Worldwide IT outsourcing revenue hit $246.6bn in 2011, climbing 7.8% on 2010’s figure of $228.7bn, according to analyst house Gartner.

Outsourcers from India and those specialising in cloud-based services saw the best growth for 2011, according to Gartner’s research.

IBM remains the dominant figure in the outsourcing space, claiming a 7.8% rise in revenue during 2011, taking it to $26.9bn in revenue. This gives it a market share of 10.9%, according to Gartner. HP, which has spent heavily on its services division, saw modest growth of just 2% during the year, taking it to $15.1bn in revenue and a market share of 6.1%.

In third behind these two tech giants was Fujitsu, with 4.5% of the market. For 2011, Fujitsu saw revenue of $10.9bn, up an impressive 10.3%. That revenue growth saw Fujitsu leapfrog CSC, which dropped to fourth following flat revenue growth. CSC now claims 4.2% of the market with revenue of $10.3bn.

Accenture saw the biggest growth of the top five vendors, seeing its revenue rise 18.2% to $6.5bn, giving it 2.6% of the market.

Forty-three providers booked 2011 revenues of $1bn or more, Gartner said, giving this group growth of 9.5%.

"Revenue cannibalisation resulting from client adoption of industrialised, and often cloud-based, services risks muting the growth opportunities for the ITO providers that are heavily weighted in infrastructure outsourcing," said Bryan Britz, research director at Gartner.

"Strategies will vary as clients are likely to pursue hybrid cloud strategies requiring providers to deliver some asset-light and some asset-heavy offerings — which will result in varying growth trajectories among competitors over the next several years," he added.

Britz added that the growth figures were impressive considering the perilous economic situation in many parts of the world.

"For many leading providers in the ITO market, 2011 revenue results demonstrate how challenging simply maintaining a market share position has become, much less gaining share — and this challenge is likely to worsen over the next few years for providers that do not address these forces," he said.