Bengaluru, May 7 -- Smaller information technology (IT) services companies earning $1-5 billion in revenue outpaced the Big Four by more than three times in FY25, a performance they may repeat in the year ahead, multiple analysts tracking the sector said. Better execution skills and skilful navigation of the GenAI disruption have helped the mid-cap IT companies eat into the business of their larger rivals. Coforge, Persistent Systems and Hexaware Technologies Ltd reported revenue growth of 31.1%, 18.8%, and 13.7%, respectively in the last fiscal year. To be sure, Hexaware follows a January-December financial year while other homegrown IT services companies follow an April-March financial calendar. Meanwhile, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, Infosys Ltd and HCL Technologies grew 3.78%, 3.85% and 4.3% respectively, and Wipro Ltd's revenue fell 2.72%. Historically, all these companies would bid for different projects but over the last 12 months, the rise of Gen AI has enabled smaller companies to compete with their larger peers. "Inherently, new technologies tend to be deflationary, a headwind for incumbents and an opportunity for challengers. Additionally, the difference in technology expertise (skill + scale) narrows down in new technologies, aiding challengers. It will be difficult for incumbents to aggressively incorporate Gen AI into their services portfolios, given the larger size relative to challengers who can better afford to cannibalise existing revenues to get a bigger portion of the pie from incumbents," said Kotak Institutional Equities analysts Kawaljeet Saluja, Sathishkumar S., and Vamshi Krishna, in a note dated 2 May. Stable leaderships have helped too. Coforge, Persistent and Hexaware have each had chief executive officers (CEOs) who have been in their positions for more than five years. Srikrishna Ramakarthikeyan took over as CEO of Hexaware in August 2014, whereas Sandeep Kalra took over as Persistent Systems' CEO in October 2020. Both were former HCLTech employees who had been in the company more than a decade. Sudhir Singh took over as Coforge CEO in May 2017. He had spent a little more than nine years at Infosys.This is in contrast to TCS, Wipro and Tech Mahindra, each of which have new CEOs with less than two years of experience at the helm. K. Krithivasan took over as TCS CEO in June 2023 whereas Mohit Joshi joined Tech Mahindra as its CEO in December 2023. Srinivas Pallia was the latest entrant to the CEO club after he took over Wipro's reins in April last year. "We forecast strong 20.8% organic c/c revenue growth in FY26, an acceleration from 16.4% in FY25E on the back of (1) strong broad-based growth momentum across geos, verticals and services, (2) healthy increase in 12-month order backlog, up 47.7% yoy and 10.3% qoq buoyed by the Sabre deal; (3) strong deal win trajectory and pipeline and (4) revenue synergies from Cigniti through cross-selling of Coforge's services to Cigniti's F-500 accounts," said Kotak Institutional Equities analysts Kawaljeet Saluja, Sathishkumar S., and Vamshi Krishna, in a note dated 6 May....