{"id":1625,"date":"2010-09-16T17:09:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T17:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/cognizant-genpact-091610\/"},"modified":"2010-09-16T17:09:00","modified_gmt":"2010-09-16T17:09:00","slug":"cognizant-genpact-091610","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/cognizant-genpact-091610\/","title":{"rendered":"Cog and Gen getting it on? Naaaahhhhh"},"content":{"rendered":"
Cog and Gen earlier… denying any romance<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Lots of frantic noise this week that Cog has been making romantic overtones to Genpact – with India’s press jumping on “<\/strong>speculation<\/strong><\/a>“.<\/strong><\/p>\n Like any other industry observer, you can certainly see lots of romantic potential here – Wall Street’s darlings of BPO and ADM tying the knot to frighten the life out of Accenture, IBM,\u00a0Infosys \u00a0et al.\u00a0However, while its seems like Brad and Angie Part II, I’m afraid this one just ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. \u00a0And if it does, I will personally send a box of chocolates to Senator Schumer.<\/p>\n Here’s why this is highly unlikely:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Industry media is bored and yearns for big M&A across the new breed of services providers, but they’re not (quite) ready<\/strong>. \u00a0Everyone’s been predicting major M&A for the last couple of years, but it’s only really happening in very mature industries (for example payroll and benefits administration) or with companies that have been around for many years and need to be acquired to have them broken up and re-balanced (i.e. Perot Systems, EDS etc.). \u00a0Firms such as Cognizant and Genpact have been on such a high growth trajectory these past 3-4 years, they’re simply not ready to drive such a thunderbolt of disruption into their\u00a0business operations. \u00a0We’ll need to observe a significant slowdown of growth for at least two consecutive quarters, before mergers of this magnitude will be entertained by the leading offshore providers.<\/p>\n Both Genpact and Cognizant have been developing their own unique cultures and brands – merging them now is risky. <\/strong> The speed of development of these firms has been staggering, and much of the energy behind this, has been the unique cultures created by dynamic leadership of taking the offshore model to the global enterprise. \u00a0The management\u00a0style\u00a0required to lead a \u00a0BPO business is also different from ITO – the margins are often tighter, the skills needed to run certain processes often harder to attract, develop, train and cross-train. \u00a0Taking a unique BPO culture and trying to shoe-horn it into a\u00a0dynamic\u00a0ITO culture could very quickly derail a secret sauce that took years to develop.<\/p>\n