Top Ten IT Companies of India 2008-2009

1) Tata Consultancy Services : Tata group-owned Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the country's no. 1 IT company. During the year 2008-09, the company clocked Rs 25,894 crore in revenues.

Like all its peers the company too was hit by slowdown pangs. The turmoil in the BFSI sector in the US hurt the company which has a huge exposure to the segment. It also had to write off some dues of Lehman Brothers and was hit by the bankruptcy of auto major General Motors and telecom giant Nortel.

However, the company made impressible gains in other sectors like manufacturing, healthcare and engineering services to grow by 22% year on year. Geographically, the company continued its expansion in Latin America, setting up its third delivery centre in Mexico. On acquisitions front, the company bought Citibank's BPO unit for $505 million.

The company which got 8% of its revenues from the domestic segment expanded its focus beyond government. It provided backend connectivity to Rajathan Royal's team during IPL season 2.

2) Wipro : At no. 2 is Bangalore-based Wipro. The company beat its larger rivals TCS and Infosys to post a revenue growth of 41% (excluding BPO). The company recorded revenues of Rs 23,882 crore during the fiscal 2008-09 which saw its two divisions Wipro Technologies and Wipro Infotech synergies better for total outsourcing deals.

The company fought the likes of IBM and HP on the domestic turf to wrestle Aircel, Wnitech Wireless and ESIC deals. The company's Middles East operations grew by over 280%.

The restructuring at the top level was followed by the departure of several senior executives of the company. The company was also hit by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and General Motors. The news that it Wipro has been barred by World Bank also created a small flutter.

3) Infosys : The third biggest IT company in India is Infosys with 2008-09 revenues of Rs 20,392 crore. The company closed the year with a 31% growth, with Europe and the US contributing 90% of the total revenues.

The turmoil in the US economy hit the company which had little focus on the domestic market. Only 1% of the company's revenues came from the domestic market.

However, the recession in the US seems to have wisened the company who is now focusing aggressively on the domestic market. Bharti Airtel and SBI were two of its big wins in the domestic market during the year.

Geographically, the company also expanded in Central Europe, Latin America and South America. The company also opened a new development centre in Mexico.

Last quarter saw the company laying off almost 1500 people on the grounds of non-performance.

4) HP India : The fourth largest IT company is Hewlett Packard India. Slowdown seems to have hurt the company badly, which grew by mere 2% in the fiscal 2008-09.

However, the company's slow growth was not company wide. While TSG grew by a good 33%, largely led by services and enterprise software, the PSG and IPG divisions saw a big hit in their numbers due to the general hit in the consumer sentiment.

Parent company's acquisition of EDS helped solidify HP's services business in the Indian market, with 18% of the revenues coming from the domestic segment.

The company bagged several new clients including Indian Railways, Tata Motors, Durgapur Steel and Raymonds. HP India continued to be the no. 1 vendor in notebooks and desktops across all four quarters according to IDC.

5) IBM India : At no. 5 is IBM India. With revenues of Rs 12,048 crore, the company grew by a decent 36% during the fiscal 2008-09 (excluding BPO business). The FY ‘09 saw the share of domestic revenue in the overall pie increase to 48%, from the previous year's 42%.

The company's big wins included SAP implementation deals from Torrent Pharma and Star India. It also won some key deals from Bharti Retail, Bharat Bijlee, LANCO Infratech, Cavincare, HDFC Bank, Max NewYork Life and Sun Direct.

The company was hit by its aggressive focus on the retail and real estate segments, as the two sectors are among the worst hit sectors.

The company's image as a hire and fire employer too is said to be there due to the layoffs it announced early last year.

6) Cognizant Technology Services : The sixth largest IT company in India is Cognizant Technology Services. Surprisingly, the company which gets four-fifth of its revenues from the US and half of this from the BFSI sector grew by almost 49% during the fiscal year 2008-09. With this the company recorded highest growth among all IT companies in the country for the third year in a row.

At a time when almost all companies announced layoffs, Cognizant claimed to have added 10% to its workforce between April ‘08 to March ‘09.

Cognizant also increased its penetration in the non-US markets, growing by over 71% in Europe and 142% in APAC. The company also made some inroads into the German market. The year also marked Cognizant’s entry into the domestic market.

7) Ingram Micro : IT distributor Ingram Micro is the seventh biggest IT company in the country. The year saw slowdown straining the company's revenues. The worst hit was the company's non-IT business, which includes mobiles and consumer electronics.

Incidentally, the company witnessed healthy growth in the first half of fiscal 2008-09, however, the poor showing in the second half wiped out the gains of the first half.

Computing systems including, notebooks, servers and desktops continue to be the biggest revenue generator for the company. In the computing segment, Ingram got maximum revenue from HP products followed by Acer. Lenovo's declining fortunes continue to trouble Ingram.

While printers and other peripherals did show slowdown pangs, the company's component business did well showing impressive performance from Intel.

8) HCL Technologies : At no. 8 is HCL Technologies. The company grew by 41% to clock revenues of Rs 8,764 crore. The biggest highlight of the fiscal 2008-09 for the company was its acquisition of UK-based Axon for which it pipped rival Infosys technologies.

The $658 million Axon buy was the biggest acquisition in the history of Indian IT. The company said that the acquisition was the part of its Blue Ocean strategy, which aims to expand in high-potential areas with low competition.

The year saw the company expanding its footprint in the APAC market. Some big deals included, UTI, MTV Networks, Misys and Serena Software.

The company's two major clients were among the worst hit BFSI companies.

9) HCL Infosystems : The ninth largest Indian IT company is HCL Infosystems. With Rs 8,089 crore revenues, the company grew by almost 60% during the fiscal 2008-09 largely riding on its services business.

BFSI segment showed the most activity, with the company acquiring a cooperative banking software vendor NTPL. The company bagged orders from BSNL in the telecom space.

The company ventured into physical security space launching Safe State to offer security and surveillance solutions. Some big launches of the year include mobile POS solutions and high-speed Infiniti challenger series workstations.

However, the company's marketshare in the PC/laptop market continues to lag at a lowly 11-13%.

10) Redington India : The tenth largest IT company in India is Redington. Slowdown hit the company badly during the fiscal 2008-09, with growth slipping to 5% from 25% in the previous year.

The company's revenues during the year stood at Rs 6,576 crore. Peripheral and systems were the biggest spoilers for the company during the year, with both businesses shrinking.

On the positive side, the company added nine new vendors including some niche principals like Philips LCD and Belkin accessories. Focusing on large deals and guarding it cash reserves helped the company.

Mozilla Story

BOXES lined the cubicles and hallways in the offices of Mozilla on a recent afternoon, and its chief executive, John Lilly, seemed a bit disoriented as he looked for a place to sit. Mozilla, which makes the Firefox Web browser, had just moved from one end of this city to the other, mainly to gain more space for its growing work force.

Yet it was hard not to read symbolism into the move. Mozilla’s old offices were next door to Google’s sprawling headquarters. For several years, Google has been Mozilla’s biggest ally and patron. But in September, it also became Mozilla’s competitor when it unveiled its own Web browser, Chrome.

So it seemed only natural for Mozilla to move out from under Google’s shadow.

“We’ve learned how to compete with Microsoft and Apple,” says Mr. Lilly, a soft-spoken, earnest 38-year-old. “Google is a giant, of course, and competing with them means we are competing with another giant, which is a little tiring.”

Those big companies weren’t giving much thought to browsers when Firefox was released in 2004, and neither were most ordinary Web users. A browser was just a window onto the Web, and people used whatever was already installed on a computer. Usually that meant Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Since then, Firefox has captured nearly a quarter of the browser market by focusing on speed, security and innovation. Its success is all the more remarkable because it was built and marketed by a far-flung community of programmers, testers and fans — mostly volunteers — coordinated by a nonprofit foundation. It is a shining example of the potential of open-source software, which anyone can modify and improve, and its ascent is one of Silicon Valley’s most unusual success stories.

In short, Mozilla showed the world that browsers matter. Now the challenge is to keep proving that Mozilla matters.

The rise of Firefox unleashed a new wave of innovation and competition among browser makers. Microsoft and Apple, which makes the Safari browser, have narrowed the gap with recent upgrades. That makes it less likely that people will take the trouble to seek out and install Firefox.

At the same time, the Web has been migrating from PCs to powerful mobile phones like the iPhone. Firefox won’t have a mobile version ready until later this year.

And then there is Google. After introducing Chrome, a lightning-fast browser designed to run increasingly complex Web applications, Google upped the ante. This month it said it would put Chrome at the center of a new operating system — the software that handles the most basic functions of a PC.

“Google, Apple and Microsoft can all throw a lot of resources toward improving their browsers. Mozilla, not so much,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “When it was them against Microsoft, it wasn’t such a big problem. Now that there are other alternatives, it becomes harder for them to retain relevance.”

DESPITE Mozilla’s mighty and increasingly competitive rivals, the spread of Firefox has continued unabated. Nearly 300 million people around the world use it, making Firefox not only the most successful open-source consumer product, but also one of the most successful software programs ever.

To a large extent, that success sprang from a disparate community that coalesced around Firefox and was harnessed by Mitchell Baker, Mr. Lilly’s predecessor. Ms. Baker, whom Mr. Lilly calls the “conscience” of Mozilla, remains its chairwoman and is actively involved in managing it.

Ms. Baker, 52, seems to embody Mozilla’s anticorporate ethos. Unlike the clean-cut Mr. Lilly, Ms. Baker has a decidedly counterculture look. Her hair, dyed a reddish color, is closely cropped on one side only, and she is prone to wearing sandals with hiking socks.

She organized a recent meeting of nonprofit groups at Mozilla that ended with what she called a “psychic group hug” — not a literal embrace, but a chance for everyone there to describe in one word how they were feeling.

For Mozilla and its millions of fans, Firefox is not just cool software but also a cause: to ensure that no company, whether Microsoft, Google or anyone else, can tilt the Web to its advantage by tweaking its browser to favor its products or applications. Microsoft appeared ready to use that tactic after its browser vanquished Netscape’s.

Ms. Baker envisioned Firefox as a counterweight to that possibility, and a way to make browsing safer. In the years after Netscape’s demise, Microsoft essentially stopped improving Internet Explorer, and the browser quickly became vulnerable to security threats, an explosion of pop-up ads and other annoyances.

Firefox was faster, safer and blocked pop-ups. It also offered some compelling innovations, like tabs, which allowed users to have multiple pages open inside a single browser window. Word of its virtues spread quickly, first in the tech world, then through a rapidly expanding fan base.

Today the model remains the same. Only a small fraction of the people involved in building Firefox are paid employees at Mozilla, which has about 250 workers. An additional 1,000 or so programmers contributed code for the most recent Firefox release. There are also tens of thousands of other volunteers who help test and promote Firefox, write add-ons and help translate it into more than 70 languages.

“We succeeded because more people got engaged, helped us build a better product and helped us get the product into the hands of people,” Ms. Baker says. “We succeeded because of the mission.”

That community’s fervor was heard in a recent weekly conference call for engineers who build Firefox. The call, moderated but open to anyone, had 30 participants, some in Mozilla offices and others scattered worldwide.

The conversation bounced from one technical topic to another: user interfaces, bug tracking, security. Then someone interrupted to announce that in just a few hours, one million people had downloaded the new Firefox 3.5. The group erupted in cheers. (By the next afternoon, the number had topped six million.)

“Mozilla is about a community coming together and saying it can compete with the largest software company in the world,” says Sandeep Krishnamurthy, director of the business administration program at the University of Washington at Bothell, who recently wrote a paper on Firefox’s success. “There really is nothing like it.”

Across the globe, Vineel Reddy, 21, an engineering student in Hyderabad, India, basks in the satisfaction of having contributed to that success. Drawn to the Firefox mission, but not particularly good at programming, he decided to work on promoting Firefox. He rallied some friends who were skilled at video editing, rented a camera and produced a flashy clip that compares Firefox to a slick sports car.

The video has been seen more than 33,000 times, and Mr. Reddy says he gets daily e-mail messages thanking him. “This is the best experience I have had,” he says.

Mr. Lilly says it was that kind of dedication from volunteers that enticed him to move from a career in venture capital and to join Mozilla in 2005.

“As Americans we’ve lost the sort of civic engagement, the participation in making the world what we want and what we think it should be,” says Mr. Lilly, who became chief executive last year. “That, as a mission and as a product ethos, resonated with me.”

MR. LILLY readily acknowledges that Google’s entrance into the browser market rocked the Mozilla boat. “Life was simpler before they did this,” he says.

That said, Chrome’s release does not signal a return to the browser wars of the 1990s, when Microsoft poured resources into crushing the upstart Netscape.

For starters, Mozilla and Google have long had an agreement that makes Google the standard home page when people start Firefox, and sends them to Google when they type something into the search box at the top of the browser.

Google pays Mozilla hefty fees in return.

The deal accounted for 88 percent of Mozilla’s $75 million in revenue in 2007, according to its most recent tax filings, and it was recently renewed through 2011. (The gusher of income from Google prompted the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation to set up a taxpaying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, in 2005.)

The deal has helped Google gain market share in search. But Google has also been among the biggest beneficiaries of Firefox’s success in other ways.

Google’s fortunes are tied to the advancement of the Web. As browsers become faster, more standardized, more secure and more capable of running complex Web applications, Google’s services, like search, Gmail, maps and office software, become easier to use and more popular, and Google earns more money. Firefox’s innovations have helped with this.

“Mozilla has done an amazing job,” says Sundar Pichai, a vice president of engineering at Google who heads the development of Chrome.

Mr. Pichai says that because of Mozilla’s vital role, the company thought long and hard about the impact Chrome would have on Firefox. Google eventually came to believe that it could help spur even more innovation in browsers by building its own, he says. And it made Chrome open-source, so any advances it makes could be adopted by others, including Mozilla.

“We were all very clear that if the outcome was that somehow Mozilla lost share to Google, and everything else remained the same, internally, we would have been seen as having failed,” Mr. Pichai says.

So far, Chrome doesn’t appear to have hurt Firefox. Chrome has grabbed just under 2 percent of the browser market, according to Net Applications, a company that tracks browser use. During the same period, Firefox’s share has kept growing, to 22.5 percent from 19.5 percent. Microsoft’s has continued to decline, to 66 percent from 72, though it argues that most of that loss has been on computers that don’t readily support Internet Explorer, like those from Apple.

In many ways, Google and Mozilla are fighting the same battle, albeit not with the same objectives. They both contend that the Web should be open and based on common standards — Mozilla because it is its mission, Google because it is good for its business.

“Most days we are aligned with them,” Mr. Lilly says. “Their focus on the open Web is pretty amazing.”

But he says financial pressures may someday push Google to start using Chrome to favor its own services. That danger, he says, “clarifies for me how important it is for independent organizations like Mozilla to exist.”

Few at Mozilla fear that Google will pull its financial support. And even if it did, Mozilla says that it could find another company willing to cut a similar deal. The real challenge for Firefox is that over time, as Google and others invest in developing and marketing their browsers, the mission that drove Firefox’s success will lose urgency.

“Mozilla performed a really good service, but you have to wonder what their relevance is going to be going forward,” says Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent firm that tracks the company. “They keep Microsoft honest. But if Google is pushing innovation in its own browser, it can play that role.”

Mr. Lilly acknowledges that with the intense competition, it will be harder for Firefox to stand out. Firefox and its supporters will have to work harder to find areas of browser technology where they want to focus their efforts, he says, and let Google, Apple and Microsoft push innovation in other areas.

But he says the renewed competition is a testament to the success of Firefox and of the Mozilla mission.

“This is the world we wanted, and the world we made,” he says. “We wanted a world where people — normal human beings — could make meaningful choices about the browser technology that they use. That’s what we have today.”