The 2022 Fastest Growing Firms: EPAM Continuum

Number of Billable Consultants: 3,700

Client Industries Served: 8

Consulting Service Lines: 4

Website URL: https://www.epam.com/epam-continuum

EPAM Continuum, is an integrated business, experience, and technology consulting network within EPAM. It's diverse, integrated consulting teams apply Systems Thinking mindsets to navigate our clients' complex challenges. Business, experience, technology, and data consultants work together creating holistic solutions that achieve meaningful, sustained impact for businesses, their employees, and customers.

Consulting: What were the main factors that contributed to your firm's exceptional growth?

Dobkin: The demand for digital transformation services has grown in the past several years and the clientele EPAM serves are cutting-edge, forward-thinking companies. We continue to invest in the multidisciplinary thinking that is required to tackle complex customer needs and building long-term partnerships to design and engineer the right solution, at scale. We are adaptive: investing in the right technology, providing strategic internal training programs to advance our talent and are flexible in a fast-paced market. This has contributed to our retention of key accounts, including Vue, Epic Games and, Southwest Airlines, all of which have been EPAM clients for many years. In order to maintain value for our retained clients we continually expand our offerings for long-standing accounts to serve their changing needs.

Consulting: How would you say you've managed to maintain growth during the unprecedented past three years?

Dobkin: As part of EPAM's own transformation, we recognized that to continue to effectively tackle our clients' most complex problems, we needed to form a world-class consulting organization to integrate with our established engineering core. Through a series of strategic acquisitions and organic growth, we formed a dedicated service brand for integrated consulting. Each acquisition brings proven methodologies, assets, and award-winning expertise to form a comprehensive set of tools and skills to bring products and services to life, at scale. One example is the Made Real Lab, both a physical space and set of methodologies, that prototypes new-to-world ideas so clients and consumers can touch, feel, and experience them for the first time.

Consulting: How is this year shaping up for your firm?

Dobkin: EPAM 's YoY 40% industry-leading growth is a strong performance indicator validating our product development services strategy. We maintain a geographically diverse client base in multiple industries. Our focus on delivering quality service is reflected in established relationships with many of our customers, with 53.8% and 26.5% of our revenues in 2021 coming from customers that had used our services for at least five and ten years, respectively. As we ended 2021 and almost 2 years under pandemic restrictions, our revenues had grown to over $3.6 Billion. Having ended 2021 strongly, we fully expected to continue growing 44% through 2022, but the start of the war in Ukraine forced us to rapidly reassess our client and talent acquisition projections. We found ourselves pivoting again, away from some customers, and focusing much of our time and resources supporting our employees, their families, and the people affected by the war in Ukraine. Despite 3 years of turmoil, EPAM ended Q2 2022 with a reported increase of 42.4% over the same period of 2021. EPAM and EPAM Continuum have maintained a 3-tiered priority system of preparedness to serve our clients now and post-crisis as well as protect the wellbeing of our employees and our financial position.

Consulting: How would you describe your firm's outlook for 2023? Where do you see the most opportunities?

Dobkin: EPAM Continuum's solution-agnostic and networked-team approach to our clients' challenges allows us to take the time to identify the right problem to solve, then accelerate to scale a solution. Our clients recognize that they can no longer wait to embark on transformation initiatives and are looking to collaborate on everything from identifying new business models to engineering the infrastructure that supports their business.

Our consultants have leveraged new tools and adopted core methodologies for how we conduct research and workshops, to continue to exceed client expectations. In short, we see new engagements with new clients and anticipate continuing our growth now and post-crisis.

Consulting: What would you say are your firm's biggest challenges in 2023?

Dobkin: The upcoming year brings uncertainty for all businesses and the global community at large: industries and customers alike are facing economic upheaval, inflation, and fast adjustments to unplanned disruptions and transitions. Businesses have new priorities in the digital world and transformational change is not always easy to accept or implement. Clients need trusted partners who can adapt themselves and help them to adapt at pace with outside influences. EPAM Continuum offerings will continue to evolve as we listen to the needs of our clients and the market. Our consultants will continue to explore new ways of engaging client teams and applying proven methodologies.

Consulting: What does being named one of Consulting's Fastest Growing Firms mean to your firm, your employees, and your clients?

Dobkin: Public recognition for the value we already place in EPAM Continuum would shine a light on the success of our partnership of engineering and consulting together in-house. Being named on this list would reinforce for our employees and clients what they already experience: that integrated consulting and delivery allows us to support our customers with the speed and confidence you get with networked teams. Our engineering strength is a differentiator and when engineering is integrated in the earliest phases of strategy and advisory work, we can speed time to market.

Consulting: Any additional comments?

Dobkin: The work of EPAM Continuum is based on these three pillars:

• Desirable: is the solution that we're developing desired by the target consumer if you lose the integrity of what the consumer wants/needs in the development, you land with a solution that no one will buy)
• Viable: will the solution make money for our client/is there a viable business model behind it (if you lose the viability, our client will put something in market that doesn't make money)
• Feasible: is the solution feasible from a technical/organizational perspective (if you design a solution that hasn't gone through the technical/operations review, you end up with a solution that can't be implemented and you find out too late in the process, wasting time)

When consulting and engineering are connected end-to-end, our client has confidence in whatever solution goes to market, because we've addressed all three points.