(The award seeks to recognise a company that has consistently set clear performance benchmarks for the rest of the industry and strived to be a world leader)Tata Consultancy Services is worth more than its three closest rivals put together — Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies. The first company to surpass valuation of Rs 5 lakh crore on the domestic bourses, earlier this year, has been the leader of the Indian information technology industry by a long mile. But over the past year it has also staked its claim to the upper reaches of the global IT sector as it has entered the rarified club of top 10 IT companies in the world.TCS has overtaken Accenture in headcount and is now second only to International Business Machines in the number of people it employs. It has the lowest attrition rate among the top IT companies and of the 300,000 people on its rolls, a third are women.Although Accenture's annual revenues were more than double those of TCS' $13.4 billion in the past financial year, the Indian company has posted larger profits over the past two quarters. Moreover, analysts expect it to buck the trend in the IT industry of slower growth in a company as its size increases.The National Association for Software and Services Companies or Nasscom expects the Indian IT industry to grow 13%-15% in the current financial year. N Chandrasekaran , CEO of TCS has confidently declared that his company will surpass that target."Talk to any incumbent Western service provider today, and the one making them all tremble from the subcontinent is TCS," analyst firm HfS said of the company.Chandrasekaran, who was recently reappointed for a second five-year term at the Mumbai-based IT behemoth, is steering towards more broad-based growth and making the company less dependent on the US financial services industry. He spearheaded an acquisition in Japan that will boost the company's revenue from that large and largely untapped IT market by five times.Newer technologies like cloud, mobility, social media and analytics are expected to contribute $5 billion to the company's revenues in the next three to five years.TCS has also overcome a major weakness — lower profitability. For years, Infosys had the best margins in the industry at about 30% in 2008-09. But since then TCS has boosted its offshore utilisation, kept down employee costs and sales expenses, to post the best margins in the industry. TCS had an operating margin of 29.1% in 2013-14 while Infosys achieved 24%.TCS is well on its way to becoming a true Indian multinational. It operates in 44 countries and is a considered good corporate citizen in all of them. In its largest market, the US, it has taken steps to improve science and technology education and is the title sponsor for the New York Marathon.