EPAM’s India Leap: How the Tech Giant Built its Biggest Hub in a Decade

EPAM’s India Leap: How the Tech Giant Built its Biggest Hub in a Decade

In 2015, NYSE-listed and Newtown, Pennsylvania-headquartered technology company EPAM Systems, Inc. (EPAM) entered India through the acquisition of software solutions provider Alliance Global Services, which already had a presence in India. A decade since then, from just 1,100 employees, India now has become the largest single-location delivery centre with more than 10,000 employees working across India and in offices located in five cities. In an exclusive conversation with Fortune India’s Rukmini Rao, EPAM’s CEO, President and Chairman of the Board, Arkadiy Dobkin, EPAM India’s Managing Director, Srinivas Reddy and EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Elaina Shekhter, discussed the changing technology landscape and what 2025 holds for EPAM.

Edited excerpts.

Fortune India: India has become your largest location in terms of headcount and delivery capability. Could you summarize the last 10 years in terms of growth trajectory, services and clients being serviced from India?

Srinivas Reddy: After the acquisition of Alliance Global Services, we focused on building the EPAM brand in terms of platform product engineering. Although we faced some challenges in the initial years, we have since experienced significant growth in India, and we expect this to continue, especially in life sciences, healthcare, banking, financial services and insurance, which are currently seeing the fastest sectoral growth.

In terms of our growth trajectory, what set us apart was our high engineering quality, the use of the latest technologies and our substantial investments in cloud, data, data science, AI and GenAI over the past few years. We’ve attracted top engineering talent similar to what global capability centers would typically hire, enabling us to offer a premium service to our clients. 

Arkadiy Dobkin: To put it in a wider context, although EPAM started in the U.S., we quickly built strong engineering teams in Eastern Europe, focusing on software and technology clients. For 20 years, this shaped our expertise in product engineering. After our 2012 IPO, demand grew as big organizations needed high-quality technology solutions to drive their digital transformation initiatives. To enable us to scale globally, we expanded beyond Eastern Europe, with India playing a key role in our expansion.

In more recent years, geopolitical developments have made India even more important to us. Our India delivery capacity contribution grew from 6-7% in the early years of our operations to nearly 20% by the end of 2024, with India becoming a major hub for us in cloud, AI and digital solutions. Now, EPAM is positioned for the next wave of innovation, including Generative AI, and we’re expanding in India, Latin America and Central Asia to drive global growth.

Fortune India: You have been in India for 10 years now, and the geography delivers higher-than-average profitability for the company. Can you explain the factors that work well for you in India?

Arkadiy Dobkin: This can be attributed to several unique factors. During 2020-2023, we relocated around 14,000 employees from our traditional locations worldwide. While some of these moves were made under emergency conditions and were not always optimal for profitability, India provided a stable balance of rates and costs. This stability helped maintain profitability even as we faced additional pressures from relocating skilled employees to more expensive countries.

Fortune India: What is your outlook on 2025 and where do you see the growth pockets for EPAM?

Arkadiy Dobkin: The 2025 outlook is showing some moderate signs of improvement compared to 2023 and the first half of 2024, although the second part of 2024 was particularly good for us, showing significant growth compared to the previous two years. Overall, we are starting to see more relevant demand growing, which is a positive sign for our future prospects.

Elaina Shekhter: I think there's a couple of things that we see going on from a demand perspective and that's driving the kind of moderated optimism on the outlook. Number one, specifically in India we have a significant amount of demand coming into India, not just from GCCs but from our enterprise clients who are looking to rebalance their partner portfolios. There’s a lot of consolidation going on, and actually, EPAM India offers a hybrid solution between going to a low-cost India service provider and something that's slightly more premium with the quality that our clients expect from EPAM Global, so that's one.

Secondly, and broadly, there’s really a conversion of POC level AI programs and things that started as R&D now turning into solution build and deploy programs. We expect this trend will continue around AI and that AI is actually driving demand for our core services in advanced engineering and in data and modernization work, because most of what has to happen in order to really turn on AI at scale depends on the readiness of things like data foundation and data architecture and overall modernization programs that have yet to be completed.

The third thing we're seeing – and I think this is sector specific – there's some pressure from kind of global industry demands to grow quicker, and certainly this is true in financial services with respect to AI, and it's also true in several other verticals like life sciences for us, and we think that that is going to continue going into this year.

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