The convergences of various forms of IT and business process services continues to accelerate.

After witnessing the merger of business services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) in August with the acquisition of Employease by ADP, the latest transaction to signal a new stage in the evolution of the IT services industry is Cognizant’s acquisition of AimNet Solutions.

This transaction is driven by the growing demand among customer organizations of all sizes for their strategic vendors to assume greater responsibility for both their application and infrastructure requirements.

Cognizant is a U.S.-based, offshore IT services company with strong applications development, integration, reengineering, consulting and business process outsourcing (BPO) skills. It is a leading provider of application services for large-scale providers.

AimNet Solutions Inc. offers a suite of managed and professional services aimed at helping a variety of small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs), as well as large-scale enterprises, with their IT infrastructure requirements. Overall, AimNet has over 80 direct customers across various industries, including ten channel re-sellers serving approximately 600 end-user companies.

This acquisition gives Cognizant a combination of remote and onsite application and IT infrastructure services to meet a fuller array of its customers’ needs and new channel relationships to expand its market opportunities.

Specifically, Cognizant gains a stronger, on-shore presence in the U.S. and can now deliver its remote IT infrastructure management services to North American clients via AimNet’s Holliston, MA-based network operations center (NOC). Cognizant can also capitalize on AimNet’s channel relationships with Sprint and Verizon to gain access to smaller customers and deliver a wider range of networking services to its larger customers.

AimNet, profiled by THINKstrategies in 2005, is one of a handful of independent full-service managed services providers (MSPs) that pioneered the managed services market during the dot.com era. The acquisition of NetSolve by Cisco Systems and SevenSpace by Sun Microsystems in 2004 marked the beginning of a new era of major vendors assuming the reins of the managed services market. But, Cisco has yet to determine how to fit NetSolve’s service capabilities into its product portfolio. And, Sun’s strategic challenges have overshadowed its growing array of remote support services powered by the SevenSpace acquisition. This has left the door open for a new generation of MSPs to enter the market. Yet, the major vendors are still trying to gain a foothold as well. In August, IBM bolstered its managed security services capabilities by acquiring Internet Security Systems (ISS).

In addition to giving Cognizant additional IT infrastructure management capabilities and a stronger U.S. presence, this transaction gives AimNet deeper pockets and a broader channel to market to serve large-scale enterprises worldwide.

Delivering a full suite of application and infrastructure services, both remote/managed and onsite/consulting, should be an attractive proposition for Cognizant’s customers. It should help the company broaden and tighten its customer relationships. However, scaling both its remote and onsite services to meet the end-to-end requirements of the companies’ mutual customers and channel partners will also be a significant challenge.

To accomplish this objective will require integrating the companies’ centralized monitoring capabilities; development, deployment and remote management staffs; and sales/marketing operations. This will require the integration of their respective systems, skills and corporate cultures. Having gone through my own acquisition experiences and hearing the war-stories of others in similar situations, it is more common for service-oriented mergers to fail than to succeed.

Fortunately, AimNet Solutions is a relatively small organization which should fit easily within Cognizant’s corporate operations. The test will be whether Cognizant will know how to fully leverage this acquisition within its larger corporate culture.