HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY: XEBIA GLOBAL SERVICES
Company Overview
Xebia Global Services is a The Netherlands-based Digital Transformation Company that provides innovative solutions and services to enable organizations to become digital winners. It is organized into Centers of Excellence and specialized in new technology like Agile, Develops, Continuous Delivery & Integration, Big Data, Cloud, Software Craftsmanship, and Data Center Automation. In the last fiscal year, Xebia Group’s turnover was USD 100 Million.
Mr Anand Sahay, CEO of the company, and other senior Java specialists were instrumental in starting it in 2001 in The Netherlands. It has grown from a company with a handful of employees based out of the founder’s home into a $100 million company. To cater to the increasing demand from across the globe, Xebia decided to set up in India in 2006. According to Mr Anand Sahay, CEO, Xebia, “The entrepreneurial ecosystem in India is the third largest in the world. What I do for Xebia is a stint in entrepreneurial upcycling. My experiential knowledge from the earlier parts of my career play a huge role in strengthening what Xebia does. We are not only making a mark in cutting edge technology but also exploring and creating new frontiers.”
Since then and especially in the last six years, Xebia has been spreading its footprint and has expanded globally to Middle East, USA, UK and in India to cities like Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad. These are mini Silicon Valleys of India and Xebia has a substantial presence there.
Xebians are known for their prolific and profound open source contributions. Xebia is known for turning latest technology trends into significant competitive advantage for customers by creating new solutions. As a software development company, Xebia constantly looks for new ways to thrive. In Xebia, the team members are enhancing their capabilities through partnerships to implement more end to end and innovative solutions for their customers. They have partnered with the industry’s top technology providers to enable collaboration and provide the right kind of solutions to the customers.
Digital Transformation is permeating industries — Aviation, Banking, Healthcare, Retail, or E-Commerce — and enabling companies to expand their footprints on a global scale. These sectors are embracing digital transformation to bring a paradigm shift in their customer experience.
The clients in the banking sector want to digitise their processes, improve mobile and online banking applications, and build “Future of Banking” concepts to remain in close connection with their customers. Airline companies are looking for ways to enhance customer experience across the entire travel value chain—pre-booking, reservations, price optimisation, loyalty programs, in-flight experience — and use analytics to provide improved customer experience by rolling out programs that could provide a fillip to their businesses. This approach has helped Xebia cultivate long-term relationships with over 65 global prestigious clients.
Work Culture and Challenges
True knowledge workers find Xebia an inspiring place to work where they are challenged by peers. Their open work culture, flat hierarchy, independence provides a perfect balance to people to innovate and also create quality software.
Xebia lays great emphasis on the personal development and growth of its people, investing heavily in the knowledge sharing and refinement of skills, through various knowledge sharing programs like XKE’s, XTR, Blogs. People are free to choose a training that would aid and enhance their potential, from anywhere in the world! Xebia Knowledge Exchange (XKE) provided a fortnightly forum to learn and share about the latest and greatest in technology. Techies are encouraged to blog, write books, and participate in new and emerging technology events.
To encourage the women employees and to increase their number, Xebia runs a program called #SheTalksTech. Under this, it organises mentorship programs where all women professionals can discuss with an experienced Xebian about their aspirations, areas of interest, challenges faced, and get the support required to grow professionally.
In Xebia it’s not just about working on technology, but about harnessing the collective creativity and innovation to create something new; it’s about making a difference!
Xebia has global presence and while different geographies come with their own sets of challenges and advantages, their current challenge is the “education around technology”. Today in terms of technology, we are only constrained by our own imagination. If we can imagine it and understand the tools around us, we can build solutions, we can build integrated frameworks, we can quite simply solve problems that deserve tech insight. While Xebia prides itself on its human capital, it is becoming all the more difficult to keep ready a healthy pipeline of folks who are passionate about technology and are skill ready for using cutting edge technologies.
Future Plans
Today the technology industry is undergoing a tectonic shift. For business growth it is critical to be at the forefront of technology and digital transformation. Transformation must happen at the core of a company’s business model, processes, and infrastructure. It needs disruptive thinking and innovation.
Xebia encourages its people to work on new ideas and latest and upcoming technologies to foster a culture of innovation. If the idea is commercially viable, it helps it to spin it off as a separate company (a mini startup) within its Holding Company. Xebia provides the right kind of support to achieve scale and profitability. Companies like Stackstate and XebiaLabs were formed based on this premise and spun-off to operate just like any other start-up and at the same time are a part of the Xebia group. Xebia will continue to be Tech Driven with disruptive domain solutions at the heart of it. They will look for opportunities to grow their technology width as well as take leading positions on the domain side. As a company they want to be seen as a high quality technology services company with a product mindset leading to almost technical debt-free softwares for their customers.
Xebia has been predominantly innovating on the tech side of business. In the future they intend to verticalize their services where they also start innovating on the domain side of business. Xebia will start with creating Banking and Financial services & Airlines as two domains where new ideas will be conceptualized to disrupt the business processes itself. Xebia stands perfectly poised for this.
