Mint Asia: Cognizant Leadership Talks About Opportunities in the Company’s Horizon 3 Business

Francisco D'Souza, CEO, Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice Chairman, and Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice President, Strategy

“One of the best pieces of advice I got was to get some of the most seasoned leaders in the company to move to the Horizon 3 business. But they had to be paired with fresh talent that could bring new thinking for the true power of this strategy to work. And that’s what we have done,” says Francisco D’Souza, CEO, Cognizant. “In today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility. Nothing else is sustainable. Everything else you create, somebody else will replicate.”

Cognizant Vice Chairman Lakshmi Narayanan notes, “When you start something like Horizon 3, if you fear failure, you won’t succeed. With Frank (D’Souza), the approach is very different, he feels like he has nothing to lose.”

“It’s definitely a multi-billion dollar opportunity,” adds Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant. “It’s akin to what happened before the Internet bubble—in the late 1980s, all these new technologies started hitting the market, such as PCs, Unix servers, etc., and IT departments saw the value in these, but the businesses didn’t. Around 1992, at the time the likes of SAP came up, that’s when the market really took off. I think we’ll see something similar here, when SMAC solutions start to crystallize into true business solutions and then clients understand how to buy those.”

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