Key Findings & Highlights:

Expleo is the organization resulting from the 2018 acquisition by Assystem Technologies (ATG) of Software Quality Systems (SQS). Germany-headquartered SQS was founded in 1982. The company was, until Q1 2018, the largest QA/software testing service pure-play globally.

The company has transformed its business model, expanding from its background in QA consulting and onshore test delivery to provide a broad portfolio of application and consulting services. This has also resulting in growing its presence across offshore and nearshore centers, e.g., India, for addressing multi-year managed development and testing services contracts (managed services, MTS/MDS). It also repositioned its onshore service offering away from staff augmentation (professional services, PS) and is growing its specialized technical services and management consulting services (MC).

With agile and DevOps driving closer coupling of development and testing services, Expleo uses its quality engineering heritage to position itself as having a different perspective than its traditional application development competitors. Its historical focus on testing also provides it a longer focus on the application of automation in the development lifecycle and the impact of non-functional requirements.

Low code application services are a component within Expleo's broader digital software development and engineering services. These services span the full planning, implementation, and operations lifecycle, including assessing capabilities, developing a transformation strategy, implementing the strategy, developing supporting frameworks and tooling, delivering application development and support, and training and coaching.

Specific offerings that comprise the digital development and engineering services include:

• Full-stack software development
• Low code development
• Cloud-native application development
• Mobile app development
• RPA development
• Integration development
• UX services
• Prototyping
• Systems engineering
• Architecture Design and Reviews
• Low code platform testing
• Maintenance and production support.

In addition to the Assystem/SQS merger that forms the core of Expleo, the company has expanded its capabilities through a network of affiliate companies including Aerotec, Athos Aéronautique, Double Consulting, Edison Technical Recruitment, Moorhouse Consulting, Silver Atena, Stirling Dynamics, Sud Aviation Services, Trissential and Vista Technologies.

Expleo is a private company and does not release details of its revenues. NelsonHall estimates its revenues to €903m in 2020. NelsonHall estimates the revenues of the low code application services business of Expleo in 2020 were ~€10m.

While Expleo sees low code application services taking an increasingly large proportion of the application development services market, it also sees the limitations of low code platforms. Frequently, it sees the requirement to augment low code development with traditional application development to develop the applications with the capabilities required to meet client objectives.

It, therefore, positions its low code application services as acting as a bridge between citizen development using low code platforms and full-stack development, supporting business-side developers by building structures to govern the development process and integrating citizen-developed applications to the broader ecosystem. While it can help clients develop citizen developers within their business units that provide specific business and process knowledge, Expleo looks to augment these resources with skilled developers to address integration requirements or add incremental functional capabilities on top of the low code platforms.

Expleo has a total of ~15k employees globally across ~30 countries, including delivery concentrations in Romania, India, and South Africa.

Its low code applications skilled workforce is ~150-200 developers. This low code application skilled workforce works across both delivery of low code based projects and working with partners like Neutrinos in building their low code platform.

As the application development lifecycle becomes more tightly integrated through agile and DevOps-based delivery approaches, Expleo is looking to leverage its core capabilities within the quality and testing phase into a broader application development capability, particularly using low code application platforms. This provides Expleo a unique position in the market, as it starts with quality and testing considerations. However, it will also need to change its client's perceptions of its capabilities to develop a more expanded relationship, requiring a focused, concerted go-to-market even within its existing client base.  

Expleo has built relationships with a broad set of low code application platforms, focusing on developing specific use cases across a breadth of industries and business functional areas. This is a smart approach, rather than trying to fit all potential opportunities into a small set of platforms. While it has built strong relationships with companies like Neutrinos and Unqork, it lacks a significant focus on some of the more mature platforms such as Pega and Appian though does possess Microsoft Power capabilities. As these platforms have a broader existing client footprint and more mature portfolio of offerings, lacking these capabilities may limit Expleo's opportunities within clients who have already invested in them.

Expleo's application development and low code application platform practices are still relatively nascent. This provides both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity exists to build a practice native to these platforms rather than re-skill a broad legacy application development capability. The challenge is that this area's rapid growth will mean increased competition from large competitors with more established application development capabilities.