LONDON, March 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Cognizant , a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, today announced that it is helping Marks & Spencer Group plc (OP: MAKSF), one of the UK's leading retailers, improve operational efficiencies, drive business effectiveness, and provide superior customer experience.

As part of a multi-year managed services contract, Cognizant is providing end-to-end, integrated applications and infrastructure management services to Marks & Spencer (M&S) supporting mission-critical applications spanning multiple lines of business and functional areas, such as procurement, supply chain, forecasting, sales, stock replenishment, and financial management.

"As a result of a number of service improvement initiatives delivered by Cognizant over the last year, we are now more confident about promising our business better system availability, capacity, and stability," said Damone Quigley, Head of Infrastructure and Application Services at M&S. "Ever since our relationship began in 2009, both M&S and Cognizant have demonstrated an open, trust-based relationship that has created a strong foundation from which to deliver further efficiencies and achieve more positive outcomes in the coming years."

"A new generation of consumers, the millennials, is changing the way consumer demands and preferences are expressed and fulfilled, and brand value and product benefits are perceived," said Sanjiv Gossain, Senior Vice President and Head of the UK and Ireland Operations of Cognizant. "This has led to increasingly virtualized and globalized business and technology architectures, which are changing the retail landscape significantly. We are committed to helping M&S embrace new technologies and business processes to strengthen its leadership position as a seamless multi-channel retailer and expand its international business."

Cognizant's end-to-end, integrated service delivery provides M&S with:

-- Application support services delivering Level 2/3 support for all applications that support all lines of business and are used by end-users at stores, warehouses and head office. -- Remote IT Infrastructure Management (RIM) services based on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to drive operational efficiencies, enhance the quality of service, and enable virtualization. It encompasses a pre-built catalogue of productized services, a sophisticated operations maturity model, and Cognizant's proprietary RIM 2.0 managed services framework. -- Faster and more efficient resolution of incidents and problems to increase system availability and stability, while proactively monitoring and managing capacity and security provisions, and governing all changes that get into production systems. -- Service continuity to ensure all systems have adequate provisions and are ready to cope with any critical outages, ensuring business continuity and operations. -- Operational Acceptance Testing to ensure high operability across applications, infrastructure and networks. -- Non-Production Services to ensure environments are available when required for timely delivery of projects.