Mint, India: Cognizant’s CEO Says the Company is Positioned in the Market Like Never Before

“I’m incredibly optimistic,” says Francisco D’Souza. “I genuinely believe that for this company, the best days are ahead. The way we are positioned in the market and the scale of the opportunity is like nothing that I’ve experienced over 24 years.” Excerpts:

“I wouldn’t characterize the first 22 years of the growth journey at Cognizant as ‘growth at all costs.’ At that phase of the industry, the market opportunity was significant. We needed to catch market share — when we started the company and when we took the company public, we were small. It was the right thing to do — to capture market share. As we transitioned, it was really important to say to investors that you should now expect us to be focused on growth that is high-quality and sustainable...and as part of that, we said we would slowly take margins up. That’s a reasonable quid pro quo and we’ve executed that.

Cognizant would always remain open to engaging with and listening to constructive suggestions from key shareholders. Our shareholders are our owners. So, that’s not my definition of a risk.

We have evolved the board in a very deliberate way. It’s not been by accident. We’ve evolved it very deliberately over the past 5-6 years. Firstly, because up until 5-6 years ago, much of our board was the board that we had when we took Cognizant public. For a variety of reasons, we knew that we would need to take the board through a transition. At the same time, there were a number of things and capabilities that we felt we needed on the board. Some of those things were technology-oriented, but equally they were capability-oriented. For example, we looked at the size and scale of Cognizant’s business today. Going forward, we felt we needed to add people who had experience running a large global, distributed organization across multiple companies.”

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