CRN.com: Cognizant’s Vice President and Global Markets Leader of Life Sciences Says the Company’s Acquisition of Cadient Group is a Step Toward Bridging the Gap Between Business and IT

“The life sciences industry is going through a period of fairly intense change. Obviously we want to be at the forefront of those changes,” Shankar Narayanan told CRN.com shortly after Cognizant announced the acquisition of Cadient Group, a full-service digital marketing agency that serves a broad spectrum of life sciences companies in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, consumer health, and medical device industries. Excerpts from the interview:

“While sales and marketing capabilities and offerings are not new to Cognizant, Cadient adds two major capabilities to Cognizant’s line up: First, it expands the brand strategy across many digital footprints, and second it adds creative capabilities around campaign design.

The overall opportunity in the $1 trillion global life sciences market is huge. The life sciences industry, in particular, is a dynamic market, with factors such as the Affordable Care Act changing the way drugs are being reimbursed and new diseases driving change.

Branding is particularly important in the life sciences space. The companies are now actively looking to transition from more traditional branding techniques to tackle web, mobile and social mediums. However, branding in the life sciences space is tricky, as there are strict regulations around branding and strategies. Cadient Group already had experience in that area and will bring a lot to the portfolio.

Together, what we’re able to do is go to the client with an end-to-end solution and straddle technology execution and analytics and really provide that end to end experience with the brand markets.

The acquisition gives Cognizant the opportunity to go broader with the use of digital technologies across other areas of life sciences such as research and development, medical affairs and more.

There’s definitely an opportunity to ride the digital wave into R&D, into medical affairs, into manufacturing and supply chain, and all of the critical functions that are core to the life sciences organizations. That’s something that we’re betting on here.

The acquisition signifies another step by Cognizant to stretch beyond to other stakeholders and bridge the gap between business and IT. With the acquisition of a digital marketing agency, Cognizant can better approach CMOs and other executives outside of IT with their solutions.

That is definitely a conscious decision we’re making across the board, especially as the whole social, mobile, analytics, cloud (SMAC) stack is becoming more pervasive across the whole IT architecture of a company. What we’re finding is the level of interest and engagement is increasing among the business leaders and communities in terms of how they can use those technologies to drive forward their business.”

Analyst View

Anthony Miller of Techmarketview called the acquisition “another canny deal” by Cognizant. “This deal just makes so much sense for Cognizant (and no doubt for Cadient too),” he wrote. The acquisition, he added, brings with it some useful analytics and marketing IP too. “Once again it’s all about the US market, though there should be no reason why Cognizant shouldn’t be able to apply Cadient’s skills, tools and techniques to other sectors and other country markets over time,” he noted.