>> Top 100 Global Services Companies

The practice of global services--distributing business and IT work beyond your country's borders--is beginning to mature. The signs aren't quite as obvious--or awkward--as puberty, but the industry is growing up.

It's evident in the blistering growth of Indian firms, even as the choices for global outsourcing expand in Eastern Europe and countries from China to Mexico. It can be seen in the widening types of services that vendors offer and how buyers of such services are changing their internal operations.

At Time Warner, the roles of employees have changed as a result of outsourcing, says David Bass, manager of application development and maintenance. The emphasis is on cutting-edge technology and making tech-related business decisions. Says Bass, "We need employees to be system analysts, business analysts, and architects, and not to do software coding anymore."

The pace of change makes tracking the world market for business and technology service providers a complicated and expensive undertaking. In this spirit, InformationWeek's sibling publication Global Services teamed with outsourcing consulting firm neoIT for the third consecutive year to field an in-depth study of service providers spanning four continents. The result is the Global Services 100 list, along with top 10 rankings by a number of categories. Global Services and neoIT vetted providers much the way a program management office engages in a request for proposals and selected winners in 11 categories based on the strengths of the information they provided, plus what they gleaned from customers and industry analysts.

What makes these companies more special than the ones that ranked just behind them, or those that finished out of the running in our respective categories? They demonstrated a pattern of market leadership, innovation, and outstanding customer service. If your company conducts a similar program to select service providers, your results will almost certainly vary--no two customers' weighting systems are the same. But you can be sure these companies are worth considering.

PRICING AND PROJECTS ON THE MOVE

Most service providers aspire to do high-margin, transformational consulting, but the lure of steady hosting and maintenance work, back-office paperwork, and customer contact centers is hard to pass up. No consensus exists about industry consolidation. There's widespread evidence that executives with global sourcing experience will be much in demand. "The globalization of services is at a torrid pace, with focus on greater value generation," says Atul Vashistha, CEO of neoIT.

Demand's been so strong that many offshore vendors have been able to raise prices in the last six months, says James Friedman, a senior analyst covering business services at Susquehanna Financial Group, an institutional research, brokerage, and trading firm. Perennial Global Services 100 leaders such as Cognizant, Infosys, Ness Technologies, Patni, and Satyam are among those on his list of service providers with higher prices.