Mumbai, Aug. 2: Cognizant has finally knocked Wipro off its perch.

The pecking order among software exporters from India changed today with Cognizant just nosing ahead of Wipro and jumping into the third spot behind TCS and Infosys after reporting a 34.4 per cent surge in year-on-year revenues in its second quarter ended June 30 at $1,485 million.

That’s about $77 million higher than Wipro’s IT services revenues of $1,408 million in the quarter ended June 30.

The Chennai-based software exporter has been snapping at the heels of Azim Premji’s Wipro all through last year. The software cognoscenti have been closely tracking this battle and Cognizant’s chest-thumping talk over the past few months of sparking a shake-up at the top has been viewed with as much alarm as with derision. Finally, the shoguns at Cognizant have the numbers to buttress their claims and show all that talk wasn’t just a lot of hot air after all.

Cognizant’s revenues grew 8.3 per cent on a sequential quarter basis (that is over January–March 2011) against Wipro’s piffling growth of 0.5 per cent.

Wipro has been going through a period of sharp restructuring since Premji unscrambled in January an unworkable structure of co-chief executives leading to the exit of Girish Paranjape and Suresh Vaswani. Premji named T.K. Kurien as the sole CEO, who has taken a hatchet to the firm’s problem areas as part of the major rejig that has seen several top and middle-level executives leave Wipro.

Cognizant also reported a 20.8 per cent year-on-year growth in its net income at $208 million against $172.2 million in the second quarter of 2010.

“We continue to see stronger than anticipated demand for our increasing range of services across the industries we serve,” Cognizant CEO and president Francisco D’Souza said.

“We believe that our ability to attract the world’s best talent and our unique global delivery model infused with deep consulting and domain expertise are the reasons why we see continued demand for our services that deliver both top-line and bottom-line value to our clients and industry-leading growth for Cognizant,” he said.

“We had a gross addition of 76 new customers and closed the quarter with 721 active customers,” Cognizant officials said at a conference call. It reported an attrition rate of 15.2 per cent —one of the lowest in the industry.

Cognizant has also given a reasonably firm forecast for the third quarter ended September 30, projecting revenues to be at least $1.57 billion that works out to a sequential quarter growth of 5.7 per cent. However, this is slower than the 8.3 per cent growth achieved in the quarter ended June and is indicative of the headwinds that other players are also anticipating.

The firm projected its third quarter diluted earnings per share at $0.70 on a GAAP basis and $0.76 on a non-GAAP basis.