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Executive Interviews: Interview with Lakshmi Narayanan on Indian IT Industry
March 2006
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By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
Could you tell us briefly about the
background of your company (evolution,
promoters, business objective)?
Cognizant was founded in 1994 as
the in-house technology development
center for The Dun and
Bradstreet Corporation (D&B) and its
operating entities. During the first
two years, Cognizant's objective was
to service The D&B group of companies
including D&B Information Services,
AC Nielsen, NielsenMedia Research
and IMS Health. Cognizant
was fortunate to work with global
leaders in their respective areas of
business such as credit rating, information
research on fast moving
consumer goods, television and radio
spot rating, and healthcare information
research.
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In 1996, Cognizant took a conscious
decision to service companies outside
of The D&B Corporation to provide
greater value to the D&B Corporation
by leveraging cross-industry
and cross-enterprise best practices,
to provide its employees a richer and
faster career progression, and to
grow its business. In June 1998, Cognizant completed
its initial public offering and got
listed on NASDAQunder the symbol
CTSH, and by the end of 2004, Cognizant
was added to the NASDAQ
100 Index, joining marquee names
such as eBay, Intuit, Yahoo, Amazon,
Microsoft, Starbucks and Dell that
defined newer business paradigms. From servicing a single customer to
servicing about 250 customers, from
about 200 employees in 1994 to over
22,500 by the end of 2005, from revenues
of under $2 mn to approximately
$881 mn (our guidance) in
calendar 2005, Cognizant has come a
long way. It is today seen as the fastest
growing IT services company globally
and is seen by customers as
their most preferred partner for solutions
to business problems, leveraging
technology and processes.
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What have been your major
achievements so far?
The highest achievement for Cognizant
has been its ability to passionately
help its customers to "build
stronger businesses". Our customercentric
culture, high people-orientation,
and domain-intensive execution
excellence has helped us work
with about 250 customers, and provide
increasing value to them as we
grew those relationships. This ability
to build stronger businesses for clients
has resulted in Cognizant:
- Posting industry-leading revenue
and profit growth of over 50% in
each of the last ten quarters.
- Creating global opportunities for
its employees.
- Being the best performing IT stock
for several years now, globally.
- Being rated among the Top 5 IT services
companies globally by
BusinessWeek in its Infotech 100.
- Being rated the "Best Small Company
in America" by Forbes several
times.
- Being ranked the best "US Company
in India" by the Indo-American
Chamber of Commerce.
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What are your plans for your company
in terms of growth, new clients,
venturing into new markets and new
products/services?
Cognizant has been posting industryleading
revenue and net income
growth for the last several years. Cognizant
believes that it will continue
to grow above industry average and
its growth will come from three key
drivers:
- Deepening our relationship with
key customers through cross-selling
of newer solutions such as
CRM, data warehousing and business
intelligence, ERP, Testing and
KPO tomeet growing demand for
a "broad range of services".
- Expanding our knowledge expertise
in additional industry sectors
such as pharmaceutical, retail,
media and entertainment, logistics,
telecommunications as
companies beyond financial services
increasingly recognize the
value of broadly adopting offshoreenabled
IT and business
outsourcing.
- Broadening our geographic presence
and expanding our international
executivemanagement team
to cater to the increasing demand
fromnon-US, especially European,
customers that are increasingly interested
in adopting large-scale offshore
outsourcing.
1.
Indian Industry Case Study
2. ICMR
Case Collection
3.
Case Study Volumes
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