Francisco D’Souzo is the chief executive of Cognizant, a New Jersey-based consultancy that is fairing very well in today’s somewhat volatile outsourcing market. He provided an insider’s perspective on the firm’s strong financial performance in a recent interview with Times of India.

His company reported its earnings for the second quarter earlier this month, which included a 21 percent increase in revenue whilst some of its peers – namely Infosys – are seeing their business faltering. Cognizant surpassed the Indian outsourcing behemoth’s sales figures this year, and this achievement is partially credited to the former’s dependency on the U.S. market – one of the things that D’Souzo discussed.

“Customer intimacy was crucial to us, and that meant that we wanted to fight a small number of battles and put all of our energy fighting those battles. We started with North America, but now we are investing in several other geographies, as also industry verticals. “

Nearly 80 percent of Cognizant’s revenue comes from the US, which is in a better economic state than Europe right now. But D’Souzo added that his company does have plans to expand; last week Cognizant president Gordon Coburn was quoted as saying that France and Germany are the next destinations on the firm’s roadmap.

While the services provider may not be seeing as big of a decline in demand as some of its competitors, its customers have been affected by the global downturn one way or the other. D’Souzo described how Cognizant managed to establish itself in these circumstances by helping clients develop ‘more agile cost structures,’ powered to a great extent by technologies such as mobile and cloud.

The chief executive addressed a couple of other topics as well, most notably his company’s reinvestment policy. He says that while Cognizant’s aggressive spenditure keeps margins relatively low it’s enough to keep investors happy, while also enabling more expansion across ‘three horizons of demand.’ These cover a substantial number of key verticals, from BI and apps to infrastructure services and emerging markets.