began its software services business in
1994 as the in-house technology development center for The
Dun & Bradstreet Corporation (D&B) and its operating units. In
1996 , the Company became a division of Cognizant Corporation, after the split-up of the D&B Corp.
In June
1998 , Cognizant Corporation was again spun-off into many independent companies, and Cognizant Technology Solutions was formed as a division of
IMS Health , the world’s leading provider of information solutions to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. In June
1998 , the Company completed its initial public offering and was listed on the
NASDAQ . In November 2002, IMS Health divested its majority interest in Cognizant through a tax-free split-off,thereby making Cognizant a truly widely-held company traded on the NASDAQ.
The present CEO of the company is Lakshmi Narayanan. The base of Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS) is in the Indian city of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, where they have eight offices at present. The employees at Cognizant number 26725+, and this figure is on the increase, as Cognizant is fast becoming one of the largest job providers in India.
While initially the core clients were from Healthcare, Cognizant now has clients who deal in Manufacturing & Logistics, Finance, Information Defined Services, Telecom,CRM, Healthcare, Insurance, Life Sciences, Retail and Media.
The revenue of Cognizant is around the $850 million mark (2nd Quarter 2005),it may be considered as being in the same league as
Infosys ,
Wipro ,
Tata Consultancy Services which are the other, major Indian Information Technology (IT) companies.
Cognizant is also a very employee friendly Organization.For nearly 18,000 Cognizant Technology Solutions employees around the world, March 9,2006, rung in, literally, with a surprise. After having reached the billion dollar revenue in the last quarter of 2005, the IT major celebrated the achievement in style by gifting a majority of its employees a state-of-the-art iPod each.
Cognizant's earlier gifting sprees had consisted of cruises to the Bahamas, chartered trains to Pondicherry and chartered flights to Malaysia, all exclusively for its employees.
