Vendor Analysis
published on Feb 05, 2024
Report Overview:
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes Cognizant's offerings and capabilities in Salesforce Services
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s vendor profile on Cognizant is a comprehensive assessment of Cognizant’s offerings and capabilities, designed for:
- Sourcing managers monitoring the capabilities of existing IT services suppliers of Salesforce
- Vendor marketing, sales, and business managers looking to benchmark themselves against their peers
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in the IT services sector and examining growth areas within IT services.
Scope of this Report:
The report provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of Cognizant’s Salesforce capabilities, market, and financial strengths, including:
- Identification of the company’s strategy, emphasis, and new developments
- Analysis of the company’s strengths, challenges, and outlook
- Revenue estimates
- Analysis of the profile of the company’s customer base, including the company’s targeting strategy and examples of current contracts
- Analysis of the company’s offerings and key service components
- Analysis of the company’s delivery organization, including the location of delivery centers.
Key Findings & Highlights:
Cognizant's revenue guidance for 2023 is in the range of $19.3-19.4bn. Its headcount at the end of September 30, 2023 was 346.6k.
Cognizant has grouped its Salesforce expertise, including MuleSoft, in a separate service line with P&L responsibility. This Salesforce practice is a delivery organization and is a horizontal line within Cognizant’s Enterprise Application Services (EAS) unit. All the sales and marketing aspects of all platforms including Salesforce (along with Oracle, Pega, SAP, and Workday) are handled by the wider CX & CRM practice which is also present under EAS.
Cognizant has quickly emerged as a tier-one Salesforce vendor. We estimate that the company was the most acquisitive in the space. More importantly, it specialized its capabilities around emerging Salesforce products such as Revenue Cloud and Marketing Cloud.
An example is acquiring ATG, which brought presence in the rising quote-to-cash/Revenue Cloud space and provided a high-tech and manufacturing client base in the U.S. Another example is the Lev acquisition that brought some scale to the emerging Marketing Cloud product. Thanks to its next-gen Salesforce capabilities, Cognizant often complements the expertise of the professional services arm of Salesforce.
Cognizant has also made its space in the Salesforce industry having a well-defined IP strategy. Overall, the company works with Salesforce on identifying functionality gaps and creating semi-products, filling those functional white spaces. The company acknowledges that Salesforce's intense M&A and new product/feature activity leads to two-year solution opportunities and is ready to move on to new functional gaps.
The company wants to be #1 in its bets.
Overall, Cognizant follows a commercial strategy to increase its share of wallet with existing clients. The company focuses on cross-selling its Salesforce capabilities and on multi-cloud opportunities. As a result, it wants to have multiple certifications and domain training.
Cognizant aspires to grow by 20% annually. The company intends to generate ~50% of its revenues from solutions and offerings and the other half from application management and staff augmentation services. The company aspires to become Salesforce's third-largest partner by headcount and number by IP.