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By Robert Hertzberg
The law of big numbers held back the largest companies in the CIOZone 100, with fewer than a third of them registering revenue growth of 25% or more in 2007.
The standouts among big companies (those with sales of $10 billion and above) were Google (growth of 56%), thanks to its popular search engine, and Apple Inc. (up 28%), which benefited from sales of its iPod music players and its iPhone. Microsoft had revenue growth of 26%, as a new generation of its operating system and application software gave the lie, at least for one more year, to the contention that it is no longer a growth story.
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Among midsized companies-those with sales between $1 billion and $10 billion-Cognizant Technology Solutions had the best revenue growth, of 50%. The firm, which offers outsourced software development services, is prospering as customers increasingly turn to consultants for offshore coding. Teaneck, N.J.-based Cognizant has 15 development centers worldwide, including nine in India, that help implement major initiatives in areas like enterprise resource planning, business process reengineering and Web commerce.
After Cognizant, Citrix and Adobe were the fastest-growing companies in the midsize category. Citrix grew 23% as demand rose for its application delivery products. Adobe also grew 23% to a record $3.16 billion on increased sales of its design and graphics software, including Adobe Acrobat.
Not surprisingly, the biggest growth in the CIOZone 100 was among companies that entered 2007 with less than $1 billion in sales-and thus had easier comparisons. That was true of the virtualization leader VMware (growth of 88%) and the speech recognition vendor Nuance Communications (49%). Some smaller companies related to E-commerce also grew smartly. Omniture, which helps companies analyze their Internet traffic, grew 80%. Akamai Technologies, which offers a high-speed distribution network for content customers, grew 48%.
Several of last year's fastest-growing companies have made acquisitions in recent months in the hope of continuing to bolstering their top line performance. Oracle, one of the fastest-growing large companies, said in January that it would buy BEA Systems (No. 30 in the CIOZone 100) for $8.5 billion. Citrix too is using acquisitions to foster growth; last October, the company bought XenSource for $500 million to help it advance in the red-hot area of virtualization.
Still to be determined is the outcome of the biggest proposed merger of the year-Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo (No. 16 in the CIOZone 100). If it gets completed at all, it is very difficult to imagine this acquisition happening early enough in 2008 to make a material contribution to Microsoft's revenue. But if Microsoft's current year ends up being as successful as its last, that may not be much of a problem.
Big Companies (Larger Than $10 Billion)
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