Mumbai: Second-rung cities like Chandigarh and Coimbatore are fast emerging as India's new information technology (IT) hubs as inadequate infrastructure cripples the traditional centres of Bangalore and Hyderabad, technology consulting firm Gartner Research said in a recent study.

While information technology services grow at 20 per cent annual rate, more and more companies and workers are flocking to the new centres like Chandigarh and Coimbatore, the study noted.

Chandigarh is now home to IT majors, including Infosys, textile city Coimbatore has attracted companies such as Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services to its newly developed technology parks over the past few years.

Gartner named Infosys, Wipro and TCS as the next three ''megavendors'' that will increasingly take on IBM Global Services, Hewlett-Packard-EDS and CSC for major contracts.

''These vendors will increasingly be considered for strategic service deals and will augment, or in some cases replace, today''s acknowledged megavendors in this space,'' the Gartner report says.

''Such a shift in the IT service landscape is a key trend that application development and sourcing managers need to understand and prepare for. Investment bank UBS has named Infosys and smaller firm Satyam as its best bets in the sector.''

The top five India-based IT companies have raised combined market share from 33 per cent in the 2004 financial year to 40 per cent in fiscal 2008, the Gartner report noted.
 
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys Technologies and Wipro Technologies, collectively referred as 'India-3', will emerge as the next generation of IT service megavendors, according to Gartner, Inc. These vendors are increasingly being considered for strategic service deals, and will augment or, in some cases, replace today's acknowledged megavendors by revenue - IBM Global Services, Accenture and EDS - in this space by 2011. These emerging megavendors are much smaller than the current megavendors but will increasingly compete for the same megadeals that had been the exclusive domain of the incumbent megavendors, the report said.

''The emerging megavendors have made dramatic progress in the past few years and have more than doubled their revenue in a four-year period, with the 2007 revenue being 2.6 times the 2004 revenue,'' said Partha Iyengar, vice president, and regional research director, Gartner. ''This level of growth differential has continued even as these vendors have become multibillion dollar enterprises. To put this in context, there are just 100 service enterprises globally with more than $1 billion in revenue.''