The most clearly defined group covered in the Top 5 happens to be also the most diverse: the Hewlett-Packard group. It has the most complete range of products and services (both domestic and exports) that a group could wish for. It's revenue-dominated by domestic sales (of systems, peripherals, supplies, and services), and manpower-dominated by the services groups. Services include domestic and export SI and related businesses, and BPO and R&D and other IP work for HP itself. Its India head talks of "leveraging India like no one else", and it seems to have done it. It's also had the challenge of taking up a global structure that works with four separate business groups. So far, business customers would deal with four separate sales people. A common sales force makes that process more efficient today, for HP's domestic sales in India.

More loosely defined is the HCL group. The name suggests common origin and, possibly, ownership, but the real link is the holdings of over 50% in both HCL Insys (HCLI) and HCL Tech (HCLI), by Shiv Nadar and his family, through holding companies. There are others who have moved out of the group. One is NIIT, which was a member based on the same principle of origin and Nadar's holdings; but over time, discussions with both parties brought up the issue that there was really no thread strong enough to consider NIIT part of "an HCL group"; so we moved it out in our reckoning. Former HCLT subsidiary HCL-Perot went out of the picture after Perot bought out HCL's stake. HCL Tech and HCL Insys have tended to work independently as separate companies; HCL Insys too was keenly eyeing services exports. Last year, they came closer together, after 'rationalizing' parts of the business. This basically meant that all the services exports (software and BPO) business was hived off to HCLT and its BPO subsidiary eServe. HCLI retains only the hardware-related services, and fronts the sales for other domestic services.

You'd expect the Tata Group to be the most rigidly defined: all of them are clearly Indian entities and subsidiaries or divisions of Tata Sons, or of one of the group companies. While that is so, there is really no "IT group" defined at Tata Sons. So there's no central discussion on "which businesses the group should be in" or which are the gaps or overlaps. These discussions do reportedly happen at an informal level, but it's not structured. Nor is there a group CIO/CTO, so all IT usage decisions across the 85-odd Tata group companies are by and large "decentralized" and left to the individual companies. On one hand, this means quicker decisions. On the other, the group may be missing out on economies of scale, and, in the IT business domain, on synergies, cross-selling, and efficiencies through the one-customer-face approach it's done with, say, for with its Telecom Enterprise Business Unit. Then there are market conflicts, which, with such an overwhelming dominance by one company, are more likely than not to be resolved in favor of TCS.

But there's a surprise. Usually TCS grows sharply, and the others pull growth down. This time, TCS is at below industry average, and the other companies pulled the group up to the industry average!

All in all, there are surprisingly few "IT groups". No other traditional business house has really entered the IT industry and occupied it the way the Tata group and Wipro (once a vegetable oils and soaps company) have done. Both of these started with turning their internal IT departments into profit centers, and growing from there. Nor have enough MNC companies entered diverse areas in India beyond the captive development or contact center, or integrated their businesses in the Indian market to "leverage India" as HP describes it. Having said that, many MNCs are of course ramping up their India services delivery centers to amazing level: for instance, GE, Acenture, IBM all hitting the 10,000-person levels.

How much group-level leverage can a group do? Well, the five giants featured here are all about scale. They're billion-dollar-level groups (except HCL, which should get there next year). The Tatas (IT), Wipro, Infosys, HCL, even HP, all employee between 12,000 and 25,000 people. Those numbers suggest that they're also all into services. All of them are struggling with scale. Infosys gets a million resumes in a year, and is rapidly recruiting. The scale helps both in sharing learnings, and in possible efficiencies. Group CTOs and other functions can have a similar purpose and effect.

An effect of scale is also influence (and in some cases, likely successor grooming). Vivek Paul, vice-chairman, is now the clear number two at Wipro: even the infotech (domestic) division now reports in to him. TCS' Ramdorai reportedly (informally) calls the shots on IT business issues across the Tata Group. Hema Ravichander is now group HR manager, handling Infosys too. And Balu Doraisamy is MD for HP with charge of all HP activities in India, a new designation that recognizes the scale of operations in, and the importance of, India.

But the strangest effect of scale sometimes is speed. China has shown that you don't have to be Singapore to move fast. In India, companies like Reliance have done that too-if you're not overly democratic and decentralized, you can turn a large corporate on a dime and recover from major marketing disasters, etc. The IT giants have demonstrated agility and speed too-which is how they've kept growing faster than the industry. Whether it's HCL Insys' rapid change of direction (it's rapidly become a mobile-phone distribution powerhouse), or HP's post-merger integration, sales structure changes and the integration of and model shift for Digital, or Wipro's rapid structural changes over the years.

So when we said last year that while the top groups accrue scale, growth would slow down. We were wrong, at least for this year. The giants made it through the bad years through adaptive agility. Now, when the wave is turning up again, they're riding it smoothly, right on top.

Prasanto K Roy with Iishwar Daas Nair