DataArt has historically relied on three core pillars: our people, our clients, and our values. The crisis caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has tested our operations, but it has not changed our values. As we reflect on the events and challenges of the last few months, we are extremely proud of our company and our employees, every one of whom has demonstrated immense strength, adaptability, and resilience. We are deeply grateful for the ongoing support from our clients, partners, and investors, all of whom have helped us meet today’s challenges head on. It’s because of their support that our business remains strong. We are pleased to share that DataArt continues to grow and see positive results, despite significant volatility and disruptions in both the labor and client markets.
Below, we share some of the highlights of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 that showcase the strength of our business. We also offer our view on where we’re headed for the remainder of this year.
2021 Full Year & Q1 2022 Highlights
In 2021, we expanded our global footprint, strengthened our service offerings in key innovation sectors, and achieved nearly 60% revenue growth. As of today, we are financially strong and enjoy significant investor support. Due to our robust business continuity planning and agility in the face of the war in Ukraine, we have experienced minimal interruption in the delivery of our services. So far in 2022, we are seeing continued strong client demand for our key engineering services, with first quarter 2022 revenue growth of 50% year-on-year. However, we anticipate that the pace of growth will slow over the next few months as the war continues to impact certain client commitments, and we finalize our exit from Russia and re-organize our delivery capacity.
Focus on Growth and Expansion
Investing in Innovation
Given our scale and international presence, as well as our reliable and secure infrastructure, we continue to expand our technology capabilities in key growth areas including Cloud, AI/ML, and Data Analytics. We are actively investing in internal Centers of Excellence, proprietary R&D, and training programs, all of which allow us to scale quickly to meet client demand. A recent example of our achievement in research is our AutoML solution, which aims to reduce the amount of manual work and time needed for common data preprocessing and machine learning tasks. The solution supports feature engineering on relational datasets, as well as model selection and optimization, focusing on explainability with the code generation features. Moreover, by strengthening our position in the market, we have also developed the DP-ML accelerator, the most important achievement of which is our intelligent document processing solution, which enables smart data extraction from documents and provides interpretations of the extracted blocks. It helps to organize fully or partially automated processes for routine tasks like document processing, transaction handling, and text processing, fundamentally reducing the human labor necessary, decreasing errors, and speeding up the entire process.
Our R&D accelerators unleash the company’s true potential and help to drive ROI with fast prototyping, code reuse, and people expertise.
We continue to identify and invest in partnerships with major platform providers that align with our overall strategy and values, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, Stripe, Salesforce and BigCommerce.
In the past year, we have achieved new specializations with some of our key partners, including:
- Microsoft – Gold Application Integration, Gold Cloud Platform, Gold Data Platform, and Silver Security. We also upgraded the following competencies from Silver to Gold level: Cloud Productivity, Data Analytics, and DevOps.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Service Delivery in: CloudFormation, Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway.
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – Streaming Data Analytics, Modernize .NET Applications, Advertising & Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Media & Entertainment, Google Cloud Databases, and Retail & Wholesale, as well as a new specialization – Application Development.
- Salesforce – We earned new distinctions in Sales Cloud, Einstein, and Experience Cloud
Finally, we are working to strengthen our ability to deliver on large-scale, mission critical, enterprise transformation programs. We launched new Centers of Excellence for Program Management and Product Engineering, as well as invested further in our Cyber Security practice.
Exiting Russia and Expanding Operations
DataArt is exiting the Russian market in a manner that is definitive, strategic, and consistent with our values and commitments to employees and clients. We will close all our Russian offices by June 15, 2022 and have begun the process of liquidating all DataArt legal entities as expeditiously as possible.
As we continue to diversify our delivery footprint, DataArt remains focused on expanding operations and increasing capacity in existing locations in Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East, while also working to grow new operations in Latin America, which we view as a key strategic region for future growth. As of today, headcount in Latin America has grown by more than 50% in the past quarter, and we are on track to hire thousands of new employees in the next 3 years.
We have accelerated hiring in 14 different countries outside Russia and Ukraine, producing a strong pipeline of qualified candidates including more than 577 new hires in Q1 2022, which is a 12% increase year-on-year.
Some examples of the steps we’ve taken to diversify and grow our delivery organization:
- Over the past months we expanded into Serbia and Cyprus, as well as opened new offices in Lodz and Krakow (Poland), and Montevideo (Uruguay).
- DataArt has started to hire in Colombia and Brazil, adding many new engineers per month across the region.
- We have helped to relocate many of our Russia-based employees, and we’re expanding back-office operations across the globe. As a result of employee relocations from Ukraine and Russia, DataArt’s offices in Dubai, Armenia, Georgia, Germany, and other countries have grown significantly. Overall, DataArt intends to continue hiring in 20 countries.
- Continuing to invest in our people and education, we have launched an educational training course for QA engineers in Poland. Participants (over 600 people) include relatives of our colleagues who have relocated from Ukraine. The goal is to train QA engineers from scratch and help our colleagues' displaced families learn new skills and become more competitive in the labor market. This is just one of many steps we’ve taken to provide support to the families of colleagues impacted by the war.
Recent DataArt Recognition
In 2021, DataArt received various accolades for being a great place to work. In August, DataArt was named to the Inc. 5000 list, a prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States, for the tenth consecutive year.
The company also won “Best Company Culture,” “Best Company for Diversity,” “Best Company for Women,” “Best Company for Work-Life Balance,” and “Best Company Compensation” awards from Comparably, and earned a Great Place to Work Certification. More specifically, 97% of employees reported that DataArt is a great place to work (compared to just 59% at a typical U.S.-based company) and our employee retention rate (89%) remains among the highest in the IT services market.
Additionally, DataArt was listed in the top 30 large companies with the “Best Company Outlook in 2022”, according to anonymous employee feedback submitted to Comparably.com over the past 12 months.
As we continue to put people first and support our employees in need during this unprecedented time, we stand strong and are confident that we are on track with our goals. We’re well on our way to becoming an even more global firm with greater capacity and capital to deliver results for our clients.
Once again, thank you for your partnership. We look forward to continuing to provide outstanding value to our clients as we build a global, next generation IT services firm.
