In March, Xebia had acquired Jaipur-based Appcino for its low-code competencies. Vipul Baijal, the Managing Director of Xebia Americas, spoke to BusinessLine about market opportunities and how the company continues to look for niche acquisitions in India to strengthen its global offerings. Excerpts:
IT consulting is a very broad area. What are Xebia’s focus areas?
As you know, our roots are very Dutch as our founders started it in the Netherlands in 2001. We started as a technical architecture company and since then have expanded our offerings. We offer specialised consulting in data and AI, cloud, DevOps, business agility, security, training & learning, software development, product management and quality improvement.
Our India story began in 2006-07 and in a sense we brought Agile here before others. Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of the Agile Manifesto, works out of our Netherlands office and we kickstarted it by offering training to several companies. For instance, even now in India, we are working with a player like say Cap Gemini to implement the Agile agenda. This is the kind of expertise we bring and this is what sets us apart.
You have made several acquisitions in the past year, unlike your strategy for growth historically. What changed?
For the first two decades of our journey, we grew organically, building the company brick by brick. In the last year or so, we changed our strategy and have started making acquisitions. The first reason for this is incubating and building up capabilities, the second is to acquire for scale, and the third is entering new geography where we didn’t have a presence.
For instance, we acquired Appcino — a Jaipur based company. We could have built those competencies but it would have taken us a few years. So, it was a build or buy decision. Similarly, when we acquired Oblivion in June of this year, it was primarily to achieve scale in that segment.
The key thing is we have now started looking at inorganic opportunities to accelerate our growth. When we recently acquired PGS Software, a Polish company, it was to enter new geo(graphy) where we did not have a footprint and to tap opportunities in surrounding markets.
What is your India growth strategy?
India is both an important market as well as a base to serve our global customers. We have doubled our headcount in India in the last year alone. Today in India we have 2,500 of our 4,000 plus global employees. Global numbers have expanded due to the five acquisitions we made in the last one year or so. The domestic India market has also been very attractive for us and about 15-20 per cent of our revenues come from here.
We are working with at least six of the top 10 banks in India. For some of them, we are developing a super app and for others, we offer technology consulting. Similarly, we have several clients in retail but some of them are GCC’s (Global Capability Centres) which serve the global market. To continue our growth story, we continue to look for acquisitions that make financial and technology sense.
We are looking for acquisitions in the cloud space as well as in the Data AI and ML space. We are on the forefront of helping our customers undergo digital transformations and any acquisition which can aid and strengthen that would interest us.
Sourced from BusinessLine - written by Venkatesha Babu