IBM has maintained its role as the IT services kingpin, coming out on top of a league table from analyst Gartner.
The company holds 7.2 percent of the worldwide IT services market, followed by EDS, Fujitsu, Accenture, HP and CSC, according to Gartner.
But its growth rate is among the slowest of the top six. Accenture and EDS are the fastest growing companies in the upper ranking, growing by 7.8 percent and 7.6 percent from 2005 to 2006 respectively.
Despite talk of the threat of Indian-based IT services companies, these businesses account for just three percent of worldwide revenues, according to Gartner, compared to 57 percent for US-based vendors.
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Katharine Hale, vice president at Gartner, said that, without significant acquisitions, it would take India-based vendors many years to reach even half the revenue of US-based vendors.
Overall worldwide IT services revenue totalled $672.3bn in 2006, up 6.4 percent from the previous year. BPO services showed the strongest growth at 8.6 percent, while Gartner described development and integration services as the "backbone" of the market, given they account for 30 percent of total revenues.
Though the usual suspects top the list, together they account for just one-fifth of the total market, indicating this is a diverse area with plenty of players.
IBM Global Services was recently voted the world's best outsourcing company by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals.
Talkback
it is true that the indian firms are small in revenue but they have growth rates of around 30% as opposed to the 8% of the larger firms. they are also considerably more profitable, with the Big 3 sitting on cash reserves of $1 billion. they also have market caps of around $25 bn despite revenues of around $4 bn which gives them a lot of leverage to acquire other firms if they want to.
Size is just one parameter for being number one. reputation and customer loyalty are good indicators for the future. the press release mentions that IBM was voted #1 by the members of International Association of Outsourcing Professionals...Wipro was #6 followed by Infosys.
So just as Toyota overtook GM on the basis of good quality and innovation my bets are on the indian firms.