Cognizant and Nvidia team up to supercharge data modernization

Cognizant has announced a new partnership with Nvidia that aims to enhance the IT consultancy firm’s data modernization offering and enable faster AI adoption.

The collaboration will see Cognizant leverage the chipmaker’s full stack accelerated computing platform, including Nvidia RAPIDS, part of the Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform, alongside the Cognizant Data and Intelligence Toolkit.

The move aims to tackle the escalating costs and performance bottlenecks caused by the rapid growth of data and enterprise need for real-time analytics, while laying the groundwork for faster adoption of AI use cases, Cognizant said in an announcement.

“Our latest collaboration with Nvidia aims to transform the way businesses process and analyze large datasets, delivering, we believe, unprecedented speed and efficiency,” commented Annadurai Elango, EVP and global head of core technologies and insights at Cognizant.

“Transitioning clients to GPU-based infrastructure will also lay the groundwork for implementing exciting new generative AI use cases in critical business functions.”

The new and enhanced data modernization offering will leverage Nvidia’s RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark to help customers speed up data processing tasks, ramp up resource efficiency, and leverage more sophisticated analytics.

The pair said the combination will outperform traditional CPU-based processing without the need for code changes in Apache Spark-based workloads.

Cognizant’s Data and Intelligence Toolkit, which features a set of accelerators designed to eliminate friction when leveraging data for decision making, will harness Nvidia GPU acceleration through the RAPIDS software libraries and APIs.

Customers stand to benefit from enhancements across analytics processing performance, data preparation, model training, as well as deployment. Proprietary benchmarks have shown an increase of 2.5x in acceleration in data engineering and data science workloads, alongside a 66% reduction in computing costs when compared with traditional CPU processing.

"Enterprises migrating to the cloud need efficient solutions for large-scale data processing and real-time analytics to speed development and retrieval-augmented generation for agentic AI,” said John Fanelli, Nvidia’s vice president of enterprise software.

“With Nvidia RAPIDS accelerated data processing, Cognizant can help businesses significantly reduce computing costs and accelerate workloads to extract more value from their cloud investments."