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Business Standard: Cognizant’s Executive Vice President of Consulting Attributes the Success of the Company’s Consulting Business to its Differentiated Strategy

Mark Livingston attributes the success of Cognizant’s consulting practice to the strategy that the company laid out in 2009-2010. “Initially, I had a hard time in hiring consultants because there had been technology-oriented companies that had tried to build consulting arm and had not been too successful with it,” says Livingston. “We have done a really good job at building an operating model at Cognizant, where our consulting team is aligned to the delivery organization and that is focused on selling consulting work. Our consultants are part of the vertical, we jointly go to the market.”

Livingston states that for the first nine months of the calendar year 2015, in about 75 percent of the deals that Cognizant got, it was competing with tier-I consulting players. According to him, the consulting arm of Cognizant has been able to open 50 new accounts, on an average, every year for the past few years.

“Cognizant’s consulting practice now has 5,500 consultants…this number has gone up from about 1,000 in 2008. Consulting constitutes seven-eight per cent of Cognizant’s revenue now, says a JP Morgan report,” writes Business Standard. “The shift in Cognizant’s strategy is significant as IT consulting accounts for 13 per cent of the overall IT services market and is growing faster than the market, said a study by research firm Gartner.”

Livingston describes the current period as one of the best ever for consulting business. “The moment has arrived for companies such as the one created at Cognizant. I believe strategy without technology is no strategy at all, and clients have started to recognize this. A good strategy consultant needs to have a good understanding of the massive changes of technology going on because many of these strategies are built around the changing technology. The difference between consulting now and before is that earlier, the strategy was not focused on technology. Today, for consultants to have a tech background is an attraction,” he says.

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