Exclusive Interview: Anand Sahay, Co-founder & CEO, Xebia Global Services

Xebia, an IT consultancy with a special focus on Cloud Services is looking for acquisitions in the cloud space as well as in the Data AI and ML space to help the customers undergo digital transformations. An exclusive Interview withAnand Sahay, Co-founder & CEO of Xebia Global Services shared the company's developments so far.

How was Xebia Global Services set up?

Xebia, a niche boutique IT consulting firm, was set up in the Netherlands in 2001. Xebia started as a group of the finest—and most experienced—technologists who could advise on the right technology blueprints and architectures leading to very successful outcomes for customers. Xebia soon started its software development unit to implement good architectures, growing into a world-class company of software developers.

What are the recent developments/ acquisitions?

Recently, Xebia has acquired Google Cloud Premier Partner g-company with a revenue of 24 million Euros. With g-company, Xebia can grow by adding additional services to its one-stop-shop for businesses worldwide. Xebia’s technology and leading digital capabilities will go hand in hand with g-company’s premier Google Cloud partnership for an increased market share in India, North America, the UK, Europe, ME, ANZ and other A-Pac countries.

Xebia’s current turnover. Where do you see your organization in the next three years in terms of business growth?

Xebia’s current revenue turnover is 200 million euros. Xebia intends to further expand its services into Blockchain, Augmented and Virtual Reality along with IoT. Domain focus will also increase and expand into retail, healthcare and travel.

What are Xebia Global’s capacity and capabilities?

Xebia is currently over 3,000-people-strong with more than five development centres in India, Vietnam, Belgium, Australia, Canada and the UAE, Netherlands, UK and US.

Our software strength span all critical capabilities required to bring successful differentiated digital transformation programs to our global customers. Some key areas are Architecture, Full Stack Engineering, Cloud, DevOps, SRE, Data Engineering, Data Science, Low-Code Engineering and Product Development.

Market analysis vis-à-vis competition.

Xebia’s biggest strength is its ability to bring the right set of technologies—both mainstream and emerging—to build innovative architectural blueprints which can be a big differentiator from other competitors. This results in a much better outcome for our customers with respect to innovation, as well as scalability of applications.

Company’s plans to overcome Covid-19 challenges

Covid-19, obviously, did bring some uncertainty in early- to mid-2020 as customers struggled to decide on budgets for new software programs. But, by August 2020, it was clear that the whole world would move strongly towards digitization which requires software.

By October 2020, we were booked with no engineers left to take on the demand for new software. We had one of the strongest work pipelines ever. Xebia had to significantly increase its recruitment engine to identify and hire the best around the world and train to build software craftsmanship skills in new engineers. We had to innovate on the remote hiring process, as well as the remote induction of new engineers.

Specific tie-ups/public sector achievements

Xebia has tied up with multiple, well-known industry-leading ISVs, for instance, renowned Cloud providers and Data OEMs like Cloudera. Xebia is also doing frontier work in the BFSI space and has strong tie-ups with reputed ISVs. These alliances are helping Xebia bring best of breed products to customers and enabling them to provide unique products to theirs.