Sapient Corp

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SAPIENT CORP.

Internet services consultancy Sapient Corp. operates offices throughout the U.S., as well as in Canada, England, Germany, Italy, India, and Japan. Sales in 2000 exceeded the $500 million mark, and employees totaled roughly 2,300, as Sapient became the first Internet services firm to make the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. That year, a survey conducted by Forrester Research Inc. ranked Sapient as the top e-commerce integrator—a firm that develops and implements e-commerce solutions—in the U.S.

In 1991, Jerry Greenberg and Stuart Moore co-founded Sapient Corp. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to offer client-server integration services. Greenberg and Moore funded initial operations with $40,000 of their personal savings. When that capital began to dwindle, they ran up a $70,000 tab on their credit cards. The partners set their fledgling firm apart from rivals by not only finding technology-based solutions to solve problems or increase efficiency, but also by handling the implementation of these solutions. Sapient also set prices and deadlines prior to finalizing contracts and based employee compensation on client satisfaction, practices unlike any other consultancy at the time.

Sapient's innovative approach to technology-based consulting began to pay off in the mid-1990s. Both revenues and earnings more than doubled from 1994 to 1995. Offices in San Francisco and New York allowed the firm to extend its geographic reach. In April 1996, Sapient completed its initial public offering (IPO), generating $33 million in fresh capital, which was poured into expansion efforts. It was during the two years following the IPO, after management recognized that many Sapient clients were growing interested in e-commerce applications, that Sapient began its push into e-business integration services. The purchase of Studio Archetype, a World Wide Web integration firm, boosted Sapient's e-commerce services arsenal, which eventually became the most comprehensive in the industry. Earnings of $9.4 million in 1998 grew more than threefold to $30.3 million in 1999; over the same time period, revenues jumped 68 percent, from $165 million to $277 million. The firm acquired E-Lab LLC in October of 1999. That year, new offices opened in Texas, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Italy. Major projects included the launch of Nordstromshoes.com, the largest virtual shoe shop on the Web; the relaunch of Adobe Systems Inc.'s Web site; and the development and launch of iWon.com, an Internet gateway that used frequent cash giveaways to draw traffic to its site.

Sapient added broadband and media applications developer Human Code Inc. to its mix in August of 2000. By then, according to a November 2000 article in Computer Reseller News, the firm had transformed itself from "a nine-year-old consulting and integration company grounded in client/server computing into one of the foremost Web integrators on the scene." The firm played an integral role in the development of an online real estate service in the U.K. and Internet portal India.com that year. However, despite Sapient's leading position in the worldwide e-commerce arena, the economic slowdown in North America began to take a toll on Sapient's earnings in the first quarter of 2001. As a result, the firm launched several cost-cutting measures, which included laying off 720 employees—roughly 20 percent of its work-force—closing down an office in Sydney, Australia, and consolidating its U.S. operations by merging multiples office in a single city into one main unit.