Publicis Sapient is an American digital consulting company, founded as Sapient in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

in 1990 by Jerry Greenberg and J. Stuart Moore. On February 6, 2015, Sapient became a fully owned division of French advertising giant

Publicis Publicis Groupe is a French multinational advertising and public relations company. One of the oldest and largest marketing and communications companies in the world by revenue, it is headquartered in Paris. After 1945, the little-known Paris ...

, in a deal valued at $3.7bn (£2.3bn). On November 17, 2016, Publicis Sapient announced SapientNitro was merging with sister agency

Razorfish Razorfish may refer to: Species Fish A common name used for three unrelated groups of fishes: * The genera ''Aeoliscus'', and ''Centriscus'', also known as shrimpfishes, in the family Centriscidae * The genus ''Xyrichtys'' of the family Labridae * ...

to form SapientRazorfish, which would be led by former SapientNitro CEO Alan Wexler. At the time, Sapient consisted of both SapientRazorfish and Sapient Consulting, and was co-led by Alan Wexler and Sapient Consulting CEO Chip Register. On February 13, 2019, SapientRazorfish and Sapient Consulting were merged into one brand, Publicis Sapient, led by CEO Nigel Vaz.

History

Early years

Sapient was founded on November 6, 1990 by Jerry Greenberg and

Stuart Moore Stuart Moore is an American writer and editor of comic books and novels. Career Stuart Moore's writing includes ''Civil War'', the first in a line of prose novels from Marvel Comics, and two stories for Amazon's Kindle Worlds program: ''X-O M ...

, who met while working at Cambridge Technology Partners. They chose to use a fixed-term, fixed-price model for

IT consulting In management, information technology consulting (also called IT consulting, computer consultancy, business and technology services, computing consultancy, technology consulting, and IT advisory) is a field of activity which focuses on advising o ...

pricing projects, rather than charging on a time and materials basis. During this period, Sapient was also an early adopter of

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

-based technology, and internet-based work grew to over 70% of total revenue by 1999. This led to rapid growth in the period from 1992 to 2000, with revenue growing from $950,000 to $503 million in that period.

International expansion

After a period of contraction following the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Comp ...

burst in the early 2000s, Sapient looked overseas to grow a substantial portion of revenue, rising over 30% in 3 years. This growth was driven by a strategy called "Global Distributed Delivery," which sought to capitalize on the quickly growing tech market in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...

to grow Sapient's software development capabilities. The operations in

would supplement project teams globally. Sapient has made numerous acquisitions throughout its history, beginning in 2006 with Planning Group International. Another important acquisition was DCG group in 2008, which augmented its existing capital markets offerings. In 2009, Sapient announced a $50 million acquisition of The Nitro Group, which added 300 employees.

History of acquisitions

Corporate affairs

In April 1996, Sapient went public with a price of $21 a share. In the following four years, share prices in the technology sector increased substantially. Sapient shares soared to a split-adjusted price of $550. However, when the dot-com bust in late 2000, Sapient's shares declined to a low of $0.75/share. The share hit an all-time high of $17.95 in 2014.

References

{{Reflist, 3 Publicis Groupe American companies established in 1990 Software companies established in 1990 Companies based in Boston Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Software companies based in Massachusetts 2015 mergers and acquisitions American subsidiaries of foreign companies Software companies of the United States