The immediate impact will be aspects like delayed payments, etc, which would be followed by slowly ramping down of existing projects while retaining only the ones that are mission critical, as viewed by Karthik Ananth, Engagement Manager, Zinnov Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

"Wipro, TCS, and Satyam have multimillion dollar contracts running with GM. For Wipro, GM is among top five customers and they have close to $300 million five year business deals with them. GM is also a $100 million account for TCS and ranks among top 10 customers in terms of their contribution to the revenue. Even Satyam won $150 million five-year deal in 2006 from GM and it constitutes among top 10 customers to them." Saif argues.

As far as Satyam goes, this may look another serious alarm bell for the company that is already mired in salvage-control efforts.

With the current situation of Satyam coupled with the economic conditions world-wide and now bankruptcy by one of their top ten customers would certainly prove fatal for Satyam, seconds Saif.

"As they are trying to consolidate their client base and also trying to stop the erosion, any good old client's trouble spells trouble for Satyam too. It needs to be seen if Satyam is providing services which are critical in nature to GM, then the impact would be short term but if they are not categorized under critical vendors then it means challenge to them." he says.

On the whole, however, the impact of bankruptcy from giant US corps who outsources their work to India would be noticeable.

"For the big IT companies like Wipro, TCS, etc who have deep pockets of reserves, would be able to take the impact coupled with the fact that their receivables might not be threatened to an extent as being a critical vendor would ensure that their 50 per cent to 60 per cent receivables are safe. On the contrary impact of bankruptcy for the smaller IT companies with low reserves would be severe." Saif warns.