Demand for analytics services from users in the life sciences industry has helped drive growth in the UK and Europe, according to Cognizant.

The outsourcing giant posted a 3.5% increase in European revenue for its first quarter earnings for 2012 (an 11 percent increase year-on-year), despite a difficult economic climate.

Paul Roehrig, assistant VP of corporate strategy at Cognizant, said: “Primarily our focus is on banking and the financial services in the UK, as well as life sciences and pharmaceuticals. We are seeing good demand in those industries, for example, in life sciences there is demand around clinical data management and commercial analytics.”

Cognizant believe that users are focusing more on core business functions and outsourcing the periphery consequences of the process or what Roehrig describes as the “contextual”.

Roehrig exemplified in that the core goal of business analytics might be to analyse data and extract insight, while the “contextual” will be the management and cleaning of the information: “More focus on what is core will help create a more lean organisation and enable more business-efficient decisions.”

Cognizant have also benefitted from increased demand for cloud, social and mobile services.

Roehrig said: “We are also having lots of good interest in business process services. [Businesses] are looking for end-to-end business process solutions.”