CNBC TV 18: Cognizant President Discusses Cognizant’s Q2 2012 Performance

“We had a great quarter; things played out as expected,” says Gordon Coburn. “We beat our guidance both on the top line and EPS. But what we are most pleased about is that despite the tough economic environment, we maintained a full year guidance of at least 20%. That’s been driven by our clients looking to do two things at once, which is to reduce their cost and spend on innovation, and to grow their top-line. We are well positioned to meet that dual mandate, and customers are coming to us and we continue to take market share.”

According to Coburn, it really comes down to how each company approaches the client’s need to reduce their spend. “We have been doing it through productivity improvements, through value-added activities and not through rate cut reductions,” he says.

Coburn adds, “We are seeing a change in the market toward what we refer to as transformation deals, which are larger deals encompassing a broad range of services, a broad range of geographies focused on how do you deliver change in operations to the clients. We won several of those this past quarter and there are clearly others in the pipeline.”

Consulting, says Gordon, is a very important part of winning larger deals because it is not just delivering the technology, but also helping clients to figure out how they want to use technology to drive improvements in the operations of their business or improvements in how they interact with their clients. "We are very good at that. As a result, we expect more and larger deals over time and our pipeline is robust,” he says.