Singapore: With a 67.1-per cent revenue jump under its belt for 2001, Satyam Computer Services has been ranked as the fourth fastest growing software maintenance and support providing company in the world, by a Gartner Dataquest study.

Satyam and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) are the only Indian companies to have featured in this prestigious list which boasts of names like Peregrine, Itochu Techno-Science, Siebel, Microsoft, SAP, Oce and others.

In the US, the top three companies in terms of revenue growth percentages were Peregrine, TCS and Satyam with a revenue growth of 94 per cent, 89 per cent and 66 per cent, respectively.

The Gartner study points out that achieving top rankings for software support revenue requires reaching a critical mass in terms of experience in the market (measured in years), the number of services employees (direct or indirect) and the geographic scope of the service delivery operation.

The study further observes that the software industry is changing and bringing with it change in software support and maintenance services. The Gartner Dataquest Software Group is seeing an explosion in the means by which software companies make money.

Their product is not traditional software but intellectual property, which has been coded into binary form (programmes). These are usually sold in a customised state, which is why references to software, in its traditional sense, may be somewhat misleading.

Software products are really increasingly laborious on a highly customised project. There are many means of transferring the intellectual property to customers — leases (term agreements), sales (site license) or subscriptions (non-perpetual subscription).

According to the report traditional notions of software maintenance may no longer fit. Sometimes, the way companies transfer intellectual property may generate more revenue than license sales themselves. This occurs when software is distributed under a subscription model rather than simple up-front sales.

Traditional software maintenance is totally obsolete when software is served up in a hosted or ASP model because only one copy of the software is ‘live’ for all users. Gartner expects this will be a growing trend as the software markets continue to consolidate and mature and outsourcing continues to rise.

Achieving high growth rates in software support revenue does not require a large-scale operation, meaning a large number of employees or long-term experience in the market, although both do help. High revenue growth rates are most often attributed to being in a fast-growing product market and being able to scale up the service delivery capacity to meet the demand.

This means either aggressively recruiting new employees or quickly deploying an alliance or partner network to meet the demand. Or it can mean strategically engineering a project in such a fashion as to diminish the need for labour, while exhibiting enough value to continue to produce high revenue.