Consulting and business process outsourcing (BPO) specialist Cognizant has announced the official inauguration of its 35th global delivery centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The new centre will support Cognizant’s North American customers in a similar timezone, and, says the company, “leverage techno-functional and lingual capabilities available in the region to service global customers, and provide a base with deep local insights for Cognizant to service customers in South America”.

Argentina has become one of the fast growing economies due to increased local business demand and government support. The country has high standards of education and many business and technology students. In addition to cost advantages, and a sound IT and telecoms infrastructure, the country has a rich IT talent pool.

Cognizant's association with Buenos Aires began in 2007 working with Kimberly-Clark Corporation (K-C), jointly working with their local teams.

With the association with K-C growing rapidly, and with other marquee customers in vertical spaces such as consumer goods, retail, financial services and insurance all showing interest in same-timezone support, Cognizant has set up the new facility, which has the capacity to accommodate approximately 250 professionals.

“Cognizant has delivered on its commitment to provide Kimberly-Clark with a suite of global IT services and has high standards of customer satisfaction and demonstrated capabilities in driving transformational outsourcing programs,” said Ramon F Baez, Kimberly-Clark CIO.

“We are pleased to have been instrumental in helping Cognizant become a major presence in Buenos Aires, while taking our IT function to the next higher level. Argentina is a key location in K-C’s global sourcing mix.”

“Our DNA of having a strong local relationship management with global sourcing capabilities will be strengthened by our new Argentina delivery centre,” said Francisco D'Souza, president and CEO of Cognizant.

“Our investments in newer global, regional and local delivery centres will help our clients seamlessly harness optimal talent globally for providing differentiated value to their end customers.

“It is truly an exciting time to be in Argentina as the country continues to grow its technology exports, and with our strong talent base in India, we look forward to being a part of the growing relations between India and Argentina as well.”

Cognizant's Buenos Aires regional delivery will make use of the Cognizant 2.0 platform, which enables all of Cognizant's global, regional and local development centres to virtually collaborate through a central platform using Web 2.0 technologies.

Cognizant has more than 35 global delivery centres and over 55,000 employees.