Cognizant Sales Soar, Exec Promotions Follow

VAR500 solution provider Cognizant Technology Solutions reported revenue growth yesterday of nearly 27 percent -- and also named a new president while rolling out a number of other executive management promotions.

Cognizant reported revenue rose in the fourth quarter to $1.66 billion, up 26.9 percent from the year-ago quarter and 3.9 percent sequentially. For the full year, Cognizant's revenue increased at an even higher rate of 33 percent from 2010, coming in at $6.12 billion. This is the third straight quarter that Cognizant has seen more sales than its rival Wipro.

Francisco D'Souza, CEO of Cognizant, said that his company's willingness to invest in its employees and technology was the key to its healthy earnings report.

"With business challenges driven by globalization, regulatory changes, virtualization and consolidation and a confluence of new technology architectures such as mobile, social, cloud and big data, clients are increasingly looking to a partner like Cognizant that can create new levels of business value," he said in a statement.

Cognizant, which specializes in offshore outsourcing, is increasing its offshoring activities in geographic markets such as Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East. It is also growing its capacity to provide increasingly popular offshore services, such as business process outsourcing (BPO), knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and IT infrastructure services.

Along with the earnings news, Cognizant also announced changes to its executive management team.

Gordon Coburn, who joined Cognizant in 1996, served as Chief Financial Officer since 1998 and as Chief Financial and Operating Officer since 2007, has been promoted to president. During Wednesday's conference call, Coburn said, "Our fourth quarter annualized attrition rate of 10 percent, including our BPO/KPO practice, was quite favorable compared to the industry and is a true reflection of our status as an employer of choice." The company added a net total of 33,700 jobs last year.

Other promotions at Cognizant include: Rajeev Mehta is now Group Chief Executive -- Industries and Markets; Chandra Sekaran is Group Chief Executive -- Technology and Operations; Karen McLoughlin will take on the responsibilities of Chief Financial Officer and Malcolm Frank will be executive vice president, strategy and marketing.