10. Capita IT Services - £272m

It is a bit hard to know where to begin with an outsourcing monolith such as Capita. We clearly know that it sells quite a bit of IT and related services, but that the majority of its £2.9bn turnover stems from higher-end services out of the reach of most resellers.

Our revenue for what we would consider its VAR operations comes from the financial statements of registered company Capita IT Services, as well as those of a quintet of channel acquisitions it has made in the last decade.

CCT, ComputerLand, ABSNet, Right Document Solutions and Synetrix all still file their own numbers and the cumulative total adds up to £272m. Infrastructure VAR ComputerLand, which Capita acquired in 2008, contributed the biggest chunk of revenue, with the firm’s sales growing 25.6 per cent in 2011 to £105.1m.

This year has been a tumultuous one for Capita’s IT operations, after it announced in March that it was planning to slash at least 400 UK jobs as part of a plan to move more work offshore. After a six-month wrangle with union Unite and the threat of strike action from workers, the offshoring and job cut plan was recently shelved.