I just finished a follow up interview with IOM's Steve Young regarding the Invensys/Cognizant deal. I think I have a better handle on the situation, now, and hope I can explain it to the rest of you. I think we were all reading far more into the announcement than was there--not an unusual occurrence.
Cognizant has considerable domain expertise in developing what can be called these days "generic" software, as well as considerable clout in India regarding hiring and retaining top employees. And these days an awful lot of software involves doing things such as porting to new Microsoft Windows platforms, writing SQL database code, communication drivers and the like. Invensys was trying to manage a remote development site that was, in the scheme of things, a small operation. So the win/win of the situation is that IOM gets out of the management/recruiting role and Cognizant gets a new customer.
Not all IOM product development will be done by Cognizant. IOM retains core domain expertise development, as well as overall technology leadership, project management and technology domain skills.
Young mentioned that IOM was looking for a way to create bandwidth to innovation. By moving execution of certain types of software development to Cognizant, IOM is freed up to focus on innovations that matter. "At the end of the day, we simply can't afford to give up our core domain expertise."
This makes a lot of sense to me. Although I took a look at the capabilities and connections of Cognizant and jumped ahead three moves (old chess players never die, just look for the next move). I suppose there could be additional partnerships in the future between the two, but for now the deal takes the load of dealing with programming that can be done anywhere by any of tens of thousands of programmers from Invensys so that managers and engineers can focus on the innovations that matter for its customers.
11:26:44 AM 
|
|
