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When Dataquest started off in December 1982, the entire Indian IT industry was in the region of `100 crore. Today just the market leader TCS is in touching range of an annual revenue of `2 lakh crore.

How times have changed!

We started making a list of the Top 10 IT companies, which later became the much-awaited Top 20. It was looked upon eagerly by everyone in the industry and was always a bestseller.

As you can see in the 1985 list at the Number 1 position was ICIM (International Computers Indian Manufacture). Not many Indians have heard of this company. It was the Indian arm of the British ICL which itself saw many avatars. After many iterations, it eventually became Zensar Technologies and is a subsidiary of the RPG Group.

At second place was ECIL (Electronics Corporation of India Limited), which is still around, but not one of the IT giants. At third place was HCL which dominated initially, went down in the rankings subsequently, but which has made a comeback and is again at No. 3 in the DQ Top 20 2022 rankings as HCLTech.

At fourth position was DCM which isn’t an IT giant today and survives as DCM Infotech. Wipro came in at fifth position and in the 2022 rankings came fourth. So HCLTech and Wipro are the two companies which have retained their top status. Positions 6-10 were occupied by companies none of which are IT giants today: Nelco, Hinditron, ORG, Uptron and Zenith.

The Top 10 of 2022 were: 1. TCS. 2. Infosys. 3. HCLTech. 4. Wipro. 5. Redington India. 6. Accenture India. 7. Tech Mahindra. 8. Cognizant India. 9. Ingram Micro India. 10. HP Inc India.

Out of this, both Infosys and TCS were around in 1982 though they had not broken into the Top 10 in the early years. Tech Mahindra took over Satyam and there are some multinational India subsidiaries in the list. Both L&T Infotech and Mindtree were in the Top 20 and their merger LTIMindtree should break into the Top 10 in the future.

Another thing you can check is that in those days it was all about hardware: Minicomputers, microcomputers and large system projects. While hardware increased exponentially (think desktops, peripherals, laptops, tabs and endless devices), subsequently software ruled but in India the giants are into IT services.

sunilr@cybermedia.co.in