TCS, for the seventh year in a row, remained at the topincreasing the lead margin, thanks partially to the CMC acquisition, revenue of which has been added to its revenue (fully) for the first time this year.

The composition of Top 20 remained largely unchanged, except that the replacement of a hardware company, Samsung, by a services company, Tech Mahindra, means that services companies now occupy as many as eight slots in the Top 20. If you add IBM and HPwho draw significant share of their revenues from servicesboth export and domesticthe hold of services firms on Top 20 looks even more impressive.

Indian companies occupy 11 positions in the Top 20the replacement of Samsung by Tech Mahindra again tilting the balance in their favor.

Next 30: The Challengers
The Next 30, with a combined revenue base of Rs 31,883 crore, accounted for 16.4% of the total revenue base of the 200 companies. They grew by 38%almost at the same rate that all companies grew together, thus keeping their share in the overall pie more or less the same.

However, unlike Top 20 and Rest 150, the composition of the Next 30 was more homogenous, with services companies occupying 19 of the 32 positions (adding CMC and i-flex, which are not ranked, the Top 30 positions are shared among 32 companies) and hardware companies accounting for eight, the duo together has the lions share of 27 of the 32 positions. There is not a single distributor in the Next 30 club, unlike Top 20 where three of themIngram Micro, Redington, and Teledata, which has now eSys as part of ithold.

The Next 30like the typical middle management level in the enterpriseis still struggling to create a positioning for itself. Nowhere near the Top 20 when it comes to either growth or stability, yet with revenues just a notch behind, they are way ahead of the rest. As many as six stormed out of this category replaced by four brand new companies which have been ranked for the first time and another four who graduated to the club from Rest 150. Incidentally, two of these are not the typical IT companies. While, NIIT Limited, is focused on training; IRCTC, an Indian Railways enterprise, is an e-commerce company.

Export vs Domestic
The DQ Top 20 rankings are a mix of export firms as well as domestic companies. So you may well have an Ingram Micro and a Satyam competing for a rankone, an Indian company based on its revenues globally; the other an American company, based on its business in the Indian market. That, of course, is a good way of presenting the big picture.

But there was a genuine demand from many of our readers to segregate and provide two lists separately: one for top domestic players and one for top export players. We have done exactly that. To be honest, though tracking parameters differ, there are many research agencies which track export IT services quite well. So the need was more in the domestic front.

We have nevertheless presented two tables: the Domestic Top 20 and the Export Top 20. While rankings of top export players are available elsewhere, most such lists rank only the India-headquartered companies and ignore large non-Indian exporters like IBM, Cognizant, Oracle, and HP. We have combined both.

Export Top 20 firms grew by 45% against 32% growth of domestic companies, which is excellent by any standard. But it often looks unimpressive because it is compared with export figures where India has been getting huge chunks of services already existing in developed markets, to its shores.

Transformation Time
Numbers, especially past numbers, no matter how important they may be, do not always tell the complete story.

The year 2006-07 was a year of transformation. The two most important trends of last year in terms of the strategic vision of companies can be summarized in a single sentence: the global went more global; the local, more local.

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