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Calcutta, March 10: Cognizant has bagged a five-year contract worth $95 million for data management from pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca. This is one of the largest knowledge process outsourcing deals for an India company.

Under the agreement, Cognizant will provide a spectrum of centralised data management services for AstraZeneca’s global clinical development programmes.

“We will help AstraZeneca centralise and streamline its clinical data management operations through improved process standardisation, consistency of delivery, economies of scale and cost savings, which the company can reinvest to support its research and development programmes,” said Cognizant president and CEO Francisco D’Souza.

Cognizant’s responsibilities include data management planning, clinical study set-up for electronic data capture, medical coding, adverse event reconciliation and clinical data management. AstraZeneca announced its plans to centralise these services last year as part of its effort to improve research and development.

According to a KPMG study, the knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) market is estimated to grow by anywhere between $10 billion and $17 billion in another two years. Financial services KPOs are expected to reach $5 billion by 2010, the study said.

The study said gains from KPOs would be substantially higher than that from business process outsourcing units. However, current service contracts for KPOs are smaller in size than their BPO counterparts.

Billing rates for KPOs range from $10 to $45 per hour, while BPO billing rates vary between $4 and $15 per hour.

The KPO industry, however, faces a shortage of trained and skilled personnel.

The typical resource cost per full-time equivalent in India is between $15,000 and $40,000. For BPOs it ranges between $4000 and $10,000.

Cognizant’s healthcare and life sciences practice has 10,000 professionals, including doctors, pharmacologists, biomedical engineers, pharmacists, biostatisticians and medical writers. AstraZeneca had engaged Cognizant in business services across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific in 2004.