Fast-growing UK AWS partner Inawisdom gobbled up by Cognizant

Cognizant continues $1bn acquisition drive with purchase of Ipswich-based AI specialist, which has gone from zero to £10m turnover in less than five years

A fast-growing UK AWS partner - which has gone from zero to nearly £10m revenues in less than five years - is the latest subject of global IT services powerhouse Cognizant's $1bn 2020 acquisition drive.

Ipswich-based AWS Premier Consulting partner Inawisdom today announced it has sold up to Cognizant, which already claims to be one of the world's largest AWS-certified outfits with more than 8,000 certified cloud professionals.

Cognizant has already acquired eight firms in 2020 as it expands its prowess in data and artificial intelligence, cloud, digital engineering and IoT. This includes Microsoft Azure partner New Signature in July.

Financial details of the Inawisdom deal weren't disclosed but Cognizant claims it has lavished more than $1.1bn in 2020 alone for acquisitions in these areas.

Founded in 2016, Inawisdom has been repeatedly name checked (see here and here) by AWS bosses for its prowess in the arena of AI.

Cognizant said it will fuse Inawisdom with Contino, another company in its Digital Business group, to provide end-to-end cloud-native AI and machine learning solutions. It acquired London-based Contino in 2019.

Inawisdom saw revenue rocket to £9.5m in its fiscal year to 30 September 2020.

Talking to CRN following the deal, Inawisdom CTO Robin Meehan (pictured) - who made it into CRN's A-list in November - said the focus will be on continued growth.

"We made this move to allow us to grow even faster, the market opportunity for us in the AWS-centric AI/ML space is massive and Cognizant's scale will enable us to accelerate further. So we're all here for that journey as chapter two," he said.

Malcolm Frank, President, Digital Business, Cognizant, added: "Businesses succeed or fail by the speed and quality of their decisions, ­and the best business decisions are informed by data and AI.

"We are pleased to welcome Inawisdom's skilled team to Cognizant and further accelerate our innovation on data modernization and intelligent decision-making. Cognizant and Inawisdom's clients will benefit from our shared, deep relationships with AWS and our combined expertise with AI, machine learning, cloud, and data analytics."