Cognizant’s Executive Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Speaks About the Company’s Growth Outlook and Digital Business

Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice President, Strategy and Marketing, Cognizant

“Building partnerships is a core competency of ours,” Malcolm Frank told The Economic Times on the sidelines of NASSCOM’s India Leadership Forum 2015 in Mumbai, where he was a speaker. “We always deal with an ecosystem. In digital, it means there are more potential partners. Picking partners and placing bets in the digital arena has to be a decentralized strategy to get the widest possible view of technologies and solutions—give people the right incentives, really trust them. It’s true that digital is new, but the foundation that it is built on has been around. So getting to the next level of leaders and managers is not that hard.”

When asked about the company’s prospects in Europe, Frank said, “If you forget about it from an economy point of view and look at it through a technology lens, the needs that exist across Europe are enormous. There is need for innovation across platforms and changing the cost model of technological delivery. The company is seeing demand across its offerings from traditional application management to new areas in digital business; the demand in the digital segment in Europe is just as much as in North America.”

Speaking with Bloomberg TV India, Frank said, “From our perspective, we see good growth in Financial Services—which goes across retail banking, investment banking, as well as insurance—driven largely by digital. In each of those sectors, the ability to reach out to customers through digital channels is very important; to make decisions—whether it is around risks or managing customer relationships—through big data and big data initiatives.

He added, “We’re seeing something similar in Healthcare. We believe healthcare is on the edge of a revolution. We’re getting instrumented a lot. With wearables or the Internet of Things, we are providing one-to-one capabilities within the healthcare market. In Retail, we see a whole new movement around digital wave and omnichannel, customers wanting to search online and buy something in the store, or have those two merged together. So when you are in the store with your smartphone, we know exactly where you are. We can provide that one-to-one, curated shopping experience. In Manufacturing, we are going to see renewed energy around IT, particularly in the instrumentation of products. By 2020, a machine will be internet-enabled, online, IT-addressable at all times. We think that’s a big driver in that sector.”

Speaking about the future of digital business, he said, “When I look near-to-long term, I am very optimistic. When we find something matures, clients know how to purchase them. We saw that with ERP, with call center software, HRM and the rest. Digital is yet to become ‘codefied’ in that manner, so a lot of projects are architectural or strategy-related. But I believe once we get into 2016 and beyond, we are going to see large-scale digital deals, in the same way we saw large-scale ERP deals in the past.”

On Cognizant’s performance outlook for 2015, Frank said, “We saw good strength in the second half of 2014. We anticipate that momentum to continue throughout 2015. Across the board, we see good growth. We have a good set of portfolio as we go into 2015.”