What did Cognizant do to strike a billion-dollar deal with CoreLogic?

IT and business service providers are hungry for “big” $100 million-plus deals. Increasingly, we see big deals in the, ahem, more dusty corners of markets where digital investment has perhaps not been the priority it should have been. In this competitive services market, underpinned by challenging macroeconomic factors, enterprises want cost impact and growth. This is a minimum entry point for purveyors of big deals. To fulfill enterprises’ demand for digital transformation, service providers offer one throat to choke—clear cost-saving and growth outcomes, end-to-end services, a strong partner ecosystem with skin-in-the-game relationships, identifiable trained talent, and co-innovation relationships between the service provider and partners that help the client realize value.

Exhibit 1: A lot of massive deals in the IT and business services industry are for firms ripe for digital transformation—here are examples of recent mega $500 million-plus deals

Notes: (1) Infosys_Vanguar_deal – Q3 2020; (2) HCL_State Farm – Q1 2023
Source: HFS Research, 2023

Cognizant is the latest to win one of these mega deals—in this case, a billion-dollar deal with CoreLogic. What’s the difference between winners and losers?

Cognizant’s decade-long relationship did not secure the win—its end-to-end proven capabilities did

Cognizant already had a decade-long relationship with CoreLogic, a leading global property information, analytics, and data-enabled solutions provider. But it takes more than incumbency to win in today’s climate.

In 2021, CoreLogic was acquired by two PE firms, and its post-acquisition leadership team knew technology would be the main catalyst for propelling growth while simultaneously improving productivity. The team looked at current partners, but this bunch was largely in focused pockets covering elements of business operations, data, or technology change. Cognizant knew CoreLogic’s primary domains. Cognizant had built or managed technology and ecosystems for application transformation and cloud migration efforts, but it was ultimately its ability to span technology, operations, and data that earned it the right to be considered as the primary transformation partner to help CoreLogic expand and strengthen its position as a leader in the property technology and analytics industry.

A collaborative roadmap with a clear vision of the transformation goals in mind

The decade-long deal is broken down into annual milestones that commenced on January 1, 2023. Cognizant and CoreLogic have co-developed an aggressive roadmap with a mix of top-line and bottom-line objectives:

1. Build new technology and innovation capabilities to help CoreLogic serve its customers’ most pressing and impactful needs.
2. Broaden its market leadership position and solution applicability beyond mortgage and insurance.
3. Expand geographic coverage into targeted global growth markets.
4. Optimize productivity through digital transformation.

Cognizant brought its ecosystem and a full arsenal of capabilities

Cognizant supported CoreLogic’s data operations during the pandemic without major disruptions and contributed to CoreLogic’s operational and growth objectives to make 2020–2021 its best year. CoreLogic’s management team definitely wanted more.

For this deal, Cognizant expanded beyond its traditional commercial and engagement models by adding mechanisms to foster outcome-based alignment and moved toward more managed services models and engagements. It also showcased that it already had the four key things that CoreLogic was looking for: strong automation, AI, and ML capabilities to help on the digital transformation front; a global delivery footprint to support delivery and geographic expansion; a partner ecosystem to bring technical excellence and the right talent for in-demands like cloud; and executive sponsorship and commitment at the very top.

The Bottom Line: Enterprises demand cost savings and growth. Cognizant’s proven track record, domain expertise, innovation capabilities, commitment to outcomes, and ability to drive large-scale transformations helped secure the CoreLogic deal, potentially satisfying both needs.

In this macroeconomic environment, service providers can help clients weather uncertainty and deliver cost savings and growth by helping them uncover potential growth avenues, finding opportunities to create new value or differentiate themselves from the competition, and furthering modernization and intelligent automation. For any service provider, Cognizant included, delivering on the promises that sealed the deal is critical.