Cognizant signs R&D pact with Invensys Rail

IT, consulting and business process outsourcing services company, Cognizant Technology Solutions, on Wednesday signed an initial five-year, multi-million contract with UK-based railway control and communications systems provider Invensys Rail to serve the global product research and development (R&D) needs of its group companies located in the UK, Australia, Spain and the US.

Under the agreement, Cognizant will augment and maintain Invensys Rail's suite of products and help the latter leverage its process maturity to bring in greater operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness to its global product R&D processes and improve time-to-market. Towards this, offers to join Cognizant will be made to over 120 Invensys Rail professional from the latter's existing R&D centre in Hyderabad.

“We are pleased to work with Invensys Rail and welcome on board their highly-talented professional in Hyderabad,” Francisco D’Souza, president and chief executive of Cognizant, stated in a press release.

“Cognizant is committed to leveraging their specialised expertise, and our own world-class consulting, enterprise integration, services-based architecture, business intelligence, supply chain, and product lifecycle management capabilities to help Invensys Rail develop industry-leading solutions for emerging requirements, create newer service models, and broaden their services portfolio. We are confident that we will significantly augment Invensys Rail’s ability to innovate and ramp up the delivery of products. This multi-dimensional relationship will help both companies solidify our leadership positions in the rail industry,” he added.

This new relationship will help Cognizant strengthen its presence in the rail industry by enhancing its ability to provide end-to-end services to rail customers, and expanding its customer base through industry-leading competencies in safety-critical application development.

Cognizant will combine its proven domain and technology proficiency with the newly-acquired capabilities in the expanding area of railway automation, control, protection, and performance management to create an innovation hub for industry solutions that can help rail customers realise more capacity from their networks and make rail travel safer, faster, and more reliable, the release said.