where can we support our clients in some of the platform work we do from a business consulting perspective? Finally, how do we support transformations?
We've been very good as an organization for many years now introducing new technologies. Those technologies fundamentally change the way our clients' organizations operate. How can business consulting now help adopt and adapt the solutions that we're putting in place and also help work through the programs and how programs are executed? Most interesting thing I think we're doing now also is we're creating a local market presence. We're going into cities of particular interest to us, into regions, getting close to our customers, and now being able to execute at the local level as well. That won't just be business consulting, it'll be all of our consulting services. Again, having that at a local level and a local presence where we can start establishing deeper and more accountable relationships with our clients.
Very specific, I'm going to give you an example now of something we've done and the integration we've been able to make with our engineering organization to drive value with a client. The background on this case, we have clients out there, two big insurers came together, $42 billion organization resulted from that, publicly traded. The commitment to many of you here in the room was a $650 million cost takeout as a result of that. Process automation was identified as $250 million of that benefit. Whether or not that was possible, that's probably still to be debated. The ask that came to us, and not surprisingly, if you know EPAM and what EPAM's good at, the way the client presented it to us anyway, is we've got an implementation on a platform, WorkFusion as it was, which is an automation platform, was not going well.
Eight months into it, no results had been achieved at that point. The client came to us and asked us, "Hey, can you help us? Can you help us with the engineering, get something, get some use out of this platform that we've invested in, get a bot into production?" We did it. We came in very simply, as you can see, pretty typical. We went through our agile sprints, and we actually built that. Not a lot of consulting going on here. This was the door, as Chris talked about doors earlier, this was the door that we were able to enter through. The real opportunity for us, now you think back to the $250 million commitment that the client made, that's the opportunity for EPAM now. How do we help our client identify the $250 million of benefits?
We started getting into a more broad-based type transformation program with them. We started introducing the transition services, right? How do they now teach the business? Okay, now you're looking at automation, understanding the value of automation. How do you get your business to accept it, adopt, and change around automation? We introduced some support services because they couldn't support the WorkFusion platform initially. We introduced those as well. More importantly and more interesting, we started to demonstrate to them we could also do the design work. Really understand where are they going with automation, what do they want to do with it, and how do they want to achieve these things. What happened is, and we're seeing this in a large number of places now, a large number of clients.
We're seeing it, the platform players are seeing it, and our clients are seeing it. In the automation space, we saw this massive stall out. Our clients got to a point where they saw the low-hanging fruit and they said, "Okay, we've got this." The first wave of implementations happened, and then everything stopped, and they don't know why. It was a matter of we can't find the next set of opportunities to automate. We don't know how to identify these in our organization. The obvious ones, we've taken care of those. Most recently, we introduced a book of work. Again, this is consulting-driven. The problem our clients were coming to us with was no longer, say, $250 million necessarily, but how do I determine where in my organization I should automate? A lot of things were driving this.
We see millions and millions of dollars in spend going on today with clients around discoveries, and discoveries yielding very low results from an automation perspective. It's literally millions of dollars that's happening. There's a lot of distraction going on and a lot of skepticism going on around, gee, can we even pull this off? We created a book of work pre-discovery methodology. Now we can go into our clients in two to three weeks, take on an entire line of business, and determine where does automation opportunities exist, and more importantly, where do they not exist within the business. So far with this insurer, couple things happened here, right? First of all, it went from an engineering-only company to a solution provider by introducing new services around business consulting and integrated business consulting with engineering.
We went from a build-only, the door we entered in, to an end-to-end solution provider for them. We went from a local IT working with a single subsidiary within this client to now basically C-level value proposition. We're identifying automation verticals, as they call them, that will be applicable globally for this provider. To date, we're now processing 5 million transactions per year in our Automation Program, which is about 18 months old at this point. We've driven 72 unique use cases, 65%, that's the low-end machine learning, up to over 90%. I think we've got some now RPA cases running at 98%, 99%, 90% accuracy, and now we're up to $15 million in savings just through the automation alone. It's a pretty great story. I think that's it. I'm going to turn it over to Boris now, I believe. Thank you.
Thank you.
The clicker work can start.
I'd like to introduce the organization that runs global business. It's FB, and Jason run European and Asia Pac, and Sergey and myself run North America. We talked about breaking the silos. Actually, breaking the silos starts organizationally. We jointly manage the business. We have our own focus, but majority of the business, we kind of manage together, our accounts across the borders. It is as important as anything else. Before we get into the demand picture, I would like to take the opportunity a little bit off the script since we're here in New England to point at the very recent research from "Harvard Business Review." We talked a little bit with other analysts. What they've done, they analyzed The ship is coming.
Leaving.
It's leaving? They analyzed the franchises in National Football League, and their research, they claim, is very relevant for enterprises in 21st century. The point of research was to identify who are the most important influencers in the NFL franchise. They identified the owner. It's kind of all you guys in here. General manager, head coach, and the quarterback. They went through 48 years of data research to try to understand the variance in performance, and here's what they found out. I'm going to look at the data in here. What they found out is this, that 68% of the cases, 68% of the variance in performance was associated to change in any of the four roles. 11% variance of performance was accounted for the owners, 22% to general managers, 29% to coaches, and 47% to quarterbacks.
Quarterbacks kind of wins in this competition, the point Harvard Business Review does is this. The capability to execute in the field is actually extremely important in today's enterprise. People always forget when they talk about leaders that create visions and strategies, but really what matters is, very importantly, that value is created or destroyed by people in the field implementing those plans. The reason I brought it up in here is for two reasons. One is I just want to actually point out how important our job is here. We people in the field. The second more important reason is we truly believe our main differentiator, one of the main differentiator is our ability to execute. That's kind of how we operate. We are very customer-focused. Jason's not here. He's actually with the customer.
If you leave this room, and you think about one thing, strategy and all that, ability to execute is super important, and we deliver. Let's go back a little bit to our demand themes. What we see is we do it in a couple of slices. One slice will be general demand, and the second one we go in a little bit around verticals. What we seek is a continuing demand for digital transformation. It kind of goes across all of our customers, majority of the customers, especially fast growers in what we call digitally born enterprises. The pace for digital transformation is accelerating. They're driving a lot of that transformation. They're going into different fields. They're entering different fields, nontraditional for them. Financial services is one example. They are actually picking up the pace of competition in the field. That drives work for us.
We're a major player with them. The second is the enterprises, more traditional enterprises, are really forced to respond both to pressure in the field from their own competitors and new entrants, and they're also forced to start taking digital transformation much more seriously. Not in their reports to the industry, but really go through the end-to-end transformation drives work for us. Our new product development work, platform development work with enterprises, amount of work is increasing. The cloud migration, especially transformation of cloud migration, is actually picking up pace and increasing. That's kind of driving a lot of demand from across multiple industries, and we'll hear those themes as we talk about multiple industries.
Hi. My name is Balazs Fejes. Everybody just calls me FP because most of you guys have terrible trouble pronouncing Hungarian names. As Boris mentioned, that digital natives are driving the enterprises to end-to-end transformation. End-to-end transformation, what it means to us is a transformation that's actually happening across the whole stack, the whole business stack, which is impacting the whole enterprise IT landscape, the business processes, the actual how the business operates, creating new type of businesses, and it provides us ability to deploy our hybrid capabilities. The capabilities Chris and Eleina was talking about bringing in innovation to design new type of businesses in the beginning, deploying business consultancy to actually transform the environment, create the best user experience, because right now, user experience really differentiates the companies. There are research out there which proves that user experience is a success factor these days.
Of course, utilizing EPAM's capability, traditional engineering capability to create the platforms of the future. When we talk about platforms, we're really talking about real platforms which can scale, which can actually be elastic, integrated with others using APIs. Once you deploy this, once you put all these things in production, you need to actually deliver organizational change. Organizational change is what we think is the next layer of the demand, which drives our evolution going forward.
More from delivering technology changes to the enterprises to solve their business problems, and you're talking about integrated consulting and engineering, now we're seeing our customers are asking us to help solve their transformational problems outside of just technology. That helps with educational training. That kind of helps them with the Engineering Excellence for companies that have heavy technology investments. We are seeing demand in those fields kind of help us with our positions of Competentum and our internal offerings. We're seeing demand outside of just traditional technology-based services.
Now we're looking at from a different angle, right? From verticals. I'm using what we call the reporting verticals, the way we're seeing EPAM's verticals itself. For a very long period of time, we had a business information and media sector, which today is a large and growing vertical. Some of the excess growth is driven by one or two particular clients who have actually accelerated their transformation. In this vertical, when we were really working with the media companies, we saw them actually first when we went public, and actually we updated you during the previous analyst days that we were working on their platforms on digital video delivery. Which is very much driven by everybody's direct business model aspirations from the media organizations. Digital video also brings you into omni-commerce challenges, how you're selling, how you're monetizing it.
Once they are entered in this space, and once they've started to grow in a quad-play scenario, EPAM was also drawn into the networks and the cloud migrations. They are more and more digital, more and more digital content needs to be delivered, they have to scale the infrastructure into a cloud, which makes it elastic to make it scale as the demand comes. EPAM is helping customers to actually migrate and manage the networks and migrate to the cloud and deliver a new type of infrastructure, and modernizing backends, which are cloud native and cloud ready to deliver. The other side of the spectrum, in the business information area, they're also going through tremendous change.
This change is, for us, is materializing in amazing growth, which is driven across the globe by, A, refactoring legacy, and second is driven by very much regulatory changes, and regulation changes driving new types of business information systems being developed. Right? The other sector which we recently entered in the last two year-ish, is the manufacturing and automotive, which is new, fast-growing for EPAM. We're utilizing in this sector, EPAM's new type of hybrid skill set, which is extending beyond the digital, entering into the physical space. This is where we are able to bring together electric, mechanical design, digital, augmented reality, business consulting, how to make it work, and combined with embedded software engineering. This space is exploding due to Industry 4.0 and the overall challenges which industry is throwing in to digitize themselves.
We're having customers today across multiple fields, starting from medical diagnostics all the way to car OEMs. We also have to help them, these traditional companies, to transform themselves because they have to respond to the challenge, and their current workforce and their current organization is not ready to deliver in these challenging environments.
The emerging vertical is, as we reported externally, one of the smallest vertical, but fastest-growing vertical for us. Just to highlight two industries in there. Energy. Energy is dominated by vast, massive infrastructure, systems supporting the infrastructure. Also, you see lots of new entrants that are changing the business models with Shell, their business model is changing. Decision-making process in the energy and how you make decision, how fast you make decision, investment decisions, backend systems are changing very rapidly. What we see is a demand for our data-driven services and our consulting services. The strategy for us in this sector is grow the existing customer base and expand. We're actively expanding our new customer base in the energy sector. Telco is also super interesting fundamentally for two reasons. One reason is this 5G transformation that is happening.
Don't think of 5G as upgrading speed from 4G, kind of the way it happened between 3G and 4G, the speed of the network got much faster. 5G is a really qualitative jump, not just in speed, but how network is managed. Changes for telco and the industries outside of telco. That's driving entire new industry to appear. It's driving smart cities, smart everything. Smart cities, smart vehicles, autonomous driving, computer vision, whole new topics start all of a sudden in the horizon. We are the company that actually excels in bringing the expertise in the marketplace. Insurance, I kind of mentioned earlier that there's lots of verticals or lots of customers that are common between the co-heads of business. Insurance as a business is very localized because of regulation and the market conditions.
It's one of the faster-growing verticals for us, and this is in the P&C life and benefits management space, separate from the healthcare insurance. It is probably early in this digital transformation phase than other industries. They're more conservative for obvious reasons. They're more regulated. What we see is their large amount of legacy systems that need to be managed and upgraded. We do see insurance companies started looking at new platforms. They start looking at optimization that drives intelligent automation and RPA, and Albert just talked about one of the cases. It's a very fast-growing business for us, and also we growing existing accounts very aggressively and acquiring new logos in U.S.
In Europe, the situation a little bit different, right? The European scene is, the disruption is starting to happen due to InsurTech. Think about InsurTech like a FinTech for the insurance industry. Entrance to the market created a wave of demand for traditional corporation to modernize themselves and actually disrupt themselves. The second thing was happening is due to climate change, people are implementing new types of risk management solutions, which requires systems put in place which aggregates and analyze data and actually deploys different risk models on top of them, to drive business efficiency. That requires new type of data solutions to be put in place. That's a fast-growing space for EPAM in the reinsurance area.
Travel and consumer, very mature field. Probably a little bit challenged by economic conditions. We have a number of very large accounts with large transformation programs that we're implementing and maybe tailing off some of them. We see a kind of a tailing off of the large demand for large customers, but we also see a lot of new logos coming in in the field with us with starting the new transformational programs, trying to figure out new business models, how to compete in this new world order. We see that kind of space slightly slowing down, compared to other verticals for us. Life sciences and healthcare is one of the fastest, if not the fastest-growing verticals for us. Life sciences, traditionally for us, life sciences customers were customers in strictly R&D field. We are expanding that to our enterprise offerings.
Life sciences as an industry is going through transformational changes themselves. Personalized medicine, arms race for blockbuster drugs, all of the changes that require investment, and that's driving our business. I think we have Regeneron. Pablo from Regeneron will be presenting much more in-depth view of the industry and the company. That's one of the fastest-growing areas for us. On the healthcare side, we mostly playing on the payer side. As we said, in the insurance industry in general, the players there are a little bit more conservative, and the same type of demand. We see lots of legacy migration work. We see lots of old large system that need to be maintained and upgraded. Everybody has their own different strategy how to move forward with the large systems. It is a very large, fast-growing space for us. We also looking into the large provider market, the networks.
Going to our largest vertical, financial services. When we went public, in 2012, almost 70% of our revenue were coming in the capital markets area, which, after that, we started to diversify away from capital markets. The first diversification was entering into the, what we call B2C wealth management, going from the sell side to the buy side. We updated you about that a couple of years ago. B2C wealth management became a very large business and growing large business for EPAM since then, which combines our digital capability with business consultancy and with core engineering. EPAM, along the way, with our customers, we won couple awards delivering industry-winning solutions. We helped the industry to go through the challenge due to the changing business model, how to manage more assets per advisor, which is the main driver of the changes and the digitalization process.
I think in our last Analyst Day, we updated you that EPAM started to do projects in the payments space, which was very much being disrupted right now due to mobile payments, new vendors entering the space, lowering of the fees of the commissions. This field was originally dominated by legacy solutions. Since then, we landed quite a few new accounts, both in the startup area, startup space, also in the space of established players, helping them to really modernize their infrastructure really respond to the challenges, which is posed by the disruptors. Since then, since the last update, we started up in two other areas. One of them is what we call B2B wealth management. We would call it asset management. This is the place which has started to go through a digitalization itself. We're supporting the industry.
It's an industry where we are able to deploy our skill set across the whole globe. You will hear about from Igor, from Bridgewater, who will update you on the type of work we are delivering for them. Our work is delivered to traditional asset managers, which are many, all the way to the world's largest hedge funds or private equity companies. In neobanks. For many years now, EPAM was working with FinTech technology providers, but in recent years, some of these FinTechs are getting banking licenses due to either regulatory changes in Europe or in the U.S. due to the changing market conditions. This is a place where we are able to use our blockchain crypto capabilities, able to deploy a combined product engineering capability, and also provide to the neobanks a scalable solution to scale their technology arm with a reliable partner.
We see tremendous demand in this space going forward. Thank you, Martin.
End of presentation. In conclusion, I would like to point one thing. For the investment community, if you guys are not using EPAM for your services, I would challenge you to reach out to your CIO.
Do so.
CMO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Investment Officer, and demand the appointment with them. Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello, my name is Larry Solomon. I have the very proud responsibility of overseeing our people for EPAM. I've been here for about three years, and prior to coming here, I spent 30 years at another company that appeared on one or two of those slides. It's exciting to be here today because, as you all know, without our people and without our clients, there's really not much more to talk about. Now let me start by just asking you, how many of you recall what happened in May of 2017? Big event. Think back. May of 2017. Anyone?
Birthday.
Your birthday? No. Come on, there's a prize if you get it right. There's an extra muffin top in the back or something for you. Russian invasion. Which one? No. No. It was our last Investors Day. How can you not realize that? In May of 2017, I had just joined EPAM. I was a few months into it. I participated in the day, and frankly, I really didn't know what I was talking about back then after only being with the company for a few months. Some of my colleagues here are commenting that I still don't know what I'm talking about. I know a little more than I did back then, and I'm still figuring it out as we go.
I recall after I presented on our people, we broke, we had lunch, and we sat around in round tables, and there were about 12 people sitting at my table. Half of the people were peppering me, and some of them may have been you, were peppering me with questions about utilization. Very tactical. What's it going to be tomorrow? What's it going to be next week? How high do you think you can get it? Do you think you can get it higher than it is now? What's it going to be next quarter? That was interesting. It was back and forth. The other six people that were on my left were more focused on questions around, can we scale? Can we continue to build the supply that we need to address the increasing in number and increasing in complexity demand that we saw?
Since we're in Massachusetts today, I thought it was appropriate that I focus just today a little more to the left, hard left, and I'll talk about our ability to scale. If you look back at where we started in the early 90s, we had a few hundred people. The answer to the question that was posed 2.5 years ago, can we scale? I'm going to give you a little bit better than a maybe. I can't make commitments for the future, but we've proven in the last 2.5, 3 years, we've scaled significantly, and certainly we've scaled since the company started in the early 90s. You can see we started with a few hundred people. Back when I joined the company right around 2016, we had about 18,000 people.
As of the end of Q3 of 2019, we had over 35,000 people total. We need those people as we drive our business up the value chain from a product engineering company back in the days, which Ark covered, to today, where we find ourselves more dealing with much more complex platform engineering and transformation. We can scale efficiently, and we can scale effectively. Now, this is an interesting page. This is not the traffic pattern at LaGuardia's new terminal, or this is not the route to get a taxi at LaGuardia Airport, from what I understand. This is a real example of a page that we use that comes right out of our internal HR systems. This is used by our people, and the numbers have been blurred out here intentionally.
This shows on the left the locations that for the past 2.5 years, the 23,000 net people that we've added to the company. Since the last Investors Day, we've added on a net basis. We've hired more, but we've had some attrition. We've added 23,000 people. This is a page that maps the locations of those 23,000 people that are still here with their primary skill set on the right. This is not a tool that we use on a daily basis, but this just shows the complexity and the level of rigor and discipline and detail that our internal systems that we've been developing for years. This stuff didn't happen overnight.
To manage a workforce of over 35,000 people, where every hour and every day and every person counts in order to maintain those levels of utilization that you all are interested in. This is how we have to run and manage the business. I also want to talk about what we once again proudly call our Telescope AI product, which is our internally developed homegrown system for how we manage not only our people but our delivery. Once again, it took years and years, and Ark mentioned this, that EPAM started to develop its own internal systems way back when, because we quickly realized that the commercial off-the-shelf products were not going to be what we needed. This is one of our competitive advantages. This is one of the areas of differentiation, the HR platforms and the delivery platforms that we use internally that were developed organically.
I'm going to hit a few slides on our people. We're then going to have Vic actually talk about our delivery excellence and how we instill the rigor and discipline and how we manage work for our clients' delivery excellence. Then Vic's going to turn it over to Sandra, who's going to talk about learning and education, with the primary focus being internally, but also a little bit about how we're able to bring those services externally to the market. Because as we build platforms internally, we also gain more credibility to build those systems for our clients. Now, it's one thing for me to get up here and talk about how good our internal systems are. I can spend all day, but you don't want to hear that. It's another thing to receive some very, very positive external recognitions.
There's three that I'll call out here. One is in 2018 from North American Employee Engagement Awards, Best Use of Technology. The second was for a product that was brought to the market that was deemed to have disruption, either in the market or clients or customers or people, and that was from a big innovation award. The third was 2019, also the Most Innovative IT Software award from a very prominent organization out in Silicon Valley, California. I thought it would be interesting to show you a single page of what comes out of our internal system. Let me tell you, I wish I had this type of system back in my 30 years working for another fine company. I see a couple of you on LinkedIn now trying to find out what company that was that I spent 30 years.
I'll tell you at the end, at the break, it's okay. I also see some of you trying to figure out if Alec Wilkerson is a real person. Come on, raise your hand. Who's going on LinkedIn now on their phones to see if Alec Wilkerson really exists? Be honest. Anybody? Nobody? Okay, she doesn't. She's an avatar or whatever the PowerPoint version is of an avatar. This is a page that comes out of our internal Telescope system. This page, it looks like a simple page, but there's so much going on behind each of these boxes. It aggregates everything that we would want to know, that I would want to know, that FB, Boris would want to know about any of our people.
If you think about this page, it's like the combination of LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook all coming together into, once again, an internally developed application. It shows things like all the achievements that Alec has achieved, the feedback and the results of our performance assessment. The project workload, the utilization numbers, both backward-looking and forward-looking. The skills rated by sub-skill category. We use, which is no longer that sexy and fancy in the marketplace, but predictive analytics around attrition. Based on all the data that we can collect on our people, legally collect, we're able to predict the likelihood or the risk that someone's going to leave the company.
If we can get to that quickly before it happens, because if somebody walks into my office and says, "I'm leaving the company," we can try all day long to try to convince them to stay, and sometimes we do. The statistics show that 80% of those people that you convince to stay after they've already decided to leave and they change their mind, if they stay, they will leave again within the next 12 months. If we can get at it early through predictive analytics, we're able to drive down our attrition rate. Other sorts of information. Behind each of these boxes is a whole series of both internal and external systems and applications that bring together this one single aggregated page. Now, the technology is great. I've spoken about the awards.
I've spoken about how I feel about it, and I can compare my three years here with 30 years for another very fine company. As you all know, it's not all about technology, it's about people also. One of the things, you saw some of this in Ark's presentation as well, where we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort, is creating communities for our people around the world, both virtually and physically. The communities are focused around competency. The work that we do in this area, and we have thousands of our employees contributing to this. What you saw from Ark's presentation was just a sample of some of the events, once again, virtual and physical events that we're able to do.
It brings people with a shared competence, with shared skills, with shared interests together in order to develop their careers, both personally and professionally, they can achieve benefits from coming together on our platforms. This also helps us with our hiring efforts and also helps decrease attrition. Years ago, even as recently as two or three years ago, people were leaving EPAM because they wanted another opportunity. Once again, going back to the data which we analyze, why do people leave a company? Well, compensation is not usually the number 1 reason. The number 1 reason why people leave is because they want another opportunity. They want to change something in their professional or personal situation. Oftentimes, people go to another company because they can't find that within the company that they're working for. I'll give you an example. It's a real live example.
About a year and a half ago, one of our leadership team members was on a plane with one of our employees, just coincidentally, and the employee told him, "I'm leaving the company because I want to move to Spain, and I've already accepted an offer with another company that has offered me the opportunity to relocate to Spain." At the same time that that discussion was happening, we were in the middle of building a center in Málaga, Spain, and the employee did not know about it and did not know enough to ask, and I guess the people that she was talking to didn't know enough to tell that employee that we have an opportunity for you in Spain. It was very unfortunate.
We've now created an application where EPAM, because of the size, because of the growth, because of the diversity of the work that we're doing, has become a marketplace for our people. If you want to change something in your professional situation, if you want to experience another industry, if you want to experience another geography, if you're tired of working on your projects, for whatever reason, you can apply proactively. We've blurred some of the client names here, but this is once again, an internally developed application where thousands of hours went into this all by EPAM engineers. Our people can go on the site, find out what's available, apply. There's a process, and it's managed on the back end, also ensuring that we don't destroy the delivery excellence if we pull out too many people from a project.
There's a very fine balance there. Vic will talk about how we ensure delivery excellence while still being able to move our people around like this. Finally, you saw on one of Ark's slides that we want to be a social responsibility or a socially responsible company. This is something that's really near and dear to my heart. I tell every employee that I interact with, not all 35,000, but a lot of them, that we have an obligation, and you have an obligation, and everybody sitting in this room has an obligation to do something a little more than just their jobs. There's plenty of opportunities. We have an obligation and a responsibility to do something that benefits the communities, the local communities in which we all work and live.
This is not a significant line item on our P&L, but it's of significant importance for our people because the people that we're recruiting now want to work for a company that has a purpose. They want experiences. It's not just about a job anymore. When I was growing up, it was about a job. Now it's about an experience. It's about the ability to move around in a company. It's about the ability to do volunteer work. EPAM eKids is a program. It's our largest social responsibility or volunteer program where we partner with the Scratch Foundation. Scratch is actually a coding language that is used to teach young kids about technology and about how to code. We develop these courses, and we get, as you can see, over 1,100 volunteers are working in many of our cities, through these very creative and innovative delivery mechanisms.
Hackathons, conferences, we have hours of code days. Those are particular days. We have summer camps where we get kids from the local countries, from the local cities together to teach them about technology. I can tell you, if you've ever experienced seeing the eyes open and the brains open of a young child when they're first exposed to something like this, let me tell you, delivering for our clients is fantastic, but watching the eyes open up in these young kids is just phenomenal. This is just a couple of pictures here about some of the things that we're doing around the world. Mitch Resnick is the founder of the Scratch coding language and the Scratch organization. We were the proud sponsor of the Scratch conference that took place right here in Boston last year. Once again, something I'm very, very proud of.
I have responsibility for this area as well, and it is of significant importance now to the people that we're taking from the marketplace. I just got one of these from Elaina, which means, okay, finish up and pass it along. I'm going to do that right now, and I'm going to turn it over to my colleague that has a slightly different accent from me, but it's Victor Dvorkin. Thank you.
Thank you, Larry. Hi, my name is Vic. I actually joined EPAM 22 years ago as an engineer, now run delivery for EPAM. I will be talking about delivering at speed and scale. Larry spoke about how we onboard people, how we create new talent, I would like to talk more about how we actually ensure engineering and how we scale the engineering while preserving our engineering DNA. The core of scale for engineering is our engineering discipline. We name it internally Engineering Excellence. We evolved the discipline through years of experience with our software customers, independent software vendors, then with digitally native companies, and specifically picked up a lot from Google. EngX as one, two, three can be explained in the beginning as a very rigorous onboarding, a learning path for the engineer, and the assessment. The onboarding portion is extremely important.
With the number of engineers we are onboarding, it's very important for us to focus on them understanding how we deliver, how we code, engineer, and deliver continuously. We put a lot of effort through the onboarding process. Every engineer, which also graduates from our resource development labs, is coming through a very rigorous process, which takes weeks and months, and then through production process, where they are being educated and mentored to deliver the code well. At the next step, in order to grow, they need to go through a mandatory learning path, to pick up more engineering capabilities between the levels. We have now 8 levels of seniority for engineers, from a junior engineer to actually distinguished engineer, which is very unusual in the organization and usually existing only in Googles of the world and other digital companies.
Distinguished engineer career path was introduced a year ago, and we are evolving it right now. The next point is with the complications of the systems that we are experiencing, we need to advance our Engineering Excellence. We also understood that the things that we do for ourselves, running the teams of hundreds of engineers, we actually can help our clients as well. Our clients look at our best practices and asking, "How can you help us?" We formed, and this on the screen, an EX 360 offering, which again, in one to three can be explained very simply. It's engineering culture, engineering agility as an organization through value stream mapping, through metrics and KPIs and org structures, and continuous engineering of the systems, so agility of software, which is related to the APIs, to the architectures, to data, et cetera.
When I was preparing, I looked at the Wikipedia and looked when the first Jira was issued. Jira was issued in 2002, actually. The first EPAM delivery platform version was actually prior to Jira. We named it Project Management Center at the time. It's a long journey. This is the newest version, which you see on the screenshots. We are continuously evolving it for 20 years. It's now very well integrated with Jira and a number of tools. We have special tools as part of Telescope AI, which we name [Perf on Health], which also available for our customers. We are able to monitor, in the very back of the slide, is 2,000 projects which we run in parallel. We have it very rigorously tracked. We understand the status. We have a two-phase commit.
On one side, it's a self-reporting mechanism for our project and delivery managers and account managers. On another side, this is a system which can collect a number of KPIs and determine through AI and machine learning, what can be improved. We also understand a bit more on the team dynamic side. We help our engineers improve, self-improve, as well as help with time reporting, et cetera. The system is extremely advanced. Underneath, we actually have a subsystem which can enable the program, and a stand-up team for a complex enterprise in several days. If you can imagine, stand-up development environment for large enterprise can take weeks or months, and not necessarily always successful.
If we are talking about engineers, this helps them to feel the team, to feel fully integrated into the environment, and we collect a lot of metrics and KPIs, and we help them improve as they go. Some of those subsystems actually were created specifically to stand up the delivery platform, we also publish them on the Solution Hub. Many of them are open source. One of the older ones is ReportPortal. ReportPortal is downloaded from the open source by 70,000 users today. Some others are available now on our Solution Hub website. That brings me to the last point, the open source. We really are excited and really focused on our contributions. You saw Ark showing our contribution ratings. It's very important for us to engage our engineers in open source development. We co-develop some open source with our clients. We do a lot of internal contributions.
We have our products available through open source contributions as well. Why we're doing it, because it's another community. Engineers, which we believe we have a very good gang, are very interested to co-develop with equals. Open source is a way for them to actually feel the hand of somebody else who wants to be as experienced, as mature, and they want to contribute to the society as well. All of this kind of enables our community, and actually by connecting the communities, we now have an opportunity to teach them, and we're opening a lot of educational materials. We are opening pieces and parts of EngX to the world, to the community, and I would like to introduce Sandra, who is leading our learning process, to talk about it.
Thank you. I'm Sandra Loughlin. Unlike my colleagues, most of them in EPAM, and certainly on the leadership team, I'm not a software engineer. My expertise is in learning science and organizational change, and I joined EPAM to apply these insights here to help our people grow and also to unlock our capabilities for our clients. When I started, I took a deep look at our learning ecosystem, and I found four important things. The first is that our learning ecosystem, our platforms, and our communities are extremely comprehensive. Over 15 years, EPAM has built up an extraordinary set of assets, learning programs, and experts who work internally with the organization to keep our people sharp and on the cutting edge of knowledge. There are four components to our ecosystem.
The first is an internal learning university, EPAMU, which is the structure that I think Vic has talked a lot about in terms of our engineering growth. The second is a talent pipeline, and this has been a deliberative intervention with many of the universities that provide our top talent. We work with them directly to shape the curriculum and orient their people to become our people, skilled and oriented in the direction that we grow. The third aspect, and I think you heard quite a lot about this from Vic and Larry, is the platforms and technologies that underlie our system. We have a number of very sophisticated homegrown systems that empower our people and are very relevant for our clients and our market. The fourth, and I think or the third. Wow. Where am I? Coding bootcamp, sorry.
The fourth aspect of our comprehensive system is a new coding bootcamp that is aligned to our career changers in our target market to allow them to move rapidly and successfully into our pipeline. Those are the four aspects of our comprehensive ecosystem. What's also important to know is that it is global and scaled. Unlike some others, our programs are not oriented toward a set of high potentials. They service the entire EPAM learning and talent community across the globe, and the infrastructure that supports that is very sophisticated. The other thing that I found very exciting, and I think that Victor mentioned this, was the integration of the continuous learning culture with our talent management system. A lot of companies have both of these things. They're important, they're not integrated.
As a result, a lot of the investments don't see the most return, because unless you bring these things together in a comprehensive system, they often work in conflict. What I found exciting about our systems is how well-aligned they are and how they work together to create this Engineering Excellence and our engineering DNA. The most exciting thing, I think for me, was to realize the market relevancy of our DNA and our ecosystems. I think that people have mentioned that we are working on being adaptive. I would argue that we are already very adaptive. I think the slide that Larry showed, showing our third and fourth evolution, indicates the ability of our organization and our people to change and grow with the market. This is something that many of our clients, many of our customers desperately need.
We've talked a lot this morning about the need for transformation, the efforts of our clients to make this real. We have come to believe that our internal ecosystems, our DNA, our ability to adapt is extremely market relevant. We believe that it is, on its own, a very significant and valuable brand. To get this all going and make it very effective, we have created an umbrella organization that brings together all of EPAM's many learning education initiatives into one shared resource, which then provides us with efficiencies, scalabilities, communities of practice, and a consistent and high level of quality so that our efforts, our investments, have a high degree of return. We have also brought in a number of education experts and practitioners, including Competentum, in order to really drive this quickly forward with our people and for our clients.
Speaking of our clients, we have realized the value of our internal ecosystem for our external communities. We have invested in a number of, I think, very exciting initiatives to bring these to market. The first is a recent launch of a master's in software engineering with a highly regarded university in Ukraine. The value to us is in creating a fast pipeline to generate senior software engineering leaders to help us transform quickly and responsibly to our market. The other significant investment and effort on our parts have been deliberately unlocking our capabilities for our clients. This is where we take our content from our EPAM University, our platforms, and our expertise, particularly as it relates to our digitally born clients, and putting that all together into solutions to help our clients grow and change.
This ecosystem is designed to benefit our partners and to benefit us. I'm going to give you one example. Earlier this year, we were asked by a Fortune 20 global automotive manufacturer to equip their top 200 IT leaders and executives with the technical and leadership skills necessary to keep that organization driving toward a mobility provider profile of the future. When I say leadership, I mean the global CIO, his direct reports, and their direct reports, the top three levels. In order to make this real, we brought together a hybrid team across EPAM from our consultancy, our delivery, and our new learning practice to create a solution that really works.
Unlike many companies that invest in training, we directed and oriented them to invest in learning so that at the end of the program, their leaders had new skills, new knowledge, new behaviors, new ways of working, and a new mindset toward transformation. The program that we created is unusual and highly effective. In this particular case, it begins and ends with an assessment so that we can capture delta and program ROI. Very importantly, it leverages the expertise of our engineers and our senior leaders to provide coaching and direct support for their leaders in order to help them identify and implement transformational imperatives. The program worked. We were able to identify and measure significant growth in knowledge and behavior. We got these leaders talking across silos and collaborating together towards transformation.
Very importantly, through our program, the client was able to identify significant facilitators and blockers of their transformation efforts. Upon seeing the impact of our program, this is what we heard from the global CIO. “This was a very good day for me.” This also shows the power of the potential for this learning practice to impact internal EPAM as well as our clients, because this program did not stop here. We have brought that program back into our learning ecosystem to focus on our client-facing personnel in order to give them shared language, shared understanding of these transformational technologies so that they could better speak with leadership in their BUs. This is why and how we will continue to bring our engineering DNA to market in a way that drives EPAM and our clients into the future. I'll turn it over to Larry to wrap that up.
Thank you. Okay, you didn't have enough of me yet, one more minute. Just to wrap up this topic, you heard from me a little bit about how we manage our people and how we've scaled so far and some of the tools and technology that we use. You heard from Vic around how we instill that rigor and that discipline in what we're known for, which is delivery and execution excellence.
You heard a little bit from Sandra about how we're making, and the importance of making education an engineering brand. I just want to take us back, for those of you that were here two and a half years ago at the last IA day, I concluded my comments by saying back then in May of 2017, when I was still relatively new to the company, that I like the hand that we've got here at EPAM, and I wouldn't trade it in for anything. Fast-forward two and a half years later, I really believe that we've got the best hand to play. When I know a little more now, I'll say the same comment. I love the hand that we've got, and I wouldn't trade any of our cards in for anything. Thank you for engaging with us.
Thank you for listening, and thank you for your loyalty as well.
All right. We have probably about 10 minutes for some quick Q&A, then we'll take a break, and then we'll have our client sessions start in the afternoon. We've got a couple of microphones in the room. If we could make sure we speak into the microphone first, and then we can capture it for the webcast. If I could ask the management team to assemble in the front, please. Joe?
Oh, there we go. Okay. Back of the room first. Just had a question on the consulting part of the engagements. Any visibility on how often you're going in and leading with consulting first versus maybe three, five years ago, and what that means for the full life cycle of the engagement? That's it. Yeah, it's a big room. Over here.
Okay. Can you repeat that?
Yeah. You talked about how consulting is now, I guess, maybe more a part of the total project that you're putting together. I was wondering if you could give us some statistics on how often you're leading with consulting, who you're seeing in the consulting arenas, and how big a piece of a project it is, and how it changes the outlook for the project.
I think the answer would be right now, it's extremely difficult to share any statistics. We're not sharing statistics, how it's happening. Specifically because when we were talking about our hybrid organization for consulting very quickly kind of overlapping with engineering, it is very difficult for us exercise how to cross the line where it's starting or where. Like, for example, Khryshchanovich, Albert was sharing, actually started from engineering and then turned to consulting, and then actually create bigger field for us to play. I can say that it's very visible that five years ago it was zero, and today it's pretty touchable all across our industries right now. No statistics.
Can we comment on who we're seeing?
Yeah.
We can comment, I think, a little bit on who we're seeing. If in Ark's talk, you saw that sort of circle of competitors. On the consulting side, it continues to be sort of the big, traditional consultancy. We see a lot of Accenture. We see Deloitte. We see EY. It really depends on what, and sort of what vertical and what horizontal segment. We're seeing less consulting arms from some of the traditional Indian service providers. We just don't tend to play too directly against them. What you do see is a lot of niche consultancies, and again, depending on where you're trying to position, if you're trying to do design or if you're trying to design a new business model, for example, in financial services and as this neobank. You're starting to see a lot of specialist niche providers.
It's very difficult to kind of have a battle card against all consultancies. We know for sure that one advantage that we can continue to press is this notion of integrated consulting, because it is a matter of domain plus horizontal expertise, plus the ability to architect and deliver the platforms underneath. We just don't see a lot of that in the market. Actually, we don't see any, which is why we think it's a good idea.
I think there is a lot of technology consulting-led, really, engagements. There's a lot of design consulting-led, maybe ramping up business consulting-led. Yep.
Hi, Bryan from Cowen. I wanted to try that question a little bit of a different way. The global P&C insurer, the example that Albert used, can you give us a sense of what type of mix of your clients you'd say you have that level of a strategic relationship with? Really trying to get a sense of the penetration opportunity you have in your portfolio for those types of relationships. As you do grow those relationships, how does your engagement structure and your client relationship management change?
Yeah. Really where we are starting to focus, we're having that level of penetration. Again, I'm not going to give statistics, but again, as we're continuing to introduce new areas into the business consulting, we're almost seeing immediate penetration at that kind of level. The mix, it really varies based on how we enter into the opportunity. If we start with consulting, it's probably a little bit consulting heavy up front, and then we start to shift and engage the engineering organization or other parts of consulting, depending on the specific needs of our clients. It really varies from situation to situation.
We'll get to a nice healthy mix where we're bringing on large engineering services. That's sort of how we've looked at it, stay adjacent and close to engineering so that we're looking very quickly to see, okay, how does this, that we're talking to a client about, drive engineering opportunities for EPAM?
It's fair to say that we are actively engaging all our engineering customers, if you can say that, to start engaging on the consultancy side also. We are maturing our engagements. If you take a whole engagement setup like we have, where we have the trust from the customer around engineering. We are trying to, for lack of a better word, upsell the engagement, transform the engagement to also towards the business-oriented or consultancy-oriented access. This way, we are basically driving our access, increasing our access to the customer.
And to answer-
That's active engagement at this point.
To answer the second part of your question, which actually is a really good question. Both FB and Boris and all of the BU heads have active programs in place to not only introduce consultancy into the portfolio through our front end, through our sellers, account managers, and salespeople. Also to introduce the notion of consultative selling into the existing portfolio. While it's still very small, kind of by percentage, it's a small sort of slice. I think the opportunity for us is first and foremost with our existing portfolio in integrating the propositions around consulting into the current engagement teams. These guys have formal and very aggressive programs to kind of work with our existing account management teams.
Greg.
Thanks. Thank you. I have a question on attrition. Your attrition levels have been remarkably low, which is impressive for a company of your scale. How do you balance this level of attrition with wage hikes, assuming that the competitive intensity will only increase? Thank you.
I can.
I'm going to volunteer to take this one. We're pleased with our attrition levels right now. They're down from where they were last year. I will say that the marketplace, it's incredibly difficult to run at the levels that we're running now. Frankly, years ago, it was lower. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of human interaction. It's not just about the technology. It takes a lot of focus on a one-on-one individual basis. We have been able, through very detailed analysis between my organization and Vic's organization, going out into the countries to balance the attrition and the hiring with the wage inflation. We look at local market trends. We look at the skills that we need country to country.
We also have to have a healthy balance between voluntary attrition and involuntary attrition, and we have to turn those screws a little bit as the supply and demand situation evolves as well. I would say it's a lot of science, but it's also some part art. What works is the teaming that we have across HR and delivery and the entire organization. There's a lot of financial analysis and a lot of people analysis that goes into how we set rates and wages and all of those factors.
Just a reminder, our business is not demand but supply bound, right? The reason why we are exposing opportunities to our engineering teams, because we have opportunities open, and we think that by lowering the attrition figures, we can fulfill the demands. We're not looking at it the way probably you are looking at it. We are much more looking at it as attrition is bad because we cannot fulfill the demand, and we really need to fulfill the demand.
We also, like some of the geographies, most of the geographies where we operate, we actually are a top brand.
Yeah.
Helps with the attrition. Some of the employee-driven initiatives you've heard from Larry and the rest of the team also help. David.
Thank you. David Grossman from Stifel. Just to follow on that question. Perhaps you could give us a little more insight into how your staffing model is evolving as you scale. You are now 32,000 professionals. How have you really broadened the labor pyramid over the last couple of years, and how does that impact recruiting and training?
We shared a lot of information, and we kind of tried to explain what systems we have and how we manage it. This is a detailed question, so we can spend probably another day answering this. We're definitely doing all what you're asking, but to bring specific metrics here, especially that there is no one metric. We're talking about 31,000 people with different practices, with different capabilities in different locations. Because we're not all concentrated in two or three development centers like some of the competitors. We have 90 development centers. That's why we need systems to kind of orchestrate all of this. There is no simple answer to this. Plus, we definitely would like to share a lot of things, but there is some limit where we.
One more question back there.
Yeah, thanks. When you listen to what some of the BPO players are talking about, domain-specific transformation, digitization, it's clear that there's a big movement there. You've expanded into a consulting space. At some point way down the road, do you expand a little bit more into some of the run the business type of activities? I don't want to call it BPO, but at some point.
So-
You go from development to consulting. Is the next layer of expansion more run the business type of work way, way down the road?
Let me take that. EPAM is change and build today. We have something which you might call run, but it's actually DevOps. As the infrastructure, the applications, your data center is becoming code-defined, we are seeing that as part of our remit, and we are providing services in this arena. I don't think we're going to go to what you today call run business, which is very heavy duty going down to the boxes, because that's not our focus. On the same time, there are other types of areas where via automation, we are getting into what some people are calling already as business operation running, but it's mostly via automation. Right now in the short term, probably we are not in the, what you would call low end of the BPO space.
If I may add, what we're seeing is mostly, I believe through our Engineering Excellence, our capabilities. What we're seeing is winning managed services support work, not BPO. It's just basically running the systems. We are not actively today pursuing that as a line of business. It's more as an outcome of relationship with our customers. We are winning the businesses on, and it's mostly construct is managed service around support.
In many cases, it's very difficult to distinguish, especially if you're talking about real digital platforms. On digital platforms, this is what FB means, the whole end-to-end DevOps. You're constantly developing new features, and at the same time maintaining operation. This is what we didn't do in the past, but we're getting in this area more and more. Because when you're helping with digital platform, clients expect to take responsibility for continuous development and support of this. We're building these capabilities, and we have already some use cases of this. It's very different from traditional run.
Well, in the automation programs that you're running, they're not just BPO. They're not automating existing-
BPO has nothing to do with.
No, no, even existing managed services.
Run.
Right. I think the way that we're approaching automation is to try and actually redesign the program so that these things run smarter in the end.
The overall shift in the market, I think it was addressed to some extent, shift in the market from running projects to running products that continuously evolved, that Ark just mentioned, is very different than, we have a project, we build it, deploy it in production now. We need resources to essentially run that until it dies at some point in its evolution. Product focus, these products continuously evolve with the market. It's much more new feature development, continuous evolution, continuous experimentation around the products rather than let's put it in a corner somewhere and pretend that it's giving some value over time.
We'll do one more question, then we'll break, and then we'll come back for our client segments. Rod?
Oh, thank you. Hey, Rod Bourgeois here from DeepDive. Hey, quick question. As you increase your consulting mix over time, do you feel like that impacts your long-run margin outlook? Do you feel like you become more exposed to swings in the overall economic environment?
The right answer will be we don't know, and that's what answer which we were given before to this because, again, for us, consulting is not as a standalone line of business. For us, consulting is an extension of our delivery capabilities to make sure that we deliver something which we shouldn't be redoing again. Okay. At this point, we'll see what's the balance, because there are too many variables to this, because rates could be much higher for on-site consulting. Utilization might be much lower, but in traditional situation. We don't trying to go to traditional situation. We're trying to create different mix between capabilities. We don't know. What we know why we're doing this, and that's the main point. We don't want to be blamed that we've done something wrong, even if it from engineering point of view, was done correctly.
That's why we're going for it. Don't know.
Sensitivity to the economy, does it go up, or is it reasonably the same, given that your other businesses are also pretty project-based as well?
We're not going after pure consulting for consulting's sake. I think that's what Ark is saying. In most of the programs we're involved in are longer-term transformation programs. They're not projects that are discrete. If you think about traditional consulting businesses, they're going after the workshop and the after-work. We're already in the after-work, and now we're just trying to understand how to do it better and also how to be in the front end of the design and the strategy so that we're not, in the end, building something that isn't value for customers.
Yes, there's obviously macroeconomic things that are going on all over the place, but we're not talking about projects that are getting canceled. Most of the things we're doing are multi-year programs that have gone all the way up to the board in many cases, where it's actually changing the nature in some cases of the businesses we're helping.
I think also sensitivity is not equation between consulting and engineering.
Yeah.
It's equation more like build change versus run. Traditional thinking is if you're running, then even in recession, you still need to run. Okay. Unfortunately, or whatever, the world has changed. The run is different, and run actually not bringing much stability because it's changing all the time. I think we're in different situation. Sensitivity for us, consulting or engineering, it's more about building change. If economy will crash, we definitely will feel it very well across all our things. Again, bringing back 2008, 2009, we were flat during this period of time, but we were much smaller company then.
Thank you.
Okay. Why don't we break here, come back about 12:30 P.M. We'll start off with Bridgewater, Regeneron, we will wrap up with another Q&A session and access to the management team. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
There are changes in different locations. It's four years, more like restaurant. mission of delivery.
For some specific client.
Yeah.
Where-
That's what this is.
It's a pretty special place. Okay. If we could reassemble to our seats, we'll start the second half of our session.
Clearly, this is not working.
Clearly. All right. All right, why don't we take our chairs and get started with the second half of the session? Let me just grab Where's Igor?
Yeah, it is. It is.
Okay. [Efri], you want to just start?
If you don't sit down now, we're not going to have breaks or no coffee after that. Thank you for everyone. Want to sit down. Yeah, I know. I recognize your picture. Yeah. All right. I would like to introduce Igor Tsyganskiy from Bridgewater, and he's going to tell about our collaboration.
Yes. Hello, everyone. For those who do not know, Bridgewater is the largest hedge fund in the world. We are a systematized fund. What that means is, everything we do uses computers. We have started working with EPAM about three years ago. Because we're a hedge fund, I have to say that my presentation here does not reflect in any way, form, or shape our view on Bridgewater stock, its value. We're not here to say whether you should be long or short Bridgewater. We're here mostly to share our experience with the company. What do I do at Bridgewater? I run all the investment systems that are responsible for making all the trades, as well as all the investment systems that are responsible for research, meaning figuring out what we should trade.
As well as all the data centers, IT, and pretty much all the critical systems in the company. By and large, because we do systematized investment, we're a technology company as much as we are a hedge fund. We originally, I think, Arkadiy, we came to this event back in 2017, looked at what EPAM was back then, started engaging with folks, and we had a challenge that was focused on the fact that we're looking for a partner that can help us with our dynamic needs of deeply understanding the world, persisting the insights about the world in our systems, and then taking advantage of those insights in the way we trade. In 2017, we basically started working with EPAM, trying to find a partner that can do that. Prior to that has not worked well for Bridgewater.
We, over time, trusted EPAM to the point where now we have an engagement in all of our critical areas of the business, whether it's in research, trading, and something that we call Data Factory, which is a way to clear external data and bring it into Bridgewater. We have I can't go into a lot of details, but we have hundreds of engineers from EPAM working with Bridgewater. Okay. Basically, what do we do? We have three major focuses. One of them is called Data Factory. In Data Factory, EPAM participates and partners with us in designing an internal service that is a data clearing platform. What that means is bringing the data into Bridgewater, making sure that the data is clean and delivered on consistent basis for our trading needs.
EPAM partners with us on our trading platform, which deals with direct execution of our trades on a day-to-day basis, 24 by 7 across the globe, as well as participates in different aspects of development of software for our research platform. Let me think about what I want to say here. We are then or they very close partners. The important things for us are, with any partners that we work with at Bridgewater, is quality of the service that is being delivered. It is security of the service being delivered given our needs and our position in the world. It's deep trust with an executive leadership team. With EPAM, we have all those things, and we've listed some more here on the slides. With that, you see I told you it's going to take five minutes, so three and a half minutes.
I mostly want to answer any of the questions you might have about our relationship. Go ahead.
Sorry, can we get some microphones?
I can talk loud. Thank you. You mentioned in your presentation that you engaged with EPAM after failed attempts to do something similar with other firms. Can you talk about how your experience with EPAM has been different than dealing with others that help drive a more successful outcome there?
Well, I would believe that it's a strategic relationship, right? We do not have a consulting service agreement. What we have is a strategic relationship between the companies where what we're getting, I would say it's a program relationship, right? Which is very different than a time and material relationship, where we can come in and say, "These are the 15 people that we need." As an example, in the Data Factory case, which is something that is easier for me to talk about, the focus prior was, if we hire people, we need to write specs for them on pretty much everything that they have to do. One of the issues with that when you clear the data is you can't write infinite number of specs because the data constantly changes. As analysts, you might know that data constantly changes, the formats constantly change.
You can't predict on what it will be like. What you need is a partnership where you operate on the idea that we have to clear the data. Right? You need a partner who says, "Okay, I comprehend what that idea means, and I will build a program for you that will enable us to work together in order to deliver on that need." Right? With EPAM, we do not have a spec relationship. We have a goal relationship, where there is a goal for the program to clear the data, and they provide the expertise that has end-to-end abilities, whether it's from maintaining a service, understanding what it means to deal with macroeconomic data or microeconomic data, understanding what it means to have people to clear the data, right, and work with us on the goal level. I hope that answers your question.
Hi. Are there other IT service providers that you're using? I think you use Genpact on the BPO side.
That's correct. We do use Genpact. It's a completely different part of the business.
Sure.
It's not involved in our core investment processes.
Okay. Do you use any other IT service providers?
We do.
Okay. I think you know where the question's going to go. Can you help us understand what you use EPAM for, and then maybe what you use the other providers for and why you've made that decision or that selection? Thanks.
Right. We use EPAM for our critical investment engine needs as a partner. Other firms that we use, I have a number of folks who we use, and they're not able to provide the solution level that we need to be in our core business. That's probably the best way to answer the question. We have a very good and healthy partnership with Genpact. It's just another part of the business.
Hi. Can you help size how big the relationship is with EPAM, either headcount or otherwise? Secondly, why outsource rather than hire these people internally?
I'll start with the last. We do both. We hire people internally. Our goal of a firm is to deeply understand the world. That's a really large task, and not every part of that task is strategic enough where we choose to hire internally. We can find a partner to expand our understanding of the world in a way that is beneficial to us and expand, then we're okay with that. We hire plenty of folks internally as well. It's not an either/or thing. Right. On the first thing, outside of saying that we hire hundreds of folks from EPAM, I don't want to go into the details.
Last question.
Hi. I'm Mike Vogel from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. We're a very happy client of Bridgewater.
Yeah.
Earlier this morning, we saw examples of EPAM moving away from software development into roles in HR functions and maybe perhaps even legal or other things. I know on your slide you said they've been doing mostly capital markets functions for you, but are they expanding into these other roles in the organization as well?
Let me think about how I want to answer that question. We're partnered with EPAM on the most strategic portions of our business that make sense for us. Right now, the priority is the stuff that I have described. What the future holds, I do not know.
Any more questions?
How do you measure the performance of EPAM today, and do you expect improvement over time? How does what they have in terms of the business consulting, technology consulting arms of that play into your relationship with them in the future?
Right. The measurement of success is actually quite simple. The stuff has to work. It's very, very simple. It either works or it doesn't work. If it doesn't work, we do not use folks. Right? Over time, when we have timelines, when we deal with projects, we need consistent quality and consistent delivery. The stuff has to work, and it has to be of a certain side of quality. The product, and whether it's EPAM or our internal employees, we're going to have the same approach to that. What was your second question? I apologize.
The relationship that you see as a profit with EPAM.
I think that the best way to answer that question is we are constantly working together to find opportunities where it may be beneficial for us to work together, where we can use strengths of both companies to enhance the value for us, for Bridgewater. Again, in the future, as those things come up, for example, EPAM might make some acquisitions I have no idea about, right, or they might expand into areas that we do not know about. We will strongly look at that. Vice versa, if our needs may change and they have those capabilities, we'll also obviously consider them.
How can they improve as a company and as a vendor today and then looking to the next?
They can improve by hiring more people. It's a simple thing.
Okay. All right.
That thing that, I don't know, I think it was Larry or someone else was saying, there's a supply and demand thing, right? In our business, there's obviously, it's a supply-constrained business, right? What we're looking for is we're looking for a very high-quality set of individuals, whether when we hire them or we partner with them. As long as those services exist and we can consume them. That's where they can improve. That's my goal for you guys.
Good. Yeah.
Thank you.
Anyone else?
As when investing into EPAM as a partner.
Just don't use the word investing.
When you develop this partnership together.
Exactly. Yeah.
What other considerations do you look at? Is it location?
Well, let me give an example. First of all, security and cybersecurity are top paramount concern for us.
Okay.
Right? Qualifying anyone in that sense is a very important thing.
Sure.
Second one is we work with EPAM, and they work with us in making sure that the locations that we need to be staffed, whether it's locally in the United States or somewhere in different parts of the world, are the locations that are staffed.
Did you say you decide that?
Yeah. We work together, right?
Sure.
Basically, at the end of the day, what I need from EPAM is the partnership.
Right.
It's not just the people.
Okay.
It's basically, for example, we need people where we need people, right? There's a set of services that EPAM provides. We can be either buyers or not buyers of those services. In addition to that, when you have a partnership, we have needs. Those needs might not satisfy that what EPAM has today.
Sure.
Whether it's EPAM or anyone else, when you have partnership, you want those partners to basically satisfy your needs.
Sure.
We work with EPAM, and we literally say, "These are the types of things that we need.
Sure.
As partners, it's their job to provide it for us.
You also mentioned certain things are kept internal, some are outsourced with EPAM and other partners. What are those internal things?
I can't talk about our internal things.
What was the decision behind as to why this has to be internal and cannot be outsourced? Was it lack of capability from the partner side?
No, there are certain things that are completely private to us, and we would never give that to anyone else.
That's just about business as you have to keep it internal just because.
We have to keep it internal.
Okay.
Good. Okay. Igor, thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
Sergey. Can you hear me? Hello? Hello?
We can hear you.
I'm Sergey. I'm one of co-heads of business at EPAM with Boris, SB, and Jason. One of my areas of focus is healthcare and life sciences. We actually have the next story is from Regeneron and Bob. Regeneron is a very interesting company. I think they've been founded about 30 years ago, similar to what EPAM is, and we're very focused and passionate about software engineering. Regeneron is very passionate about bringing drugs to the market and discovering innovative therapies. Very scientific culture. As they kind of jumped on a journey and started to explore the journey about using data and digital kind of more strategically, they were kind of happy they decided to work with us.
I think what's interesting, and hopefully what's interesting, is that all of these capabilities that we've been talking about throughout today kind of come together in a way that it's hopefully not forced, but really help and solve the problem of building the product and what are the other things, digital consulting, business consulting, industry experience, you kind of knit together to deliver the result for the client. With that, I wanted to welcome Bob, who is the CIO for Regeneron. Thank you.
He says-
Yeah.
I'm going to talk about why EPAM has become a trusted partner, and I'm going to spend a little bit more time talking about Regeneron because all of us that work here like to talk about Regeneron. It gives you a little bit of an idea of when you have a partnership, often it's because there's similar values, similar trust bases. I think what's developed over the last few years is we see a lot of similarities in EPAM that we have within Regeneron itself. A little bit about myself. I'm Bob McCowan. I'm CIO. I've been in that role for about a year and a half. I've been with Regeneron for about five. My focus there, to be honest, has been mostly digital transformation. The company is 30 years old. I'll describe it a little bit further on.
It became very successful very rapidly or during a very short period. As a result of that, a lot of the systems and infrastructure that was put in place, the goal was simply to keep up with the growth. It wasn't architected well, it wasn't designed well, it wasn't really thought through for the long term. For the last three, four years, I've been building out and modernizing the infrastructure. When I joined three years ago, we talked about a cloud-first strategy. We had nothing in the cloud. In the last 18 months, we've moved probably 45% of our workloads to the cloud, and that's empowered a lot of the scientists and the clinical organizations to get the type of throughput and power they need. It's also got us to realize that we're very disconnected. We work in silos. Our organization works in silos.
A big part of the effort has been joining the dots and connecting the data. Before I joined, I was with Amgen, another very large biopharma. I worked with them in the manufacturing in Colorado and then in California. I put on there Artemis International as well, and that's really in a prior role, sort of prior life. I ran a software development organization and product organization. As a result of that, I have a very clear idea of what I look for in a partner, particularly when it comes to partners that are helping us build products. Some of that plays into the engagement model with EPAM. My focus is the patients, and anyone that works at Regeneron is continually reminded that we're not there to generate revenue for the company.
We're there to drive the science, to find new discoveries, to be able to deliver new medicines. That's the ethos of the whole organization. It's driven by the founders. We get reminders of that on a regular basis. In fact, this week we had patients come in and talk to us about the difference that one of our products, DUPIXENT, had on their lives. It was a family, mother and father, who had spent 17 years trying to find relief for their son, and at age 16, 17, he actually got onto one of our trials. At the time, his body was covered in 80% of rashes. Every morning, the routine was get up, have a bath, wash the linen, prepare for the day, and within three months of going on that trial, his body was pretty much clear.
That's been a life-changer, not just for the individual, but for the family as well. He was able to join us from his college dorm and talk about how it had changed his life. That sort of goes to the heart of the company itself. The two founders started it 30 years ago. It's a founder-led organization. They're still very involved. It's the CEO and the Chief Scientific Officer. For 20 years, they worked hard to try and find that breakthrough drug, and in, I guess, 2010, 2011, EYLEA was really that breakthrough that came out. During that 20 years, a lot of the time was invested in. They failed a lot, and they talk about failing a lot. Through that failure, they learned what worked, how to accelerate the discovery, how to really drive forward the drug discovery process.
EYLEA came out in 2011. Within a year, it grew to a billion dollar in revenue, and in our quarterly results, probably two weeks ago, we were talking about $5.5 billion from that one product. The funding or the revenue from that has been plugged straight back into the research, and we today have seven new medicines on the market. Most biopharmas are lucky to have one. In fact, most fail. We are pretty unique in that we have seven today. A lot of detail in here, you can see we just continue to grow. We continue to attract the top scientists in the world and continue to find those discoveries. These are the two founders, George and Len. Believe it or not, they're always that happy. One of the challenges that they had was they started this with a million-dollar investment in 1988.
Right out of the gate, their view was follow the science, everything else will take care of itself. Unlike other organizations I worked for that were very much focused on the quarterly results, they tend to be focused on where's the next breakthrough? What's happening in the trials? It's a very science-based focus as an organization. Today, our worth is, depending on the day, but I think today it's probably about $38 billion in terms of market cap. Pretty phenomenal growth over a fairly short period. Out of the gate early on, they reached out, brought the best scientists in. They reached out, brought key individuals onto the board to give us that direction and guidance.
This is a little bit of a snapshot, not only have we got those seven products, we have a very strong pipeline, over 21 products in the pipeline, phase I, II, and III. Everything we do, we do in-house. We have never done M&As. I can't say we'll never do M&As, right now the intent is everything is self-discovered and produced in-house. In terms of a place to work, it's a fantastic place to work. The culture takes a little while, especially when you come from maybe some of those more hardcore organizations that are driven by the revenue. When you really understand how it works, it's a fantastic place to work. We've been voted number one out of six of the past eight years for Science Magazine top places to work. We've been on the Forbes Most Innovative Company for six years in a row.
Fairly phenomenal external verification of what we do. We also started the Regeneron Genetics Center, and that's been hugely successful. We started it five years ago. In five years, we have completely sequenced over 800,000, heading up towards a million human genomes, which is a phenomenally rich set of data that we can use for our research. This is pipeline. I'm not going to read through it. The only thing I'll call out is, unlike many other organizations that focus in one area, going back to that theme of following the science, you can see that our medicines or our drugs basically are across a very broad spectrum of ailments. We tend to consider ourselves very socially aware, a couple of recent examples are MERS and Ebola. When they come out, again, when you look at that, it tends to be it's happening over there.
The reality is it could end up over here just as easily. Our scientists put their heads together, and in both cases have come up with new drug candidates to address these two serious illnesses. The approach for these is a little different. Typically, it takes 10 years to get a drug to market. In the case of something like Ebola, there are different protocols you go through. We recently had to stop a trial where our candidate was so successful beyond the existing current treatment that they felt it was unfair to those patients on the trial. We've been working with BARDA to accelerate this and get this product to those patients. The Science Talent Search is probably an 80-year-old program. Again, we are very happy to sponsor that.
We signed up for 10-year sponsorship. The goal there is basically bring the younger generation into the science world. We have remarkable success with that. If you look at whether or not the program's been successful, you've got 13 Nobel laureates, 18 MacArthur fellows, and 11 National Medal of Science winners, which is now huge to come out of a program like this. We really do believe that you have to invest in the greater ecosystem if you want to drive science forward. This is Lynn. Lynn is one of the researchers I support. Lynn's been with the organization for 20 years. A lot of what we talk about and a lot of what EPAM's involved in, she has been a big part of that thinking and science breakthrough that has been part of that.
Lynn is constantly changing, and her team is constantly changing. They're taking new approaches to discovery. They're looking at new technologies that are out there. The CRISPR-Cas9 , a whole series of external influences that basically challenge them as the scientists, which then challenges us as the IT organization to keep up with them. It's a fun place to be, but a lot of pressure at times simply to keep up with this type of change. The VelociSuite that we call it is basically technology that we developed during that first 20 years. Now, what we were doing as we were failing was trying to figure out, okay, how do we fail faster? What we realized as an organization was a big part of the science is setting up the experimentation.
A big part of the science is having the right models and having the right -- sorry, gone blind. The antibodies. Sorry, the right antibodies to do the experimentations on to grow. Part of that 20 years was building out these technologies. It's at the core of absolutely everything we do in Regeneron now, and it's one of our, if you like, secret sauces that makes us so successful. This is where EPAM really got engaged very early on the research side. Today they're working on 10 projects within not just research, but other parts of the organization. There's probably another 10-15 programs that are under discussion. The VelociGene, VelociImmune are probably two of the biggest.
Now, as a software vendor, when I worked for Artemis International, the size of budget I had was nothing compared to the budget we have invested in these two technologies because they're core to what we do. The challenge we have is we built them up over 20 years. They're using some technologies that are end of life. They were built when the organization was 500 people, where communication was shouting to each other across the cubes in the offices. Today we have 7,500, 8,000 employees. We're spread over a campus, which is hosting probably 4,000 in Tarrytown, N.Y. The way we communicated just no longer works. The way we piece this technology together just no longer works. It became a risk and a liability for us.
We needed to make sure we modernized it, rather than simply modernizing it, we were looking to see if we could also leapfrog using some of the technologies to really drive the future use of it. VelocImmune is very similar. VelocImmune is going back to how we create those fully human antibodies, which is critical to what we do. Same approach, 20 years of investing, building this capability, it had reached a point where it had become a liability. We did work with other vendors. It didn't work out so well. We eventually sort of reached out to, "Are there any other providers out there that really understand science, that understand the space, that understand the type of challenges?" This is when we got introduced to EPAM. The reason we chose them is they have depth for what we do.
We can go and have a conversation with the scientists and actually have a meaningful conversation. If you're a pure IT and you go and you start talking about bits and bytes, they'll walk away and leave you standing. If you go and have a conversation with them about what they're using the technology for, what they're expecting as an outcome, what's causing them problems, what they would like to see done differently, they will engage, they'll spend the time, and they'll help. What we found with EPAM was they had that depth of experience. Many of the other top 5 consultants we dealt with tended to be great at creating that roadmap, but when it came to execution, they didn't have the engineering skill. They didn't have the understanding of what a platform was.
They didn't have an understanding of how to really get it from concept to reality. We're also in it for the long term. I mean, drug discovery is a long-term game. It's not something you do overnight. A lot of the investments we put in, we're thinking of over the next three to five years. Again, with an organization like EPAM, they understood that. To be completely direct, we weren't being nickel and dimed. When we saw that we had this roadmap, if there were issues, we could have a serious discussion about, okay, how do we readdress this? How do we make this right? I think there was a shared ownership. They also were able to bring experience to get us to think about what we were asking for.
One of the examples is these technologies help support our vivarium, which is essentially where we have our mice. To do any work in the vivarium, it takes two people. You get suited up. You're both in suits. One is out there doing the experiment. The other is there typing in and recording the data. Through discussions with EPAM, we started experimenting with voice technology. Now today, we can perform the same duties with one person going into the vivarium. It's bringing those type of innovations that other organizations just wouldn't think about. Some of that's based on experience with other organizations, but they're able and willing to share with us. I'll wrap up now and then go to questions, essentially, we're very innovative as a company. To be successful and partner with us, we need that same type of spirit.
We need you to be comfortable with taking risks, experimenting, learning from failures. At the end of the day, you have to execute and you have to deliver. That's the bottom line. We find that that's the type of engagement we have with EPAM. I'm going to end there and be happy to answer any questions.
Any questions?
Yes. Can you talk a little bit about the concept of shared ownership and the shared relationship with the partnership? I think we saw that in the last presentation as well.
Yeah.
Is that where the outcome, are we talking fixed price contracts? What makes it shared in that sense?
We do fixed price contracts. We do time and materials. Depending on the nature of the projects, we mix it up. I think what I mean by shared is we're focused on. As an example, we're not just looking at did we deliver the technology. We're looking at, is it easier for the scientists or for the clinician or whoever to do their job? There's a shared pride in being able to solve the immediate technical problem, but also make it easier. The voice control is one example. Another more technology or IT related example is when we had to scale up, we had, I'll get these numbers wrong, but probably at one stage, maybe 200 people working on these programs. To do that at speed, we ended up using Amazon WorkSpaces as a new technology.
It was new to us as a company. We partnered with EPAM. They used that. It was much easier then for us to provision access to get them into our systems, to get them to the data and to the applications to work on. If it didn't work, other organizations, often what we'd find is we're paying by the hour. Whereas I think with EPAM, there was really a meaningful engagement to say, "Okay, how do we get this working? How do we get back to the true job, which is to get this VelociGene and VelociTrain program back on track?" Does that help?
Okay.
Hi, thanks. Can you talk about the procurement process and how the relationship with EPAM first began?
To be honest, I wasn't involved in the very early part. The procurement process for us, most people hate us. Our process is really difficult. From a security perspective, we put every organization through the wringer. Then if you're touching any of our proprietary data, from a research perspective, there's a whole different set of engagement there. The contract side of it, early on, we started with time and materials. I think when we got into talking about roadmaps and programs lasting three years, five years, we were able to have conversations about how do we structure this differently. Let's not simply pay by the hour. Let's start looking at if this is truly a three-year program, how do we help EPAM plan for that and resource for that, so that from their modeling perspective, they can have success?
How can we plan for it in terms of getting budget and paying for it? Again, it's a little bit of a different engagement model that we've often seen with some of the other large vendors that we've worked with.
Can you talk about the prospects for this relationship to grow over time? Could it double or triple over a few years?
I'll tell you where I would like it to go. Because of our growth trajectory in the early years, we used every vendor possible. We'd go to Gartner, get the top quadrant, pick the best product, and just throw it at it to try and solve the problem because we were growing so fast. We used every vendor out there. The last 3 to 5 years, well, probably the last 3 years, we've been having very serious discussions with our vendors, basically saying, "We need you to call us out. If we're asking you to do something dumb, don't take the money and run. Tell us." Where I'm trying to get to is a small number of very trusted partners that we can engage with to share our vision so that we can accelerate how we get there.
If things continue the way they're going, I believe EPAM can absolutely be one of those partners. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Bob. Okay, we have roughly about 10, 15 minutes left. Why don't we just reconvene with our Q&A session with the management team, and then we can conclude the event. Want to come up?
Drinking water.
Right. Ramsey El-Assal from Barclays. I wanted to ask Arkady you and I guess everybody the question. This is a pretty high elevation question. What is EPAM's sustainable competitive advantage? I think kind of EPAM 1.0, a great while ago now, we felt was sort of access to very high order talent in places maybe where others weren't looking for. You're obviously evolved into a much more diverse institution. We have big incumbents now who are maybe a little bit late to the dance, saying, "Now we want to reposition ourselves to go a little more head-to-head with you all." What is it? Is it adaptiveness? Is it still access to talent? Is it culture, DNA? What do you see as your sustainable competitive advantage versus other shops?
I think-
We have a regular mic. That was for you.
This is not regular mic.
No, you're still mic-ed.
Okay. I think we're trying to explain that it's from again, whatever words I will be using right now, all of them overused in general. Still not making them not true. Okay. That's what we try to explain, that to get where we are, we need to go from the story which we were sharing, where delivery engineering was really the main advantage. When you're thinking about two and a half years ago, when we were sharing the story where I try to help with explanation through these horizons. When you're going through horizon 1, horizon 2, horizon 3, this McKinsey model, you need to find new stuff, but then you need to get rid from old stuff. I think one of the advantage we have that with engineering, when you have fundamental skills, this is retrainable and reusable in any of the horizons.
We don't need to get rid of 10,000 of EPAMers. If they have fundamentals, we can retrain them. When you have a pyramid of delivery, it should be easier to put right portion of consulting on top of this, versus for traditional consulting organization to create proportionally impactful delivery organization. It's a huge deal. That's what I'm saying, we're going from there and building the right components to be end-to-end. We keeping engineering on very good level to make sure that we bring people who are retrainable, who was doing C code like 20 years ago, they definitely will do Java code as well. If somebody was trained to some very popular at this moment, simple language to do simple stuff like HTML during the dot-com, these people, not so easily retrainable. Maintaining legacy systems. I think that's the answer.
We trying to find the right proportion of these things, and we're trying to keep DNA of engineers and delivery as a first, even with all consulting on top of this.
Thanks.
Hi. We talked a lot about scaling talent. Of course in the people business, that's the most important thing. Have you maybe talked a little bit about how you can break this linear people-revenue relationship and disrupt your own delivery model through using other, more innovative means, whether it's through intellectual capital or pre-built solutions or anything that you can put together, that you can bring to client to accelerate this process? Ultimately, custom work is custom work, but there are elements that you can find commonalities across different clients within a specific industry. Can you give us a little color around that kind of initiatives?
Thanks for asking that question. Actually, yeah. I think Victor tried to talk a little bit, in some level of detail over the depth in the global delivery platform. The fundamental value of that platform isn't just to connect our engineers to their engagements and our customers, but it's actually to build over years, reusable knowledge. Whether that's through a series of components down to the code level or through productivity tools like what he demonstrated, in the health and perf tools or in reporting tools, Those are, even if some of them are not turn-keyed out to the market for consumption by clients, those are part of what differentiates us and allows us to be able to add 23,000 people in less than three years. There's that sort of understanding of reuse, which we think goes hand-in-hand with engineering DNA.
You just don't get that level of understanding of reusable components if you don't understand code. That's number one. Number two, Art shared this with you as well, there's more than just accelerators. We can actually productize solutions, some of which are fairly comprehensive, and I don't like to use the word end-to-end because you don't know which end, and you don't know which other end. Some of the solutions are at such a level that you can actually implement them as a solution to a particular problem, usually horizontal rather than vertical. We're starting to productize those things and take them to market, and examples of that would be the work that FB's been working on for many years and things like wealth management and solutions in payments. Solutions that we're in the process of building for some of these neo banks that we're working on.
That's the second category. A third category is stuff that we're actually taking to market as EPAM IP. Larry mentioned Telescope AI to you as kind of our own platform that we use to connect people, projects, and productivity. We're starting to take these things out to the market as solutions for customers because we think that our challenges are also mirrored more broadly in what our customers experience as well. There's a whole handful of those things. Could we be doing more? Probably. We're starting to kind of understand how to market these things a little better than we have before. Our plan is to do two things. In a very thoughtful way, take those to market for customers, and then also double down on open source.
Honestly, I'm not sure that anyone really has done a great job of explaining why we're into open source so as much as we are. Fundamentally, the nature of complex delivery is going to be coming increasingly from communities, right? Multiple partners, multiple developers, internal, external teams. We need to be able to share not just information, but actually expertise, and that's why we're so into building communities, and that's why we're investing so heavily in open source. If you look at the accelerators that are out on that SolutionsHub I think that you showed, a lot of the stuff that we're putting out there as a solution is open source.
We're seeing enterprise customers finally, after many, many years, starting to get excited about their own adoption of open source and figuring out how to integrate that into more of an enterprise architecture than ever before.
I think there is one more dimension to answer this question, because if you think that this dependence of revenue growth from number of bodies, to say simpler, it's a wrong dependency also with a lot of opportunities to improve it with the clients. When we were talking about client challenges, that's why we were talking about EPAM Continuum, that we would like to make things faster with less people. For this, we need like actually to position ourself from trust level what to do and how to do instead of being told what to do and how to do. Then we probably with the same number of people we have today, we can bring two times more value. Again, that's the power of right consulting if it's going to work. That's a long shot.
You can understand in your organizations where you're working, and it's the same with EPAM and the same with other clients, how much waste actually happening in the organization. How much things done we shouldn't be done. I think it's much bigger than any accelerators we've been talking about.
How about AI?
Again, everything not so simple because for this you need to have right data, and to have right data, we need to break a lot of things which exist today. It's definitely opportunity too.
Any other questions? Okay.
That will do it.
I think we're done.
Thank you.
I'd like to thank our management team. Thank you for attending today.
Thank you.