Indian IT companies never faced competition from within all these years, but things have changed drastically of late as India's second largest IT services company Infosys Technologies is reportedly facing competition in its attempt to acquire UK based SAP solutions provider Axon.

Published media reports said that another Indian giant HCL Technologies was more than likely to place a counter-bid for the British firm, a factor that has reportedly pleased Axon no end.

Though a spokesman for HCL has reportedly withheld comment on grounds that these were rumours in the market, a television channel went to town with the reports that HCL were actually going ahead with the counter-bid for Axon.

Another report quoting Infosys CFO V. Balakrishnan said that the software giant was not concerned about this news as they believed that the Axon management had already ratified their offer, which had also been accepted by the company's investors.

Industry sources also said that the HCL target was not Axon, though once again the company did not confirm or deny these reports. All that they would say is that HCL was in talks with Citibank and ABN Amro to raise a billion dollars that would be used for a big ticket acquisition in the United Kingdom.

A trend that has come to light now is that most big IT companies in India seem to be looking westwards to acquire SAP expertise. With Infosys going to Axon and Wipro announcing that they were eyeing a SAP service provider in Germany, the flavour of the season seems to be SAP.