Arkadiy Dobkin

Mr. Dobkin is the cofounder, CEO and President of EPAM Systems, the largest software engineering firm with development centers in Central and Eastern Europe.

After earning an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Byelorussian National Technical University, Mr. Dobkin began his career in Minsk, Belarus, where he worked for several emerging software development companies before immigrating to the United States in 1991.

Since 1993, when EPAM was co-founded by Mr. Dobkin, the company under his direction has grown to become one of the world’s leading software engineering firms with focus on developing software products for top and emerging software companies as well as on delivering complex, mission critical solutions for large global corporations.

Today, with over 7,000 software engineers across its development centers in CEE and thousands delivered projects in North America and Europe, EPAM is recognized as a leading software engineering firm by such major company’s clients as Oracle, SAP, Google, IBM, UBS, Barclays Capital, The Coca Cola Company, Adidas, Expedia, Thomson Reuters, and Viacom among many others.

In February of 2012 Mr. Dobkin, joined by the company’s management team, ringed the NYSE Opening Bell to signify trades opening on the day, when EPAM Systems commenced its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange and became the first software engineering firm from CEE region publicly traded on such major global stock exchange.

A recipient of numerous awards, in June 2008 Ernst & Young named Mr. Dobkin winner of The Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2008 award in New Jersey, Information Technology Consulting category. In 2006, Consulting Magazine named him to “Top 25 Most Influential Consultants”. In 2004, along with the CEOs of Wipro Technologies and CGI Group, Mr. Dobkin was spotlighted as a key industry influencer in the Foreign Relations category of CRN’s “Top 25 Executives” issue.

Through EPAM, Mr. Dobkin has been instrumental in opening the vast talent pool of the former Soviet Union region and Central and Eastern Europe to the global business community. He continues to actively promote this region across the US and Western Europe by presenting at noted international industry and technology events, such as Gartner Summits, Forrester’s GigaWorld IT Forum Europe, Russian Outsourcing & Software Summits, SAP TechEd, and others.

Presentation: Software Engineering as a Business — the past, present, and future

In his presentation, Arkadiy will talk about the hardly “repeatable” but very “agile” process of transforming the start-up he co-founded about twenty years ago into the publicly traded global software engineering services firm it is today. The “process” will be illustrated by sharing a series of chronological stories, anecdotes, and lucky (and sometimes not so lucky) coincidences while highlighting the permanently changing technology landscape, whose trends enabled these experiences to come to life and continue to trigger new exciting opportunities which EPAM plans to capitalize its future on.