The top 50 best managed outsourcing vendors for 2005 announced by The Black Book of Outsourcing (Brown & Wilson, Wiley Publishers) has a few surprises.

For starters, Indian business process outsourcing companies seem to have outshone their software services peers. There are as many as 12 Indian companies who feature in the top 50 list.

To be available in the United States from April 25, The Black Book of Outsourcing has remained on the pre-order bestseller list for the last nine weeks by US and worlwide book distributors and book chain outlets.

The rankings are based on customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction surveys, comparisons with other independent vendors, ratings of client performance and reports from global consulting firms.

This year IBM Global/Daksh (the BPO company IBM acquired last April for between Rs 700 crore and Rs 750 crore) has been ranked as the number one outsourcer.

The next two slots go to Accenture at number two and Hewlett Packard at number three.

The real surprise is Banglaore-based software service provider MphasiS, founded by ex-Citibanker Jerry Rao, which has been ranked at number four, ahead of other bigger industry peers like Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and Cognizant.

Ranks six and seven are shared by two Indian BPO companies -- Wipro Spectramind and ICICI OneSource, respectively.

This apart most of the companies featured in the top 50 list have substantial Indian presences. These include marquee names like IBM Global /Daksh, Accenture, Hewlett Packard, Ernst & Young/Capgemini, Oracle, eFunds Global Outsourcing, Convergys and CSC.

Indian IT bellwethers like Satyam Computer and Infosys Technologies featured much below at ranks 19 and 25, respectively.

The surprising omission from the list was Wipro Technologies, the billion-dollar software services division of Wipro Ltd.

Other Indian companies to be ranked in the list included i-flex at 32, Tata Consultancy Services at 33, iGate at 41 and Patni Computers at 45.