Anand Sahay: Bringing Better Business Plans to the Organization to Spearhead Software Advancements

The rise of software engineering has introduced the industry to a wide array of novel engineering challenges. Several businesses have employed teams of skillful engineers to address these issues. To help businesses cope with the rising industry demands, Xebia was set up in 2001 in the Netherlands as a niche IT consulting boutique firm. When the software world was struggling with failed implementations due to bad architectures and wrong choices of technology, Xebia started with 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 the customers. Soon it also became evident that to implement good architectures, it was equally important to have high-quality software craftsmen to develop any sort of programming and software and that is when Xebia started its software development unit, which quickly grew into a world-class company of software developers who believe in building innovative software solutions using the latest techniques and languages to give customers a differentiated business value. Xebia also became one of the few companies in the world to adopt agile software development methodologies very early on.

A Unique Amalgamation to Achieve Software Excellence

In 2006, Xebia got set up in India to tap into the country's growing software engineering prowess and cater to the demand of global customers for quality software engineering talent. The best practices of architecture, engineering, and software craftsmanship learned through years of practice in the Netherlands were all combined with India's software engineers to build a unique amalgamation of quality and scale. That made Xebia a unique proposition in India and completely differentiated it from other software firms worldwide.

Xebia's reputation in using the latest technology to build quality software soon started getting acknowledged. The company's software engineers' blogs, contribution to open-source, and knowledge sharing at the global stage started to bring global customers in a contract with Xebia for its mission-critical work. Soon the company expanded into the US, UK, Middle East, and South East Asia and became Xebia Global Services.

Xebia currently has over 4000 people working under the name with 5 development centers in India, Vietnam, UAE, Netherlands, Belgium, UK, USA, Australia, and Canada.

The company's software strength spans all critical capabilities that are required to bring successful differentiated digital transformation programs for global customers. Some of the key areas that Xebia focuses on are architecture, full-stack engineering, cloud, DevOps, SRE, data engineering, data science, low code engineering, and product development.

An Insightful Leader with Futuristic Views

Anand Sahay, the CEO of Xebia, is an electronics engineer who started his career at TCS as a software programmer. Later, he completed his MBA and moved entirely into technology sales and customer management.

In 2014, he took the role of CEO at Xebia with the mandate to build Xebia's footprint outside the Netherlands. In the process, Anand co-founded Xebia Global Service, which established Xebia's business in the US, UK, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and Australia.

Always a Pioneer in Solving Critical Business Problems

As the CEO and Co-Founder of Xebia Global Services, Anand is both an entrepreneur and a leader. On a daily basis, he focuses on helping business leaders to solve critical problems as well as run the company. In his career, Anand has been exposed to a diverse range of organizations, functional groups, and cultures. He admits that collectively, these experiences and people have contributed to the person and business leader he is today. Anand shares some of the greatest leadership lessons he has learned throughout his career-

"No one can run and grow a company alone. The only option is to continuously find people better than you. It's also important to give them a free hand while obsessively removing any kind of 'fear' from their minds," says Anand.

He states that communicating the larger goals continuously to one's leaders is another critical aspect to succeed and also adds that awareness of his own weaknesses has been one of the harder things which he realized is crucial to building a high-performance team.

Sailing through the Early Day Challenges with Compassion 

Anand discloses that in the initial phase of his Xebia journey, almost everything was to be built while keeping a very strong focus on the financial aspects. But one of the most difficult parts was to attract, hire, and retain the high-quality talent in the early part of the company's growth.

The Cognizance of a True Leader from Anand's Binocular 

Anand enunciates that everyone needs a balanced and honest view of their strengths and weaknesses. To build a successful team to lead, he articulates that the leaders must be so aware of their weaknesses that they can hire against them. It is also crucial to possess awareness about the certain areas where leaders soar and where they need more help.

He believes in speaking clear enough to get the point across by maintaining a balanced delivery of firm and delicate messaging. Anand says that he stops talking and tries taking a different approach if he is not getting the desired results. "Learning the needs and motivations of key stakeholders is also as important as determining how to better position the message to reach the desired actions and results," he highlights.

Anand further adds that it is also important to bring vision and strategy to the here and now. Leaders need to be able to communicate with frontline staff without de-positioning management, but they also need to be able to connect. It's important to engage with all levels because there will be a different perspective from each operational group and level. "Business is becoming more moment-to-moment than ever before. It's more difficult to execute long-term planning because businesses need constant re-evaluation to be relevant with the times. Leaders need to be present, listening, and open to learning from everyone around them," he mentions.

Lastly, Anand asserts that everyone can help leaders learn crucial lessons. It goes without saying that everyone has their own style of leadership, their personal brand. Observing how others handle themselves – peers, management, and other external leaders – is a great way to learn. Whether they agree with how a situation is handled or not, the experience can teach them how to approach a similar issue in the future. "Leadership is a constant assessment and re-evaluation, so the more you can learn from the experiences of others – good or bad– the better off aspiring leaders will be when they are positioned to make the decisions" he claims.

'Disruptive Technologies and Customer Fulfilment' at the Heart of Innovation

Anand states that rather than using the word 'innovation', he prefers to call it 'the way forward with Xebia'.

He asserts that across all industries, the common themes that will resonate in 2022 are those of automation, AI, cloud, and digital technologies that will enable a transformation towards customer-centric, personalized, proactive, and predictable customer experiences. With many early movers exploring use cases for AI, robotics, and industrial IoT, among a plethora of other technologies, Anand pinpoints the need for an approach that strikes a balance between the three key contributors to success in today's world. Leading transformative initiatives that will define the years to come is a task that requires the right skill set, technology experience, and capabilities from the processes and practices standpoint. At Xebia, the team's capabilities stem from deep domain experience in retail, hospitality, financial services, fintech, and insurance, which puts the company in a unique position to help customers achieve their transformation goals to remain relevant in this marketplace of flux.

Some of Xebia's transformative innovations range within these domains:

• Consulting Services: Xebia's transformation and business agility offerings helps fast-track the customers' transformation strategy through accelerated learning, agile processes, and end-to-end alignment between the businesses and IT operations for agile and sustainable digital operations
• Talent Services: The team focuses on transforming the customers' capability through training, capability building, and the setup of centers of excellence. Their depth of experience with ITSM, agile DevOps, robotic process automation, AI, and other digital enablers help customers realize their goals with a faster time-to-market and significantly reduced risk.
• Technology Partnerships: The company's powerful low-code competency through Appcino to Oblivion that drives cloud solutions, and coMakeIT that brings product engineering expertise, the team is successfully bridging the gap between requirement and solution, delivering competitive advantage to the customers. Appcino, a low code BU of Xebia, with its decade-long experience, is working with numerous global clients enriching their low-code journey on Appian from ideation to delivery and post-delivery. Appcino specializes in a unique and successful accelerator-driven approach, cutting the time to implement starting day one and ensuring higher ROI.

Anand mentions, "According to Morgan Stanley, IT spending for U.S. companies continues to be the dominant driver of growth accelerations. U.S. spending is on track to increase 4.9% and 4.7% in 2021 and 2022. Xebia has also been making substantial investments to support the growing demand, which is back to the pre-pandemic level again."

In a nutshell, Anand and his team believe that sustainable transformation and what Gartner calls, the Composable Enterprise, is the trend for 2022 and beyond. And Xebia, with its motto of creating digital leaders, can help businesses remain relevant and thrive during the tumultuous time that the industry is currently experiencing.

Playing a Win-Win Game with Digitization

Anand opines that the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain represent an unprecedented opportunity for the enterprise and the public sector. He expresses that every institution which is capable of exploiting these technologies is already and will keep getting a chance to radically streamline and enhance existing processes, create entirely new business models and develop innovative products and services for a new generation of consumers. But this is not a vision of a utopian tech-enabled future, instead, he believes that the technology capabilities are available today to help leaders build the business of tomorrow. Any leader of today will think of making a powerful combination of all these advanced technologies for automating trust by providing immersive interfaces, extended reality, working autonomy, digital reflection, and hyperconnected networks. "The primary vision behind every business should be about significantly expanding the capacity to work smarter and more seamlessly with the use of these converged technologies," adds Anand.

A Future Laden with People and Technology Transformation 

Anand says that Xebia brings with itself the evolution of IT services that are continuing to underpin technology and people transformation in 2022 and even beyond. The team's opinion reveals that 2022 will thus be the year where people and technology transformation mature and establish new standards and norms all over the world. While the business cases for different industries may vary, Anand states the core transformative trends that the industry might witness this year.

• The Digital Enterprise: With a majority of enterprises now capitalizing on the opportunity presented by a permanently remote workforce, work-from-home has made the call for the enterprises to digitalize inescapably Gartner predicts a 16% CAGR up to 2025 for digital transformation services, leading to a market size of US$2.7 trillion.
• AI at the Forefront: As businesses go digital, automation, intelligent automation, and artificial intelligence have evolved as major contributors to enabling a massively distributed enterprise and its globally distributed operations. IDC predicts a CAGR of 19% up to 2025 for AI products and services, leading to a marketing size of US $576 billion.
• IT Services for 24×7 Operations: As enterprises go digital and operations go global, IT services need to go hand-in-hand with operations and business vision, making traditional fee-for-service and managed services models nearly obsolete, as outcome-based and result-oriented models become increasingly sought after.
• Cybersecurity Redefined: With people and data from all over the world, accessing enterprise systems and data round the clock, from different networks, different devices, different types of connection, and using a diverse toolset, the term perimeter defense has become almost irrelevant. Cybersecurity today needs to protect every user, application, interface, connection, and a packet of data whether at rest or in motion.
• Compliance beyond Regulations: With digital enterprises, global operations, and commoditized data, the current regulations for PII, data protection, privacy, and information security, in general, have gone from barely meeting the needs to being inadequate. Here, enterprises and regulators need to revisit the implications of compliance, standards, and regulations.
• Flexibility and Agility are the Core: With as much change in the recent past and more on the horizon, the key to improved relevance and profitability in the post-pandemic normal. For most businesses, technological changes can be cumbersome from the knowledge, experience, and competency standpoints. As business cases for technology adoption, transformation and innovation are explored, businesses will increasingly feel the need for their IT service partners to step up to fulfill roles in areas such as agile development, DevOps, DevSecOps, and continuous-integration-and-continuous-development (CI/CD). Here, the industry will see a resurgence of IT Services providers with consulting services experience as a bridge between technological edge and capabilities. Low code development is becoming popular to speed up the time to market for businesses.

Words of Wisdom for Future Leaders

Anand advises emerging leaders to remain aware of the market play; it is crucial to have an in-depth understanding of the problem they want to solve to build their respective businesses. He also asks them not to jump into businesses they have not understood or deeply analyzed previously.