The recent year-long global recession notwithstanding, the five top Indian information technology firms – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCL and Cognizant (in the descending order), have increased their profit margins even after offering discounts varying between 4 per cent and 6 per cent to their domestic and global clients. According to a research report released by Forrester, it is predicted that these leading five Indian IT firms will increase their growth two-fold or more during 2011. As each of these IT firms has their individual ways to expand during in the aftermath of the economic slum, the report says that a number of these companies are expected to grow beyond 20 per cent over this period.

Sudin Apte, the principal analyst at Forrester, said that with a view to overcome the effects of the economic depression majority of the Indian IT companies adopted severe cost-control measures like salary cuts and variable pay, cutting expenses on marketing and enduring R&D overheads and even resorting to retrenchment in a number of instances. Additionally, the expenses towards recruitment and annual pay hikes remained unchanged or lower by five per cent to seven per cent as the attrition rate was at an unprecedented low. Methodical cuts in budgets like these together with stern approval methods enabled these IT firms to trim down expenses by double digit ratio.

Quoting the Forrester’s research report, an industry news website reports that while Cognizant plans to develop a new plane of client relationship founded on the firm’s robust domain proficiency and advisory expertise, HCL’s latest ‘value portal’ is based on the catchwords, such as ‘employee first’ empowers the company’s workforce to change the spotlight from volume or labor-oriented business to client rapport that is guided by value. Then again, Infosys intends to concentrate on expanding its global delivery model (GDM), perking up competence as well as exploiting new engagement models with a view to widen its service range from consulting to maintenance. The IT firm would like its present associations to vend further lines of offerings, inclusive of analytics, testing and product design or R&D services.

The Forrester research report further states that with a view to develop the firm’s present leadership status on the basis of its numerous current client relations, India’s largest IT firm Tata Consultancy Services intends to make new investments in the domain’s of components and framework, platform-based business process outsourcing as well as new software products for the utility of the financial services industry. Meanwhile, India’s third largest IT firm Wipro intends to incorporate integrated information technology and BPO with a view to augment the company’s consulting potentials, thereby developing a non-linear delivery service to sever the connection between its inventory of employees and proceeds.