What started with a team of ten people with a mission to help enterprise digital transformation, is now 750+ strong in just 6 years! How did we make this possible? I am going to share our secret sauce with you today and hope that together we can thicken that mix with some collective brilliance.

Let me take you back to the start – the vision of Areteans has always been clear – to help the customer take strategic business decisions, resulting in targeted outcomes through digital transformation. In this endeavor, our core team maintained its focus on being a consistent Pega delivery partner. This paid off enormously as we quickly became a trusted name in the space of cloud software automation, as well as one of the top partners to achieve the Elite level in recognition of our significant investment in growing the Pega business.

A well-mapped out roadmap to success

The Areteans’ founders instilled a value-led ethos in the organization right from the start. While building up, we always knew we would scale and hence resilience was promoted as a key ingredient of the Areteans values. Bolstered with the tenets of mobility and agility, we kept our sights on the road – building a 100% digital workplace which was technologically empowered to transform customer businesses.

In fact, a future-proof mindset ensured our ability to function with uninterrupted productivity and zero disruption during the unprecedented and prolonged lockdowns and helped us meet the pandemic curveball effectively. By delivering intangibles to a distributed workforce, making hiring fully digital, and running operations built on-cloud with secure infrastructure, Areteans proved its mettle with exemplary transformation in the heart of a crisis.

Essentially, timely deliveries, dependable partnerships, and cost-effective solutions tailor-made for the needs of our customers, are integral to how we operate as a business today. This sentiment is well echoed by the leadership at Areteans, a team that comprises members with individual experience exceeding two decades each.

So how do we collectively think of our abilities? Our approach towards the work we do is to bring more conviction into the solutions we offer for our clients than present them with just capabilities. We believe that meeting our clients with a problem-solving mindset rather than just a selling proposition, makes the outcome, and therefore the appreciation, far greater in value. And that is the strategic difference each of us is committed to making to a customer’s business.

Growing from a strong foundation to significant leadership

Well it may all sound good on paper to you, but what if I told you that Areteans has made this possible in action by growing around 60 percent year-on-year? In fact in 2020, we delivered a 110 percent growth rate. In a COVID riddled year, yes!

Seeing an exponential rise in the business, we decided to make a conscious shift from being a founder-led company to a leader-oriented one. The watershed moment came in 2020-21, when we invited stalwarts from across the globe to work with us. With the right team at the helm, the expansion of the organization – across geographies, across the existing customer base, and via new business acquisition, became a reality. The vision of Areteans has been very clear from the start – to be a customer-first organization and keep the design and methodology to scale in place to back our ambition.

Another interesting aspect to the spectacular growth of Areteans has been the foray into decisioning, which is the central theme from a technology perspective for the coming year. Being a first mover in the space of customer relationship management and intelligent automation, Areteans is doing pioneering work – whether it’s better customer decision-making, fraud analysis or prevention of cybercrimes, the context for future growth is already in place. As our digital capabilities continue to evolve, we are fast creating an agile playground for customer preferences across businesses. Touchpoints are transcending channels and customer journeys are changing rapidly with the availability of faster and newer platforms. At each step our endeavor is to ensure that our clients don’t just tailgate innovation, but stay ahead of the curve with digital technology integration and AI interventions. Of course, all underpinned by the Pega Infinity platform.

Adapting to new markets

So, what keeps us going? The quest for the new, I would say! Every market has its own nuances. When we forayed into the Asian market, we were met with an extremely competitive and price-conscious environment, while our business in North America has found the markets extremely saturated, and not necessarily price-focused. With a diverse suite of businesses and verticals to work with, Areteans stays ahead of the curve by thinking global, acting local – the idea may not be very dramatic and brilliant, but this strategic thinking holds clients in good stead. One of my favorite examples here is of a customer in Southeast Asia. Starting off as advisors to them, we are now running the entire business on a Pega technology backbone. Of course, each customer is unique and we revel in customizing solutions for their challenges.

A crystal-clear vision for the future

I always take pride in Areteans being able to adapt to situations quickly due to agility. A lot of decision-making is expected of us on a day-to-day basis and being adaptive has helped us scale. In a time where attrition went through the roof, our workforce has been loyal and steadfast to the organization’s growth.

In 2022, the main geographies for expansion will be North America and Europe. Our people, strategic thinking, and technology capabilities will be the key pillars fueling our growth in these markets. We are also building frameworks and applications that reduce time and effort for our customers, in particular – implementation. In the next year, we are looking to launch accelerators and frameworks that will further enhance speed-to-market timelines for our clients.

In addition to external growth, our own ecosystem is gaining speed. The Pega Academy, which is producing 600 skilled minds per year, is another venture that is nurturing in-house talent. As we look to new horizons, we plan to be a 3000-member company, spread across continents, from North America all the way to New Zealand, working purely on Pega, complementing our partnership with Omnicom to the advantage of our clients. Our roadmap is absolutely clear, the runway is ready, and we’re set for success.