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The industry's return to a comfortable level of financial health now seems assured. The Infoconomy Global Index, the measure of the quarterly revenue performance of the world's 200 largest IT companies, jumped to 3.7% in October from 2.4% a month earlier.

That figure represents the third consecutive month of positive and rising growth, and is the industry's best performance since June 2001.

The pace was influenced by a slew of highly upbeat results from some the largest US vendors - although in several cases growth was more a factor of acquisition than better sales. At the beginning of a new product cycle, chipmaker AMD recorded a stunning 88% growth in revenue; PC maker Apple managed a 16% rise in revenues; services and systems giants IBM and Unisys both pushed revenues up by 9%; storage systems and software companies EMC and Veritas reported rises of 20% and 23% respectively; while at Microsoft sales were up 6%.

But with the acquisition market in spate, some of the positive results influencing the Index do not actually represent underlying growth. Business applications software company PeopleSoft, for example, posted a 32% upsurge, but that was entirely due to it rolling the revenues of its recent acquisition JD Edwards into its latest quarterly numbers.

Offsetting that were some negative numbers from a group of former stars of the industry. The market leader in customer relationship management software, Siebel Systems, continued to lose momentum with a 10% downturn in revenues. Revenues at security software company Verisign tumbled 11%. And, Silicon Graphics, once regarded as the source of the world's coolest workstations, continued its slide, with an 11% drop in revenues.

There were also a continued flow of bad news from Europe, where the growth rate of companies headquartered in the region is running at around -7%.

But negative numbers are becoming much less prevalent throughout. While even six months ago more than half of all the companies tracked were reported declining sales, that figure is now down to less than a quarter - a clear pointer that the bounce-back is no fluke.