Cognizant Technology Solutions is an American multinational corporation that provides custom information technology, consulting and business process outsourcing services. It is headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey, United States. Cognizant is included in the NASDAQ-100 and the S&P 500 indices. Originally founded as an in-house technology unit of Dun & Bradstreet in 1994, Cognizant started serving external clients in 1996. Cognizant's IPO was launched in 1998, after a series of corporate splits and restructures of its parent companies, the first software services firm to be listed on the Nasdaq. During the dot com bust, it grew by accepting the application maintenance work that the bigger players were unwilling to perform. Gradually, it ventured into application development, complex systems integration and consulting work. Cognizant saw a period of fast growth during the 2000s, becoming a Fortune 500 company in 2011. In 2011, the Fortune magazine named it as the world's third most admired IT Services Company after Accenture and IBM. |