New CEO for Teaneck’s Cognizant; Humphries to Replace D’Souza Who Cofounded Company
Teaneck-based Cognizant, the giant public information technology, consulting and business-process-outsourcing services company, announced that its board of directors had named Brian Humphries, currently the CEO of Vodafone Business (New York), as its CEO and a board member.
Humphries’ appointments will be effective April 1, 2019. He will replace Francisco D’Souza, who cofounded Cognizant and has served as CEO since 2007.
During his 12 years as Cognizant’s CEO, D’Souza has overseen a continuous period of growth, innovation and success. Among the highlights, he oversaw a more than tenfold growth in revenues – from $1.42 billion in 2006 to $16.1 billion in 2018 ‒ and increased the company’s global headcount from 39,000 in 2006 to 282,000 in 2018. Overall, Cognizant’s market value has increased more than 400 times since its 1998 IPO valuation.
Current president Rajeev Mehta will also step down on April 1. It was widely thought that the board would go with a Cognizant insider like Mehta.
NJTechWeekly.com covered D’Souza in 2011 when he gave a talk at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Rothman Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship. There, he discussed the advances that had caused his company to thrive. Chief among them: an innovative business model and the development of Cognizant 2.0, a real-time operating system. D’Souza said that the latter was the “glue” holding his massive knowledge-based workforce together.
According to the Cognizant release, Humphries is a customer-centric, goal-oriented chief executive with diverse leadership experience gained from his general-manager, sales, strategy, finance and operations roles for a number of global technology companies. At Vodafone, he supported national, regional and global organizations, including emerging markets, successfully building and leading highly effective teams to drive growth and market share performance.
Humphries went to Vodafone from Dell, where he last held the position of president and COO of its Infrastructure Solutions Group, based in Boston and Geneva. Previously, he was president of Dell’s Geneva-based Worldwide Enterprise Solutions, a group with approximately $15 billion in revenue, and before that he was general manager and vice president of sales at Dell’s Enterprise Solutions, for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Before joining Dell, Humphries was with Hewlett-Packard, where his roles included senior vice president, emerging markets; senior vice president, strategy and corporate development; and chief of staff to the chairman and CEO. He also served as CFO of HP Services. The early part of his career was spent with Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation.
