Cognizant started as the in-house programming shop of Dun & Bradstreet, the credit-report company. In 1994 it set up a software team in India to work on its parent's systems. Then it began selling that work to other companies. When it went public in June 1998, corporations everywhere were racing to fix the Year 2000 bug before the calendar ran out. Cognizant bet that once clients sent their code to India for that deadline, they would keep sending it.

Born Inside Dun & Bradstreet

Kumar Mahadeva, a former McKinsey consultant and Dun & Bradstreet strategy executive, led the team that built the business. Francisco D'Souza was there from the start. The model was simple. A small team worked with the client in America, and a larger team of engineers in India did most of the coding. The time difference let work go on around the clock. Y2K repairs paid the early bills.

Ten Dollars and a Long Climb

Cognizant sold its first shares at $10 on June 19, 1998, on Nasdaq under the ticker CTSH. Its parent, IMS Health, kept control. When the Y2K deadline passed, Cognizant moved on to new software projects, and it grew faster than most of its rivals for years. It joined the S&P 500 and the Fortune 500. Cognizant is still public and employs more than 300,000 people.

Cover: Wall Clock, L’Escalier de Cristal. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a clock (the Year 2000 deadline).