Rajat Gupta, Chief Digital Officer, Xebia Global Services discusses helping companies adopt innovation, navigating challenges, and future plans for the company.

How Xebia helps companies adopt innovation.

Our Digital Impact Model focuses on leveraging the best practices to deliver the best quality deliverables to our clients. Our delivery organization is structured around verticals (industry units), horizontals (established technology/service offerings) and Centers of Excellence (thought leadership groups). Being frontrunners in technology, we continuously invest to grow dedicated centers of Excellence in Agile, Big Data and AI/ML, Cloud, Mobile, IoT and DevOps.

With a continued focus on growing our Banking vertical, we have formed a Digital Group with experts whose skills are an amalgamation of emerging technologies and digital innovations in the Banking industry. This group aligns with our customers to co-create new innovative solutions for delivering applications that go beyond current industry benchmarks.

We continuously strive for innovation through our very own R&D and Innovation lab that focuses on creating new products, services, experiences or business models, exploiting the latest technology to stay ahead of curve, exploring future scenarios for the products or industry and learn how to systematically innovate among others.

What are the challenges to navigate?

At Xebia, we take a holistic approach towards the goals of our clients and help them navigate the change by partnering with them for their innovation journey. Below are a few common challenges that we have come across that are critical to address before the start of any engagement.

1. Lack of defined strategy: Without a strategy in place, the desired transformation could fail to get off the ground. A defined strategy and objective would allow the teams to adhere to the targeted timelines with optimal utilization of resources.
2. Evolving Customer Needs: With the changing technology landscape, organizations often experience a need of upgrading their systems as per the latest market trends and technologies to remain ahead of the curve. This often leads to a challenge in the form of first understanding what the client is looking for as per its requirements and then custom fitting it into a solution that satisfies both, the need of the customer as well as is practical to deploy while also being cost-effective.
   
   Xebia continually explores the best fit innovative solutions that give our clients an edge over their competitors. Our systematic innovations allow us to continuously exploit the latest technologies to provide our clients with the most optimal solution for their needs.
3. Ineffective Business Processes: Due to the evolving nature of the industry, the business processes in place can often be inconducive to enable digital transformation. At Xebia, we deep-dive with our clients for an initial analysis and understanding of their existing business processes landscape to ensure that we start with the right background & understanding and initiate the transformation journey as seamlessly as possible.

What more opportunities do you find with emerging technologies?

We understand that the world is moving towards re-imagining its business in this digital age. With disruptive and emerging technologies such as AI/ML, Blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), Intelligent automation, we at Xebia partner with our clients to demonstrate the possibilities of implementing these for improving their business processes. Together with our clients, we explore the new technologies, trial innovative ideas, and try to leverage the latest trends coupled with these latest cutting-edge technologies to unfold the real potential of their business.

Over the years we have organically experienced growth & learning in our domain and emerging technologies knowledge across industries. However, to ensure that we offer our clients the best, we also strive to acquire the best-in-field organizations to inorganically augment our expertise as well. A few snippets offering an insight into this thought-process:

• Expertise in low-code consulting through Appcino (known for its best-in-class accelerators, frameworks, and solutions). Appcino has the maximum awards on Appian App Market innovations, more than any other partner in the market.
• AWS premier consulting through Oblivion who are known for their innovative and cost-effective offerings and are the first AWS Premier Consulting Partner in the Netherlands.
• Quality software delivery through Qxperts, where we kickstart sustainable innovation to help businesses achieve more efficient software delivery. 
• Managed cloud services through Binx.io/ Xpirit.
• Helping organizations transform and become more flexible through g-company and their Google Cloud expertise.
• AI strategy using Big Data, AI, and ML through GoDataDriven.
• Training AI professionals through Xccelerated.
• Drive relationship-based observability solution through StackState
• Gamified hands-on virtual IT lab learning through Instructor improving workforce performance through Xebia Academy training and Learning services.

To summarize, at Xebia, we consistently strive to explore the latest technology trends in the market and use them to offer the best we can to our clients.

What are the future plans?

Xebia’s vision is to enable enterprises to become Digital Leaders of the future. Our focus is to create the right “platform” strategy for our customers, which goes beyond bringing digital transformation within the groups or working on innovative applications or products for their end customers. To bring this vision to life, we bring expertise in domain-driven design thinking, context-mapping of multiple business processes, aligning them with the right architectural strategy on infra, application, and products that are scalable to cater to their future needs.

We’ve been leaders in Agile, DevOps, Cloud and Digital Transformations, focusing on core engineering values and bringing a change from legacy ways of working to continuously evolving a platform to achieve business goals. In the next few years, we plan to strengthen our expertise on the Infra side, with a lot of customers now working on hybrid cloud strategies to cater to the ever-increasing demands of their business to scale further. We’ve recently acquired a niche firm on AWS (premium consulting partner), awarded partner of the year on Azure, and we continue to grow further on our capabilities in GCP.

We are increasing our presence on the “low-code” development platforms, been one of the top services providers in Appian, and now growing further into other platforms like Outsystems and Mendix. We are building our practices in Salesforce and SAP, which will grow further our enterprise implementation business. Expanding our presence to bring in more near-shore delivery centers in Canada, Poland, Singapore & Mexico to add onto our current offices across the globe in the Americas (Denver & Atlanta), Europe (Hilversum, Amsterdam, London), India (Gurgaon, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad & Jaipur), APAC (Vietnam), Middle East (Dubai) and ANZ (Sydney).