CNBC US: Cognizant’s CEO Talks About the Company’s Business Performance and Market Trends

“We had a terrific year [2013],” Francisco D’Souza tells CNBC in a Squawk Box interview. “We saw a strong pickup in demand in our business in the middle of last year and that we expect to continue going into 2014, a lot of it driven by the new generation of technologies—social, mobile, analytics and cloud—or what we call SMAC.”

He adds, “As far as technology is concerned, we are seeing a once-in-a-decade shift in the technology landscape. Once in a decade, the technology tends to accumulate and create tremendous productivity and competitive advantage benefits. We think we’re in the middle of one of those cycles at the moment. Over the coming three to four years, you’re going to see a big regeneration in technology.”

According to D’Souza, on a year-on-year basis, the company saw strength across all industry segments. “Bigger point,” he says, “we see strong investment in technology across the board, we see all of clients across industry segments saying how do we take these technologies, drive them for competitive advantage to ‘run better’ and ‘run different’.”

In response to a question regarding emerging markets, D’Souza says, “If you think about technology adoption in emerging markets, it is driven by two things: emerging market companies looking to become global champions and looking to adopt world-class technologies in that journey, and global multinationals looking to enter the emerging markets and build their presence there. Both of those trends remain intact. If you play it for the long run, it’s a great opportunity.”