Top five India-based IT services providers grew 23.8 per cent last year compared to 7.7 per cent growth logged by the overall global IT services market, research firm Gartner said on Monday.

Nasdaq-listed Cognizant, which displaced Wipro to become the third-largest Indian IT services provider recently, experienced the highest growth rate of 33.3 per cent amongst the top five IT service providers in 2011, Gartner said in a statement.

Though Cognizant is not listed in India, 75 per cent of its over 1.3 lakh employees are based in India.

"2011 signalled a change in the mind-set of European buyers, particularly Continental Europe for offshore services," Gartner Principal Research Analyst Arup Roy said.

Indian providers have historically found it more difficult to gain market share in the Western Europe IT services market than in the US market but, as a group, the top five increased market share in the region from 2.3 per cent in 2010 to 2.8 per cent in 2011, he added.

Top player Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) saw 29.4 per cent growth in revenues in 2011, over 2010, while Infosys registered 17.8 per cent increase in revenues, Gartner said.

Wipro and HCL Technologies registered growth of 12.3 per cent and 26.2 per cent, respectively, it added.

On average, Tier 1 providers dramatically outperformed the growth rates of Tier II and Tier III providers, despite the consolidation and acquisitions among some of the smaller firms, Gartner said.

There were some standouts, however, with Genpact up 27 per cent and Syntel up 21 per cent. Smaller providers were charged with creating a more compelling marketing message that went beyond labour arbitrage, the research firm added.

"The top five Indian service providers have continuously chipped away market share from the large multinational corporation providers. In the past five years, they have been increasingly winning large outsourcing deals with a total contract value of more than USD 100 million," Roy said.

However, in recent years, these top five providers have greatly expanded their service portfolios and have been cross- selling and up-selling their application services client base with offerings like infrastructure services, BPO services, cloud and analytics services, he added.