Eating 50 Hard-Boiled Eggs In An HourEating 50 Hard-Boiled Eggs In An Hour

Remember in the movie Cool Hand Luke when Paul Newman's title character bets his work-gang buddies that he can eat 50 hard-boiled eggs in one hour? Well, outsourcer Cognizant is on such a voracious growth spurt that it's hiring 11 people per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until it hits the projected mark of 58,000 that it now forecasts it will need this year to handle the 2007 workload.Riding an astonishing growth wave, Cognizant Technology Solutions is adding about 250 per day to its global operations, says Senior VP Malcolm Frank, with about one-third of those being added in the United States and two-thirds in countries around the world. In yet another data point that runs violently counter to the canard that IT is waning in importance or is even unimportant, the IT and business-process outsourcing company has seen its employee base grow over the past four years from 14,000 to 25,000 to 38,500 to a projected 58,000 for 2007, Frank says.

Among the triggers: "Many CIOs are switching from playing only defense to aggressively playing offense," Frank says, with innovation in processes, customer experiences, Web 2.0 capabilities, and many other forms being key drivers behind that growth-oriented attitude. One other insight from Frank: While IT budgets at many companies are flat compared with last year, the surge in IT-driven innovation is leading those same companies to add more IT employees in spite of same-sized budgets.