Company Overview

CGI Group is the largest Canadian IT services firm, offering end-to-end IT and business process outsourcing services. The company started out providing a wide range of services, from facilities management for oil companies to inmate tracking software for federal prisons, in 1976. Since then it has evolved to serve clients in a variety of industries, primarily banking, government, health care, insurance, manufacturing, retail, and telecom. Consultants tend to specialize in a single industry. CGI, which used to stand for Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique (French for “Management and IT Consultants”), is 30 percent owned by BCE, Canada’s biggest telecom group. It has grown largely through acquisition, including the addition of Fairfax, Virginia–based American Management Systems in 2004, a big fish in the tank of government contracting. In addition to acquiring AMS, it gobbled up Cognicase, Underwriters Adjustment Bureau, and Cornerstone Project Management Group in 2003. The firm reported a 34 percent rise in revenue in the first half of 2005, due largely to AMS’s successful integration. For a while the company went by the name CGI-AMS in the U.S. to cash in on AMS’s name recognition, but it has since dropped AMS from its title.