Fortune India: Cognizant CEO Says the Company’s Differentiation is in its End-to-End Capability to Implement Transformation

“When industrial companies describe themselves as software players, you realize that businesses are becoming more and more technology intensive,” says Francisco D’Souza. “In such an environment, the role that companies such as Cognizant play, and have always played, becomes more important because they are the ones who create the foundation for their clients to become technology intensive, to make the most of advances in tech, and apply them to gain competitive advantage.” Excerpts:

“There is a need to have teams that cater to broader ranges of skills. If you look at Cognizant, we have doctors, engineers, MBAs, nurses, chartered accountants, data scientists, anthropologists, scientists, and behavioral economists. We need to have people who not only understand the industries that they serve, but are also thought leaders in their respective fields. Today, clients are saying, ‘Tell me what is happening in my industry and guide me to become more efficient.’

Second, changes are happening at such an incredible speed that we have to provide pre-packaged solutions, customized around the edges, and integrate them with the ecosystem so that clients can derive value at the earliest. That means we have to develop solutions and build our partner’s intellectual property into that. More and more of the solutions that we are offering are integrations of intellectual property, which include software and services. On top of that we need a world-class client interface—the people on the ground working with the clients, consultant partners, and thought leaders. Plus, we need global scale because our clients are global.

What we bring to the table is end to-end capability to implement such transformation in a tightly integrated way. We observe whether the model is working or not, and then either scale up or change the model. This ability of ours—providing all these solutions—is truly remarkable.

Just because there is a lot of innovation happening in the pure tech firms in Silicon Valley does not mean that innovations do not happen in the IT and ITES companies. Our innovations are in the models we create to make the fundamental technologies relevant to our clients. We are all innovating because technology is changing rapidly. Everybody has to innovate to stay relevant. That’s not different from any other industry, because this is a period of great disruption. The disruption journey will continue for some more years. Our case has never been more important or stronger, so we are optimistic about the future.

The differentiation has never been about technology or skill sets. The value comes from the ability to provide solutions. All services companies have world-class skills, but it is solutions that create the difference. It is not enough to go to a bank and say that I understand blockchain, but to explain its importance in trade finance, and be able to provide pre-programmed and pre-packaged solutions. We have to explain to them that if they work with us, we can get it to the market faster than others. It is hard to implement such a project because you need trade finance experts, blockchain experts, and those who understand the technology. You have to put them all together, which is not easy. But that’s where the differentiation and value comes from.

The best days are ahead. In the next two decades, technology could solve some of the hardest problems of the world like health, agriculture, and transportation. What better time than now to be in technology?”

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