Endava: The new design of people and technology working together

With two-decades footprint in delivering technology services that cover the entire cycle from idea to production for a wide range of software products and solutions, Endava marked in mid-2019, one year since a milestone achievement for the company – the listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

As the company’s CEO  John Cotterell uttered in a public statement, “the IPO was a natural next step in the evolution of Endava and a year on I would like to take another opportunity to thank my colleagues, our clients and our partners for their contribution to our ongoing story and success,” said John. “Since our IPO we have continued to build on our core purpose of creating an environment and culture that breeds success by caring for our customers as individuals and enabling our people to be the best that they can be, and I am immensely proud of our achievements.”

Claudiu Constantinescu, Regional Manager Central Europe at Endava states for The Diplomat – Bucharest that this IPO also marked the recognition of the successful services and projects delivered to the company’s clients, the excellent value contribution of our great people and a celebration of the ongoing story and success.

“It is a superior degree of maturity for the company and it is the result of 20 years of evolution started from our philosophy of focusing on helping people succeed (people who work for us, people who engage with us, and people who use the systems and applications we design, build, and operate),” Claudiu Constantinescu says. From this point on, Endava set on a journey to reimagine the relationship between people and technology which was recognized in multiple awards and global recognition.

Building synergies

The company’s strategy focused on their services and project delivery for clients, especially in the Payments and, generally, the Financial space, but also in other areas by employing the most innovative solutions and cutting-edge technology to create solutions for business challenges. This direction has been further developed during last year through the strategic partnership that Endava started with Bain & Co and, more recently, as they became principal partner of the Fintech Alliance.  Also, the company runs a (continuous) internal transformation aimed to keep them adaptable which last year meant further expanding their capacity and capability into new locations and technology areas, implementing a regional operating model to consolidate synergies, alignment, and further growth adapted to each market where the company operates.

In terms of business objectives for the future, Endava clearly plans to consolidate on adding increasingly higher value to the services, applying engineering excellence in their solutions and maintaining the strong strategic partnerships that we have with their clients. “We’ll therefore continue to focus on growing areas such as Architecture, Data, CRM, and bringing Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain and RPA into real life use for our customers and end users,” Claudiu Constantinescu adds.

Organization transformation: Agile and Digital

Endava’s offering covers transformational services at the organizational level focused on agile and digital, according to Claudiu Constantinescu. “These are aimed at making the client organization able to respond faster to their business environment and adapt quicker to context change.We use automation inside the agile processes: testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment, etc. as well as business processes, starting with RPA and up to BPM,” the Endava’s manager explains.

As the company’s manager explains, the main challenges in this area are not the technical components, but the functional part of process modelling, the orchestration, integration, and the security elements. Most businesses need automation to speed up their time to market and to free up time of individuals from mundane and repetitive tasks. Simple automation solves these challenges only to a certain degree, but today’s business environments evolve very fast, so the company looks to embed Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create adaptive systems.

Another challenge for the company and the industry is simplification and integration. People are in the middle of many flows of information and need to interact with many systems on a variety of platforms (PCs, mobile phones, web sites, etc.). The interfacing can also be automated to a higher degree with today’s technology and this comes again to AI and ML on top of which we add Augmented & Virtual reality, and chatbots, according to Claudiu Constantinescu.

The macro-economic impact

The most important aspect to expect in 2020 and the next period is a continuous acceleration of the integration of technology with businesses and, generally, people’s lives in all the aspects.

Economic reports show a few challenges internal to the Romanian market (budget deficit and inflation) but also external ones (slowdown of the German economy and Brexit). The world economy has always had challenges and has always been evolving in cycles. “I am hoping and trusting that correct measures will be taken to smoothen the impact of the slower stages,” Claudiu Constantinescu says and adds: “Another challenge I foresee is the stability of the legal and tax regime. There were several changes in the past few years which were difficult to digest in the business environment and especially in IT – an example would be moving the salary taxes from the company to the individual that came with a reduction of the advantage of being tax exempt.” The last challenge worth mentioning is the IT labor market – which is very good in Romania. But still, there is a higher need of IT specialists. I would like to see the public and private universities adapt to this demand both in terms of number of students but also in terms of content of the curricula, according to Endava manager.

Claudiu Constantinescu states that he remains optimistic regarding the evolution of the IT industry overall and of Endava in particular. To sustain his statement, Endava’s manager considers that, on the economic cycles front, there will be a lighter impact or even no negative impact at all for the IT space. “And the simple reason is that even when certain lines of business are looking to reduce costs, consume less, etc. – generally optimize something, the solution involves technology and better processes. And this is exactly what we, at Endava, are very good at! We help our clients identify the challenges, evaluate options, create efficiencies, and reimagine the relationships between people and technology,” Claudiu Constantinescu says.

On the legal and tax changes, the manager considers that it is indeed very difficult, but the company proved to be very adaptable as an organization and always ready to re-invent and optimize. The company’s footprint on several geographies it is an advantage that would make the company to be able to absorb local markets moves easier in the global context.

Regarding the labor market, Endava manager sees some good trends regarding projects and endeavors of some of the universities, but they also see a few alternative options offered by various organisms that support training people for the IT domain. “We collaborate with both the universities and the other organisms by shaping the curricula, teaching courses, organizing workshops and mentoring students – so we are deeply involved in developing the academic partnership and building the necessary and skilled workforce for the future,” Constantinescu adds. 