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IBM increased its lead in the IT services market during 2003 as two of its nearest rivals, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Hewlett-Packard (HP), lost share.

According to newly released figures from industry research company Gartner, IBM's revenue from services jumped 6.2% over the year to hit $42.6 billion, allowing it to maintain a market share of 7.5%. In contrast, EDS's flat revenues of $21.1 billion resulted in its share falling from 3.9% to 3.7%. Similarly, HP, with revenues up 2.7% to $12.5 billion, saw its share fall slightly from 2.3% to 2.2% - a situation that allowed Computer Sciences Corp (CSC), buoyed by a wave of US government contracts, to bump HP from fourth position.

However, CSC has a lot of ground to make up on the real star of IT services in 2003 - Fujitsu. According to Gartner, the company grew its services revenues by 11% to $16.1 billion during the year, making it the fastest riser of any of the services top 10.

The research also shows that US-based vendors attracted 59% of total IT services spending worldwide. And despite a sense that offshore outsourcing companies have made inroads into the global services market, Indian vendors still only accounted for a small segment of the total market. Collectively, they banked 1.4% of global IT services revenues, although their combined sales increased by 29% over the year, compared with just a 4% growth among US-based vendors.

Worldwide, organisations spent $569 billion on IT services in 2003, 6.2% more than in the previous year.

Meanwhile, findings at rival research house IDC, which defines the scope of IT services slightly differently from Gartner, show that IBM's market share in worldwide IT services rose to 7.9% in 2003 from 7.3 % in 2002. EDS stayed at 4%, while third-placed Fujitsu dropped by 0.1% to 2.9%. HP was fourth, with its share sliding to 2.4% from 2.5%. In fifth position, Accenture also suffered a slight fall from 2.4% in 2002 to 2.3%.