The most comprehensive annual survey of global outsourcing has picked out the leaders in the burgeoning market for infrastructure services.

The Brown-Wilson Group’s Black Book of Outsourcing for 2007 – which ranks the top ten suppliers based on 18 criteria of “operational excellence and client satisfaction with outcomes” – puts India’s HCL Technologies in the number one spot, in a nascent market that HCL itself reckons is worth a potential $55 billion worldwide.

EDS, CSC, Unisys and IBM also feature in the top five of the ranking, which assessed the strengths and weaknesses of 276 vendors across their customers’ overall preferences and recommendations, breadth of offerings and client types, delivery record and other benchmarks.

Infrastructure outsourcing services – through which an organisation’s servers, storage devices, desktops and other systems are managed on site or remotely – has been named as the “third wave of outsourcing” by India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), rivalling in size the first two waves of outsourced software services and business process outsourcing.