Deltek forms strategic partnership with Cognizant

Deltek has announced a strategic partnership with Cognizant. The collaboration will see Cognizant scale up and deliver services to support the implementation of Deltek Maconomy, its ERP solution that targets enterprise knowledge-intensive, project-driven professional services firms. The initial services teams will explore opportunities across Europe, including the UK.

Cognizant will support Deltek for complex implementations that span multiple countries. The global SI will bring significant experience from these projects to the ecosystem. Cognizant teams will be trained to deliver and support the finance and project-based ERP implementation projects. It will provide services that include end-to-end support across implementation, business transformation, upgrades, cloud migration, and ongoing managed services.

Maconomy is part of the wider Deltek intelligent platform, powered by Dela AI, its AI platform. Dela is an AI-powered intelligent business companion that acts as an AI orchestrator across its solutions, including Maconomy.

A new GSI partnership

The partnership will enable Deltek to target larger enterprises with the services support of global giant Cognizant. Which has tens of thousands of employees based in Europe alone. They will support organisations as they look to transition away from legacy solutions to AI-powered, cloud-based solutions to improve visibility and automation.

Congnizant will provide the expertise to deliver large-scale, multi-country deployments with a focus on data consistency, governance and operational standardisation.

Neil Davidson, Group Vice President, Deltek, said: “For project-based organisations, business transformation is no longer optional. To embed technology, including AI, effectively and realise its value, organisations must first address the fundamental barriers that limit visibility, performance, and growth.

“Too often, modernisation happens incrementally, without tackling these structural challenges. Overcoming this requires a more joined-up approach across finance, projects, and data, built on a modern, platform-based ERP foundation. With the right technology and experienced partners like Deltek and Cognizant, organisations can achieve meaningful transformation while maintaining continuity.” 

Rohit Gupta, UK&I Managing Director, Cognizant, said: “Enterprises are under pressure to move faster, serve customers better, and do more with less. But scaling AI adoption often stalls in pilots due to fundamental challenges such as legacy tech, governance, and data readiness.

“By combining Deltek’s enterprise technology and our transformation expertise, we look to give clients a practical way to strengthen their finance and operational foundations while preparing for an AI-enabled future.”

Joint customer Kantar approves

Kantar is one of the companies that has engagements with both companies. Cognizant has worked with Kantar, the world’s largest AI-native marketing data and analytics business, for over a decade.

When the firm looked to upgrade its Deltek Maconomy platform, it chose Cognizant to conduct the upgrade. Cognizant managed a project that spanned 90 markets globally and was completed in eight months. The project was delivered on time and on budget. Maximising the cost savings it achieved through streamlining of its project management processes.

Kantar commented, “Working with Cognizant and Deltek gave us the confidence and capability to deliver one of the most important finance transformations in our organisation. The combined team brought deep product expertise, delivery discipline, and a collaborative approach that made a complex upgrade feel seamless.

“Their partnership enabled us to validate thousands of test cases, manage integrations, and move to the latest release of Deltek Maconomy without disruption to the business. With both teams working together, we were able to move faster, help reduce delivery risk, and realise value much sooner than we could have achieved alone.” 

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

This is a significant win for Deltek as it means that, as they compete for ERP projects across large professional services firms, they have the backing of large, experienced Cognizant teams with evidence of success. ERP projects often have a bad reputation. But with the references such as that provided by Kantar, this should give Deltek a greater chance of winning both ERP upgrade and replacement projects across Europe.

There is, however, no mention of the relationship extending beyond Europe as yet. Moreover, if Cognizant Europe can demonstrate increased revenues and success with Maconomy, other regions will no doubt take note. Both Cognizant and Deltek will need to update their partner web pages to reflect the new relationship.

For enterprises looking to update their ERP systems, the project to replace legacy with AI-powered and Cloud based solutions, can be daunting. However, Deltek already has many integrations to solutions used in enterprises and Cognizant is experienced in taking on the heavy lifting of such integrations during the project, as it did for Kantar. It will be interesting to see what joint customers are announced in the coming years.

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