Cognizant
More info
- Released
- 1994
- Type
- IT services, outsourcing
- Headquarters
- Teaneck, New Jersey
An American IT services firm with an Indian engine room, born as an in-house unit of a credit-reporting company.
It started in 1994 as a technology division inside Dun & Bradstreet, was spun off in 1996 and listed on Nasdaq in 1998 – just in time for the world's large corporations to need armies of people willing to read millions of lines of COBOL before the year 2000. The Y2K work became a foot in the door for long-running maintenance and operations contracts.
The model is the same as at its Indian rivals: account management in the US and Europe, most of the engineers in India. The difference is largely legal. With headquarters in New Jersey, Cognizant is an American company competing with Infosys and TCS on their home turf.