Family Dollar Stores, Inc. has inked a deal with Cognizant, an information technology outsourcing firm in Teaneck that will help the leading discount retail chain improve its business responsiveness and deliver superior services in its more than 8,000 stores, according to a press release. Cognizant is delivering the services using a consumption-based managed services model to enable Family Dollar to optimize infrastructure investments and achieve a variable cost mix by paying only for usage.
The three-year agreement allows Family Dollar to utilize Cloud360 for its portal applications to improve operational performance and cost competitiveness. Cloud360 is a suite of ready-to-deploy, on-demand business and IT solutions.
"We are pleased to expand our relationship with Family Dollar," Sean Middleton, Chief Operating Officer of Emerging Business Accelerator at Cognizant, said in the press release. "Rapid advances in cloud technology, rapidly evolving consumer behavior, and increasing competitive pressures present a great opportunity for forward-thinking retailers such as Family Dollar to look at new, technology-powered business models enabled on demand. We look forward to helping Family Dollar strengthen its market differentiation through better process efficiencies, more empowered staff and customers, and revenue-aligned variable costs made possible by cloud technology."
The new agreement follows one month after Family Dollar shareholders approved an $8.74 billion takeover offer from Dollar Tree as companies scramble to be the leader in the hotly contested discount store space, according to NorthJersey.com. The acquisition of Family Dollar has been a highly controversial process. Together, the merged chains will operate as many as 13,000 stores.
"We are constantly looking for opportunities to strengthen our value proposition and improve our performance," said Vikas Wali, Divisional Vice President of IT Application and Infrastructure Services at Family Dollar. "This engagement is crucial to our efforts to execute better on our promise of being an efficient, low-cost retailer. We selected Cognizant for its robust domain knowledge, deep infrastructure service delivery and management expertise, its enterprise platform Cloud360, and rich experience implementing solutions on Amazon Web Services. Cognizant brings the vision and the end-to-end capabilities that we need in order to adopt cloud for fulfilling our business objectives."
This agreement marks an expansion of Cognizant's relationship with Family Dollar, begun in 2006.
