Fortune: Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza Named to Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year List

Cognizant’s Chief Executive Officer Francisco D’Souza has ranked #16 on Fortune’s prestigious Businessperson of the Year list of top CEOs for the year 2015.

To compile this year’s Businessperson of the Year list, Fortune weighed 10 metrics. Financial results, including 12-month and 36-month increases in profits and revenue, formed the backbone of its analysis. It wanted to identify companies that shone in the past year, but eliminate any flashes in the pan who had a single good year after a slump. Fortune also weighed each company’s stock performance and total shareholder returns over the same periods and factored in each’s ratio of debt to capital. Nonfinancial elements, like business influence, leadership style, and strategic initiatives, played a part in the evaluation as well.

“Concrete results,” wrote Fortune. “They’re what drive Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate chieftains. Of course, intangibles and inspiration matter. But what counts most for companies is the ability to generate cold, hard cash. What follows is an assemblage of superstars who navigated the inevitable turmoil this year and led their companies to stellar and, yes, concrete results.”

“No other company has appeared more times on Fortune’s list of Fastest-Growing Companies than Cognizant,” Fortune wrote about Francisco D’Souza. “Revenue exploded by a factor of 20 and profits by a factor of 15 over the past decade at this infotech outsourcer and consultancy. D’Souza is the company’s youthful (47) and dynamic chief. The son of an Indian diplomat, he taught himself programming in high school, joined Cognizant in 1994, and has been CEO since 2007. Financial services is the company’s stalwart sector, but D’Souza has kept Cognizant on the cutting edge not only with digital services, analytics, and cloud services but also by expanding its health care segment with organic revenue growth (16% last year) and its biggest acquisition to date (a healthcare IT-services provider called TriZetto). The ascent isn’t over either: The company says it’s on track for sales growth of 20.1% in 2015.”