I had a meeting the other week with a supplier with an interesting way of showing how well it is doing. What better way than to group yourself alongside Google and Apple?

The intelligence arm of HCL did some number crunching on the Bloomberg database using 3 criteria.

Sorry for passing on marketing talk but I think when IT services firms are ranked alongside the likes of Apple and Google it is evidence that it is a hot market. Even a hardened journalist like myself can find some marketing blurb interesting. After all I haven’t got time to number crunch.

The fact that all the companies ranked have recorded over 30% growth over the last five years despite recession is a clear message that IT outsourcing is getting bigger.

These three criteria used were:

1 – Over 30% compound annual growth rate for the last 5 years

Of the 3302 companies in the IT sector only 307 achieved this.

2 – 2009 revenues over $2bn

Of the 307 left only 11 achieved this.

3 – Market Cap greater than $5bn

Only six companies achieved this.

Here are six of them in no particular order.

1 – Lenovo Group

2 – Cognizant Tech

3 – Apple

4 – Google

5 – HCL Technologies

6 – Amazon