Cognizant's revenue ramp has been impressive over the last few years. From also ran a few years back the company today has carved a niche in the highly competitive IT outsourcing space. As we take a closer look at FY14, it's the traditional verticals like BFSI (42%) and healthcare, life sciences and pharma (26%) pitched in with bulk of the revenues. Meanwhile retail and CPG, manufacturing, travel, hospitality and leisure also did good job with 21%.
Clearly three focused verticals that have contributed to the bulk of revenues and add to this well-defined offerings enabled Cognizant to post robust financial growth. In the past when Cognizant was well behind Infosys, it often lacked parity in comparison as the line of argument centered on that it was based out of USA. Its true even today, but its bulk of operations are here in India and it's often seen as a Indian company with American lineage. This obviously gives it better branding in the US as compared to competition. And moreover Cognizant is known for its re-investment strategy and its strategic domain based and the infrastructure investments have clearly paid off.
All IT services providers are badly looking at key differentiators to secure higher share of the pie. Last year the market had its dose of key tech trends-from BYOD to big data to mobility-and in line with that, IT decision makers' expectations also changed. For instance, an increasing number of CEOs around the world are asking questions about how new technologies can be leveraged to build competitive advantage. Technology clearly is a CEO-level agenda today. Cognizant says that the industry is in the midst of a ‘once-in-a-decade' shift in the technology landscape driven by social, mobile, analytics, cloud (SMAC) and other digital technologies. SMAC technologies are redefining industries and their prevalence is throwing up vast amounts of rich data and information around people, devices and organizations. At Cognizant, it called this digital information the Code Halo.
The year saw some significant wins as well. Cognizant signed up with Network Rail, the UK's leading rail infrastructure provider as a key IT Solutions and Systems Integration (SI) Framework partner to provide a wide range of SI services. GoWireless, a leading wireless reseller, selected Cognizant to help the company launch its online commerce capability and generate new levels of business performance by deploying a web-based Order Management-as-a-Service (OMaaS) platform; while CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield (CareFirst), a leading not-for-profit health care company, selected Cognizant to support the insurer's efforts to leverage mobile technology for its 3.3 mn members. Other wins like the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC), for comprehensive billing and revenue management solution based on SAP Utilities enterprise software.
Closer home Max Life Insurance, India's largest non-bank owned private life insurer, has licensed Cognizant's TruMobisuite as its enterprise mobility platform to help transform the way thousands of its agent advisors do business and engage with customers.
During the year, Cognizant acquired Equinox Consulting, a financial services consulting firm based in Paris and also acquired ValueSource NV, a subsidiary of KBC group, an integrated bank insurance group and a top financial institution in Belgium. Meanwhile it also expanded its delivery and operations footprint in the Americas with the opening of a delivery center in San José, Costa Rica.