Back in the late 1980s, Arkadiy Dobkin remembers, he envied the freedom with which Indian programmers were able to commute between their U.S. clients and their start-up consultancies inside India. At that time, the Soviet government's attitude toward such comings and goings — despite the liberating climate of perestroika — remained tempered by the Cold War dictum, "If you leave, don't come back," says Dobkin.
It was late 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Dobkin decided he could wait no longer. The 31-year-old programmer emigrated to the U.S., with plans to link American clients to a 25-employee consultancy he had started in Minsk. Today, Dobkin's consultancy boasts more than 1,600 employees and is recognized as the largest provider of software engineering and consulting services in Central and Eastern Europe.
With its North American headquarters in Princeton, NJ, EPAM today operates development centers in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Hungary. Meanwhile, this past February, Siguler Guff & Company made what it called a "significant investment" in EPAM. While the fortunes of India's consultancies have continued to grow, Dobkin's firm is clearly earning the envy of its rivals.
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