Fast-growing EPAM buys Empathy
Bucks-based Euro software firm adds Conshy digital media ad agency
More than half of EPAM’s business “relates to helping our clients with transferring to new digital platforms adn to the cloud,” Dobkin added. “Clients are demanding digital strategy suppoort and user experience design and capabilities. That’s the main reason we decided to add Empathy to our portoflio of services: they have these capabilities which we can throw out ot all our cleints. And we can leverage each other’s client base.”
As part of EPAM, Empathy will hire “twenty, thirty people a year,” including designers, engineers, programmers, project managers, account managers, business analysts, Dobkin told me. EPAM employs about 350 in the U.S., about half in the Philadelphia area.
“It’s difficult to find good people all around the globe, Dobkin said. “That would be true in New York and Silicon Valley, as well as the Philadelphia area, and interenationally.”
Dobkin is a native of Belarus, a former Soviet republic between Poland and Russia; he cofounded EPAM in 1991. EPAM is 40 percent owned by Russia Partners, an investment group owned by New York-based Siguler & Guff. The Fidelity mutaul fund group of Boston and Dobkin are also major shareholders.