TEANECK, N.J., Feb. 11, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) today announced that it is helping Family Dollar Stores, Inc. (NYSE: FDO), a leading discount retail chain in the U.S., to improve business responsiveness and deliver superior services across its more than 8,000 stores in 46 states.

As part of the three-year agreement, Family Dollar has licensed Cloud360, Cognizant's proprietary enterprise-class cloud management platform developed on Amazon Web Services for its portal applications. This is helping the retailer improve operational performance and cost competitiveness.

Cloud360 is one of Cognizant's BusinessCloud^SM solutions—a suite of ready-to-deploy, on-demand business and IT solutions. It provides an on-demand service experience and a single consolidated management console to provision, monitor, analyze, and optimize diverse cloud operations.

"We are pleased to expand our relationship with Family Dollar," said Sean Middleton, Chief Operating Officer of Emerging Business Accelerator at Cognizant. "Rapid advances in cloud technology, rapidly evolving consumer behavior, and increasing competitive pressures present a great opportunity for forward-thinking retailers such as Family Dollar to look at new, technology-powered business models enabled on demand. We look forward to helping Family Dollar strengthen its market differentiation through better process efficiencies, more empowered staff and customers, and revenue-aligned variable costs made possible by cloud technology."

Cognizant is delivering the services using a consumption-based managed services model to enable Family Dollar to not only optimize infrastructure investments and achieve a variable cost mix by paying only for usage, but also improve time-to-market by quickly deploying technology solutions without large capital outlays. Cognizant has implemented intelligent management of Family Dollar's portal applications to enhance availability, reliability, scalability, and governance, while enabling Family Dollar to sharpen its business focus, embrace metrics-driven service delivery, and support complex compliance requirements.

This agreement expands Cognizant's relationship with Family Dollar, which began in 2006 and has seen Cognizant partner with the company on strategic technology and business programs encompassing store operations, supply chain, merchandizing, and back office.

"We are constantly looking for opportunities to strengthen our value proposition and improve our performance," said Vikas Wali, Divisional Vice President of IT Application and Infrastructure Services at Family Dollar. "This engagement is crucial to our efforts to execute better on our promise of being an efficient, low-cost retailer. We selected Cognizant for its robust domain knowledge, deep infrastructure service delivery and management expertise, its enterprise platform Cloud360, and rich experience implementing solutions on Amazon Web Services. Cognizant brings the vision and the end-to-end capabilities that we need in order to adopt cloud for fulfilling our business objectives."

About Cognizant
Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, dedicated to helping the world's leading companies build stronger businesses. Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfaction, technology innovation, deep industry and business process expertise, and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies the future of work. With over 75 development and delivery centers worldwide and approximately 211,500 employees as of December 31, 2014, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ-100, the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500 and is ranked among the top performing and fastest growing companies in the world. Visit us online at www.cognizant.com or follow us on Twitter: Cognizant.

About Family Dollar
For more than 55 years, Family Dollar has been providing value and convenience to customers in easy-to-shop neighborhood locations. Family Dollar's mix of name brands and quality, private brand merchandise appeals to shoppers in more than 8,100 stores in rural and urban settings across 46 states. Helping families save on the items they need with everyday low prices creates a strong bond with customers, who often refer to their neighborhood store as "my Family Dollar." Headquartered in Matthews, North Carolina, just outside of Charlotte, Family Dollar is a Fortune 300, publicly held company with common stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FDO. For more information, please visit www.familydollar.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release includes statements which may constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, the accuracy of which are necessarily subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions as to future events that may not prove to be accurate. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied include general economic conditions and the factors discussed in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Cognizant undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities law.

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SOURCE Cognizant