IT Infrastructure Market Forecast

TBR Spotlight Reports represent an excerpt of TBR’s full subscription research. Full reports and the complete data sets that underpin benchmarks, market forecasts and ecosystem reports are available as part of TBR’s subscription service. Click here to receive all new Spotlight Reports in your inbox.

 

Organizations will continue to prioritize spending on AI infrastructure

Growth drivers

  • Investment in, renewed focus on and adoption of enterprise AI are increasing demand for high-performing infrastructure.
  • Private and hybrid cloud deployments increase demand for hyperconverged infrastructure form factors.
  • Organizations are prioritizing investments in denser and more energy-efficient infrastructure solutions to make way for AI.
  • Edge deployments are creating new-new workload opportunities for OEMs.

Growth inhibitors

  • The enterprise and SMB spend environment remains cautious and fragile as trade wars erupt.
  • ODMs are largely capturing cloud growth as they produce low-cost, custom, commoditized hardware for hyperscalers.
  • Commodity hardware and the popularity of software-defined infrastructure reduce OEMs’ pricing power.
  • Heightened demand for InfiniBand threatens traditional Ethernet-based networking solutions providers.

 

IT Infrastructure Market Forecast for 2024-2029 (Source: TBR)


 

If you believe you have access to the full research via your employer’s enterprise license or would like to learn how to access the full research, click the Access Research button.

Access Research

 

TBR predicts that the top 5 covered IT infrastructure OEMs will achieve double-digit revenue growth from 2024 to 2029 but their respective market shares will decline

IT Infrastructure Market Share for 2024 and 2029 (Source: TBR)


 

Despite shipping over $11B in Blackwell products in 4Q24, NVIDIA is racing to increase production to meet the market’s seemingly insatiable demand for AI servers

Within the OEM market, AI server demand continues to be driven primarily by services providers and model builders, but sovereigns are showing increased interest in OEMs’ AI infrastructure solutions, presenting the OEMs with a major opportunity. Additionally, although enterprise demand for on-premises deployments of AI infrastructure remains soft, especially for the most powerful and thereby highest-revenue-generating systems, the industry expects enterprise AI demand will accelerate throughout 2025 and 2026 as customers pursuing tailored AI solutions increasingly transition from the prototyping phase to the deployment phase.

TBR predicts Dell will lead covered vendors in terms of storage revenue growth due in part to increased attached sales opportunities associated with the company’s growing server business

Key takeaways

TBR forecasts the storage market will grow at a 13.4% CAGR from 2024 to 2029 as organizations across a variety of industries invest in modernizing and hybridizing their storage estates to support current and future workloads, including those related to AI. Organizations’ data volumes will continue to grow over the next five years as the rise of AI further underscores the value behind organizations’ proprietary data.

 

The storage market typically lags trends in the traditional server market, as is presently the case. However, as organizations increasingly transition from prototyping to deploying AI solutions, data management and orchestration has risen toward the top of key customer pain points. Recognizing this, storage OEMs are selling customers on the capabilities of their storage platforms, comprising software, adjacent services and sometimes hardware. Additionally, storage OEMs are forming partnerships with hyperscalers and other ecosystem players, like NVIDIA, to have their storage solutions validated and certified for operability and AI system reference architectures. TBR believes Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are well positioned for growth in storage over the next five years due to their strong data management capabilities and increased opportunities around attaching storage sales to server deals.

 

In 2024 TBR estimates Lenovo overtook NetApp for the third-largest storage market share among covered vendors. The storage market has become more of a priority for Lenovo in recent years due to the segment’s higher margins, evidenced by the company’s recently announced acquisition of Infinidat. TBR forecasts NetApp will outperform Lenovo in five-year storage revenue CAGR, but Lenovo will retain its positioning in the market among covered vendors.

 

Storage Revenues and Market Share of Top 5 Vendors for 2024 and 2029 (Source: TBR)

 

IT infrastructure OEMs are expanding manufacturing capabilities in Saudi Arabia

EMEA market changes and vendor activities

Relative to the U.S., European economies have had more difficulty recovering from the pandemic; however, looking ahead to 2029, TBR forecasts covered vendors’ IT infrastructure revenue derived from the EMEA region will grow at a 12.9% CAGR due in large part to AI. While the EMEA market pales in comparison to that of the Americas, TBR believes the region’s strong growth will be driven both by rising AI adoption — especially among sovereigns — as well as rapidly increasing technology and infrastructure investments in countries like Saudi Arabia.

 

TBR believes HPE is among the best-positioned covered vendors in the EMEA geography. Sovereigns in the region already have a strong working relationship with HPE due to their legacy investments in high-performance computing based on Cray systems, and the company has made some of the strongest commitments among covered vendors to develop infrastructure manufacturing capacity in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East.

AI & GenAI Model Provider Market Landscape

TBR Spotlight Reports represent an excerpt of TBR’s full subscription research. Full reports and the complete data sets that underpin benchmarks, market forecasts and ecosystem reports are available as part of TBR’s subscription service. Click here to receive all new Spotlight Reports in your inbox.

 

Interest in AI capabilities has not waned as enterprises view the technology as critical to long-term competitive positioning

The buzz around GenAI persists as enterprise interest is leading to adoption. Yet it is still early days, and many enterprises remain in exploration mode. Some use cases, such as data management, customer service, administrative tasks and software development, have already moved from the proof-of-concept stage to production. Still, the exploration phase of AI adoption will be a slow burn as enterprises seek opportunities beyond these low-hanging fruit. As seen in the graph to the right, most enterprises are evaluating AI qualitatively, forgoing quantitative measures to keep up with peers based upon the assumption that the technology will bring transformational improvement to business operations.

 

Source: TBR 2H24

Reasoning models excel at performing complex, deterministic tasks, and have become the most popular models at the back end of agentic AI

The capability improvement brought by the iterative inferencing process has made reasoning models the focal point of frontier model research. In fact, most of the models sitting atop established third-party benchmarks are reasoning models, except for OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, which the company stated would be its last nonreasoning LLM. Put simply, the difference in output quality is too pronounced to ignore, especially regarding complex, deterministic tasks. As seen in the graph, reasoning models outperform their nonreasoning predecessors across the board, with the greatest distinction appearing in coding and math benchmarks. The strength in complex, deterministic tasks makes reasoning models particularly adept at powering agentic AI capabilities, offering a wider range of addressable use cases and greater accuracy. In addition, reasoning frameworks can be leveraged at any parameter count, with available reasoning models ranging from fewer than 10 billion parameters to more than 100 billion.

 

As SaaS vendors continue to build proprietary, domain-specific SLMs [small language models] to power their agentic capabilities, incorporating reasoning frameworks will be an important part of their development strategies. Although the capabilities of reasoning models are impressive, the models bring new challenges and are not necessarily the best choice for every application.

 

Simple content generation and summarization, for instance, do not necessarily require iterative inferencing. Moreover, the greater compute intensity caused by repeated processing at the transformer layer will compound existing challenges to scaling AI adoption. Not only will these models be more expensive to run for the customer, but they will also exacerbate the persistent supply shortages facing cloud infrastructure providers. Microsoft has noted infrastructure constraints as a headwind to AI revenue growth in the past several quarters, and the emerging need for test-time compute adds to these infrastructure demands. As discussed in TBR’s special report, Sheer Scale of GTC 2025 Reaffirms NVIDIA’s Position at the Epicenter of the AI Revolution, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang stated that reasoning AI consumes 100 times more compute than nonreasoning AI. Of course, this was a highly self-serving statement, as NVIDIA is the leading provider of GPUs powering this compute, but we are dealing with magnitudes of difference. For the use of reasoning models to continue scaling, this high compute intensity will need to be addressed.

 

If you believe you have access to the full research via your employer’s enterprise license or would like to learn how to access the full research, click the Access Research button.

Access Research

 

SaaS vendors will need to get on board with the new Model Context Protocol to ensure customers can use their model of choice

SaaS vendor strategy assessment

From a strategic positioning perspective, TBR does not expect the rising popularity of the Model Context Protocol to have an outsized impact, primarily because we anticipate all application vendors will adopt the framework to ensure customers can leverage the model of their choice. Furthermore, cloud application vendors are positioned to benefit from the standardization of API calls between models and their workloads. Through a standardized API calling framework, these vendors will be better positioned to drive cost optimization and improve workload management for embedded AI tools.

Recent developments

The Model Context Protocol is becoming the standard: The idea of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has been steadily gaining popularity following its release by Anthropic in November 2024. At its core, MCP aims to address the emerging challenge of building dedicated API connectors between LLMs and applications by introducing an abstraction layer that standardizes API integrations. This abstraction layer — commonly referred to as the MCP server — would establish a default method for LLM function calling, which software providers would need to incorporate into their applications to access LLMs.

 

This standardization offers several benefits for model vendors, such as eliminating the need to build individual connectors for each service and promoting a modular approach to AI service integration, potentially unlocking long-term advantages in areas such as workload management and cost optimization.

 

For SaaS vendors, there is little reason to resist the shift toward MCP, and its growing popularity may make adoption inevitable. Application vendors like Microsoft and ServiceNow have already begun implementing the protocol by establishing MCP servers for the Copilot suite and Now Assist, respectively, and TBR expects other vendors to follow.

 

It is important to recognize, however, that this approach better suits vendors taking a model-agnostic stance — meaning they aim to empower enterprises to use any LLM to automate agentic capabilities. A possible exception lies with vendors that are less model-agnostic. For instance, Salesforce’s emphasis on proprietary models reduces the need for MCP and favors the company’s focus on native connectors between Customer 360 workflows and xGen models.

 

Ultimately, TBR expects Salesforce to adopt MCP, but there is an important distinction in how different SaaS vendors may approach standardization. Today, the BYOM [bring your own model] philosophy remains a priority for Salesforce, but if the company were to eventually push customers to use its proprietary models exclusively with Customer 360, its commitment to MCP could be deprioritized in favor of tighter customer lock-in.

Google enhances AI capabilities with the launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro, revolutionizing search functionality, healthcare solutions and multimodal content generation

Google remains differentiated in the AI landscape through the deep integration of its proprietary models across a broad product ecosystem, including Search, YouTube, Android and Workspace. Although many competitors focus on niche capabilities or open-source development, Google positions Gemini as a comprehensive, multimodal foundation model designed for widescale consumer and enterprise adoption. Google’s infrastructure, proprietary TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), and access to vast and diverse data sources provide a significant advantage in training and deploying next-generation models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is a testament to this strength, offering the best performance and largest context window available on the market. Although TBR expects the top spot to continue exchanging hands, we believe Google’s models will remain among the frontier leaders for years to come.

OpenAI advances AI development with GPT-4.5, cutting-edge agent tools and a premium ChatGPT Pro subscription to expand capabilities and improve user experiences

OpenAI is the most valuable model developer in the market today, largely due to the company’s success in productizing its models via ChatGPT. The mindshare generated by ChatGPT is benefiting the company’s ability to reach custom enterprise workloads, though OpenAI must be mindful of the widening gap in price to performance relative to peers. From a sheer performance perspective, TBR believes the company’s emphasis on securing compute infrastructure via the Stargate Project, as well as its ongoing partner initiatives to gain access to high-quality training data, will ensure its models remain near the top of established third-party benchmarks over the long term.

ServiceNow Ecosystem Report

TBR Spotlight Reports represent an excerpt of TBR’s full subscription research. Full reports and the complete data sets that underpin benchmarks, market forecasts and ecosystem reports are available as part of TBR’s subscription service. Click here to receive all new Spotlight Reports in your inbox.

 

ServiceNow’s evolving value proposition, centered on seamless tech integration and sales alignment, provides a strong backbone in its alliances’ strategy, appealing to client-mindshare-hungry partners

Key trends

The need to unlock data and break down integration barriers between the back, middle and front office is as relevant as ever as customers look to deploy generative AI (GenAI) within their workflows. Acting as an abstraction layer on top of the enterprise system of record (SOR), ServiceNow is in a strong position to message around business transformation and to have more outcome-based conversations with clients, which is aligned with the IT services companies and consultancies’ business models. IT services companies and consultancies that have experience reducing organizations’ technical debt and implementing systems like SAP, Workday and Salesforce are well positioned to use ServiceNow to deliver added value. As evidenced by ServiceNow’s introduction of consumption-based pricing for AI Agents, ServiceNow is focused on selling value as part of its GenAI portfolio, which is certainly in step with the market, though outcome-based pricing may be something for ServiceNow to consider to further align with the global systems integrator (GSI) ecosystem and stay ahead of its growing list of SaaS competitors.

Go-to-market strategy

As ServiceNow continues to grow and pursue new market opportunities, the company is doing a better job of enabling the ecosystem in both sales and delivery. Unlike some of its SaaS peers, ServiceNow is not as established in the market, underscoring a clear need to leverage partners that have the C-Suite relationships, particularly in the line of business (LOB) that can articulate ServiceNow’s value as it exists alongside core enterprise applications. Despite its rapid expansion into more SaaS markets, ServiceNow remains a platform company at its core, but being a true platform company requires an ecosystem that can build on that platform. We suspect the Build motion, where partners sell custom, often industry-specific offerings they develop on the Now Platform, will be an increasingly critical motion, helping ServiceNow capitalize on opportunities.

Vendors

Given the smaller size, ServiceNow is unsurprisingly among the fastest-growing practice area within the GSIs, with average practice-related revenue up 12.9% year-to-year in 4Q24. Several partners have more than $1 billion commitments with ServiceNow, and in early 2025 Infosys and Cognizant joined their competitors in the Global Elite tier of the ServiceNow Partner Program. Cognizant is also the inaugural partner for ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric platform, a key offering that rounds out ServiceNow’s portfolio, offering zero-copy integrations with key platforms, including Google Cloud and Oracle, to feed ServiceNow’s AI Agents. On the technology side, ServiceNow is also strengthening its partnerships with hyperscalers beyond Microsoft, which could unlock new points of engagement for services partners as they start to embrace the multiparty alliance structure. For example, Deloitte is looking at how it can build agents for ServiceNow-specific use cases, with an immediate focus on the front office, on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), while Accenture included ServiceNow on its partner list for the recently announced Trusted Agent Huddle for agent-to-agent interoperability.

Emergence of multipartner networks will test vendors’ trustworthiness and framework transparency

Prioritizing the needs of partners and enterprise buyers over internal growth aspirations will position vendors across the ICT value chain as leading ecosystem participants. It sounds like an idea born in marketing, but positive digital transformation (DT) outcomes will require multiparty business networks that bring together the value propositions of players across the technology value chain. By leading with their core competencies, players can establish needed trust among partners and customers alike, increasing their competitiveness against other players that have spread themselves too thin with aspirations of being end-to-end DT providers.

 

To better understand these approaches, we have identified three back-office ecosystem relationship requirements that guide how the parties work together.

 

TBR Ecosystem Value Chain (Source: TBR)

TBR has identified 4 cloud ecosystem relationship requirements that guide how the parties work together

ServiceNow ecosystem relationship best practices

1.Consider PaaS layer and its role in the SaaS ecosystem: As discussed throughout our research, the value is shifting from “out of the box” to “build your own,” and customers clearly believe building their own custom solutions around a microservices architecture will give their business a competitive advantage. Naturally, we expect ServiceNow wants partners to take the lead in Now Assist delivery, but for the GSIs to see value, GenAI has to actually change the business process.

 

2.Drive awareness through talent development efforts: ServiceNow’s growing portfolio outside the core IT service management (ITSM) space is creating new channel opportunities for services partners to capitalize on, compelling them to invest in training and development programs. Gaining the stamp of approval from a ServiceNow certification program enhances services partners’ value proposition, especially in new areas such as the Creator Workflow and Build portion of the ServiceNow portfolio, which positions them to drive custom application and managed services opportunities. Standing out in a crowded marketplace where services and technology providers vie for each other’s attention will elevate the need to invest in consistent messaging and knowledge management frameworks that elevate buyer trust.

 

3.Prioritize IT modernization ahead of GenAI opportunities and scaling NOW deployment: Some vendors have made GenAI capabilities available only to cloud-deployed back-office suites, meaning customers still on legacy systems must first migrate to the cloud before they can adopt the emerging technology. Partners must account for this modernization prerequisite by prioritizing traditional migration services through broader programs like RISE with SAP if they hope to pursue new opportunities over the long term. Reducing legacy technical debt will also free up resources, both human and financial, which will allow for broader ServiceNow portfolio adoption.

 

4.Set up outcome-based commercial models to scale adoption across emerging areas and protect against new contenders: Aligning commercial, pricing and incentive models that resonate with buyer priorities and achieving business outcomes can allow partners to expand addressable market opportunities, especially as scaling GenAI adoption necessitates greater trust in the portfolio offerings. ServiceNow’s consumption-based model provides a short-term hedge against potential tech partner disruptors, which may take on the risk to offer similar solutions but are able to better align with services partners’ messaging through the use of outcome-based pricing.

 

If you believe you have access to the full research via your employer’s enterprise license or would like to learn how to access the full research, click the Access Research button.

Access Research

 

Acting as an abstraction layer, ServiceNow has a unique opportunity to further expand into the back office to address integration pain points but risks further overlapping with its SOR peers

ServiceNow positions as system of action to expose gaps in core system of record

Existing as a platform layer that orchestrates and integrates workflows, ServiceNow has long been able to successfully enter new markets without encountering a lot of head-to-head competition. But this is changing as ServiceNow, a $10-plus billion company, continues to drive traction with the LOB buyer by challenging a lot of the fragmentation that exists within front- and back-office systems. Over the past several quarters, ServiceNow has continued to launch new products in areas like talent management, finance and supply chain. One of the company’s biggest moves was in the front office with the launch of Sales & Order Management (SOM), giving customers the ability to use CPQ (configure, price, quote) and guided selling in a single product. Though ServiceNow famously integrates with all of the systems of record, these new innovations could pose a risk to the likes of SAP, Workday and Salesforce, which perhaps do not have the platform capabilities to build custom processes that can be tied back to the workflow, at least in a truly modern way. To be clear, ServiceNow is not interested in being a core CRM, ERP or human capital management (HCM) provider, and today acts as a service delivery system. But having customers store their data in the service delivery layer, as opposed to the core system of record so they can use that data against a specific workflow, is how ServiceNow aims to position as a “system of action.”

DXC Technology’s ServiceNow Ecosystem Strategy in Review

TBR assessment

DXC Technology has an established history and deep expertise within the ServiceNow ecosystem, with a partnership spanning more than 15 years, a talent pool of over 1,800 ServiceNow experts, and a track record of more than 7,200 global implementations with over 350 instances managed worldwide, all of which position the company as a mature and experienced service provider for ServiceNow. Notable client wins, such as with the city of Milan (medical supply delivery during a crisis), Nordex Group (workplace safety management) and Swiss Federal Railways (unified customer inquiry management) underscore DXC’s ability to leverage the partnership to address diverse and critical business challenges across different industries and sectors. These successes highlight DXC’s capacity to translate its deep ServiceNow knowledge and implementation capabilities into tangible business value for its clients, suggesting a well-established and impactful ServiceNow practice.

Strategic portfolio offering

Through a strategic alliance with ServiceNow and bolstered by a dedicated global business group and acquisitions such as Syscom AS, TESM, BusinessNow and Logicalis SMC, DXC delivers a comprehensive range of ServiceNow-focused solutions. This approach enables DXC to digitize processes, enhance user experiences, and transform service management across the full ServiceNow platform, driving business innovation at scale, including specialized solutions such as those for the insurance industry, where DXC has had core competencies and long-lasting customer relationships. DXC’s offerings span enterprise applications transformation, security solutions, and compute and data center modernization, all designed to maximize client efficiency and agility utilizing the ServiceNow platform. The establishment of a new Center of Excellence in Virginia in November 2024, combining DXC’s industry strengths with ServiceNow’s solutions, further solidifies the two companies’ commitment to streamlining AI adoption and delivering cutting-edge solutions.

 

DXC Technology’s ServiceNow Ecosystem Strategy in Review (Source: TBR ServiceNow Ecosystem Report)

 

DOGE Federal IT Vendor Impact Series: Maximus

The Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have generated massive upheaval across the board in federal operations, including in the federal IT segment. As of May 2025, thousands of contracts described by DOGE as “non-mission critical” have been canceled, including some across the federal IT and professional services landscape. TBR’s DOGE Federal IT Vendor Impact Series explores vendor-specific DOGE-related developments and impacts on earnings performance. Click here to receive upcoming series blogs in your inbox as soon as they’ve published.

 

Maximus is unfazed by the uncertainty in the federal IT market

While vendors like ICF International have disclosed devastating impacts to their FY25 revenue as DOGE upends the stability of the federal IT market with stop work orders and contract cancellations, Maximus remains largely unaffected. Maximus’ leadership team stated on May 8 that a mere $4 million of its FY25 revenue had been negatively impacted year to date by DOGE’s actions.

 

Maximus’ U.S. Federal Services segment has continued to rapidly expand, generating $778 million in revenue during 1Q25. This represents an improvement of 10.9% on a year-to-year basis and is all organic. U.S. Federal Services’ operating margin also kept improving as it expanded 340 basis points year-to-year and 260 basis points sequentially to 15.3% in 1Q25.

 

These robust top- and bottom-line expansions were driven largely by volume growth on clinical assessments. U.S. Federal Services has benefited from the steady increase in demand for medical disability exam (MDE) services since the Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act was passed in 2022. Maximus has been increasingly leveraging productivity-enhancing tools like AI to support these types of engagements so the company can successfully take on higher volumes of work while relying less on temporary contract workers.

 

Maximus has landed in a better position than it was in when the Trump administration first took charge in 2017 with significantly expanded capabilities, breadth and scale. While it processes these clinical assessments and supports the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ multibillion-dollar Contact Center Operations (CCO) contract, Maximus has continued to parlay its existing relationships with clients into more lucrative opportunities like systems integration and digital transformation work.

 

Maximus is also taking advantage of the bipartisan support for federal agencies to augment their citizen-facing services. The vendor unveiled the Maximus Total Experience Management solution in 2024 to gain traction with the Federal Reserve System and other agencies making these investments.

 

Maximus has booked $2.9 billion in total contract value year to date across its U.S. Federal Services, U.S. Services and its Outside the U.S. segments and has an additional $451 million in unassigned awards in its pipeline as of 1Q25.

 

Maximus estimated the value of its total addressable market at $41.2 billion as of 1Q25, down from $41.4 billion in 4Q24. Roughly $24.7 billion, or 60% of Maximus’ total addressable market, is tied to the U.S. Federal Services segment. It is also worth noting that over 60% of Maximus’ revenue during the first half of FY25 was derived from performance-based and fixed-price contracts, which is the Trump administration’s preferred contracting method.

How Maximus will navigate 2025

Maximus will likely continue to be shielded from the brunt of DOGE’s disruptions, given the bipartisan support for Maximus’ critical citizen services like the CCO and MDE contracts. These two engagements alone were last disclosed as being responsible for around 25% to 30% of Maximus’ $4.9 billion in total FY23 revenue. With the CCO recompete withdrawn and domestic Regions 1 through 4 secured, Maximus’ long-term prospects are more favorable than they were in summer 2024, but the vendor is not completely immune from the surrounding chaos.

 

While the bulk of DOGE’s contract cancellations and stop work orders have focused on various consulting and engineering services, Maximus could still face some disruptions, given the department’s activity in the federal civilian market. Maximus is heavily entrenched in this space and has flagged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, IRS and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as crucial long-term clients. Maximus’ relationship with the IRS has notably evolved over the years and is the epitome of the vendor’s go-to-market strategy.

 

Maximus gained traction with the IRS initially through its BPO-oriented work before expanding the scope of its services for the agency and becoming a valued technology integrator. Maximus is now competing against top-tier players like Accenture Federal Services as part of the IRS’ $2.6 billion Enterprise Development, Operations Services blanket purchase agreement while providing other crucial services like transitioning the IRS to a cloud-based Enterprise Data Platform. However, like many other agencies, the IRS’ budget could be slashed by billions of dollars in federal FY26. With spending from key clients under threat, Maximus needs to demonstrate that its services are mission critical and in line with the Trump administration’s long-term priorities.

 

A part of DOGE’s stated goals is to modernize agencies’ systems and streamline processes. Maximus can showcase how its technologies are reducing the amount of time needed to deliver critical citizen services without negatively impacting the customer experience (CX). Maximus can also leverage the case studies illustrating how the company’s digital transformation as well as modernization services have positioned agencies for success and put them on the path to responsibly utilize AI. Maximus leadership team recently disclosed that the vendor is currently discussing with clients and even DOGE representatives how to make processes across the government more efficient.

 

Partnerships will be integral as vendors across the federal IT market look to quickly demonstrate their value to the new administration. While Maximus has historically been quiet regarding its alliance activity, this could change as the vendor aims to avoid falling behind. For example, Maximus recently announced a partnership with Salesforce to augment its CX as a Service efforts. The Maximus Total Experience Management solution is being augmented with the Agentforce platform to provide clients with AI agents tailored to their needs that use data to adapt to citizens’ needs and simplify interactions.

 

Maximus is also one of the vendors currently considering M&A activity to bolster its operations despite the ongoing uncertainty in the federal IT market. While Maximus will not make any blockbuster moves like when it purchased Veterans Evaluation Services in 2021 to rapidly expand its clinical assessments business and relationship with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the company will explore tuck-in acquisitions that can strengthen Maximus’ capabilities with emerging technologies and its presence in core markets like the health sector.

 

Maximus’ venture capital arm will also closely monitor potential candidates that fit that criteria. Maximus disclosed during its 4Q24 earnings call that Maximus Ventures has made its first investment since being established in 3Q23. The unnamed company is optimizing technicians’ workloads when providing clinical assessment services with human-in-the-loop AI.

 

TBR anticipates that while Maximus will keep prioritizing federal opportunities relating to CX as a Service as well as technology modernization and optimization, it will balance the risk of its portfolio mix with state and local opportunities. The U.S. Services segment is particularly well positioned to support state and local governments in navigating the Trump administration’s sweeping changes and use these relationships as a chance to provide other services like unemployment insurance support.

 

TBR predicts that Maximus’ FY25 revenue will be $5.3 billion, representing a decline of 0.2% over FY24. Although U.S. Federal Services will continue to rapidly expand, its growth will not offset the normalization of the U.S. Services segment’s performance and the Outside the U.S. segment divestitures. TBR believes that these divestitures and the volume growth on key programs will cause the vendor’s operating margin to just narrowly surpass its FY24 operating margin of 9.2%.

 

TBR’s DOGE Federal IT Impact Series will include analysis of Accenture Federal Services, General Dynamics Technologies, CACI, IBM, CGI, Leidos, IFC International, Maximus, Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC. Click here to download a preview of our federal IT research and receive upcoming series blogs in your inbox as soon as they’ve published.

DOGE Federal IT Vendor Impact Series: ICF International

December 2025 Update: “Shutdown Ends, but Federal Contractors Face a Slow Return to Normal”

The Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have generated massive upheaval across the board in federal operations, including in the federal IT segment. As of May 2025, thousands of contracts described by DOGE as “non-mission critical” have been canceled, including some across the federal IT and professional services landscape. TBR’s DOGE Federal IT Vendor Impact Series explores vendor-specific DOGE-related developments and impacts on earnings performance. Click here to receive upcoming series blogs in your inbox as soon as they’ve published.

 

ICF struggles as uncertainties mount

While several vendors in TBR’s DOGE Federal IT Vendor Impact Series have managed to largely escape the Trump administration’s chainsaw, ICF International has not been as lucky. ICF’s revenue from the U.S. federal government plummeted 12.6% year-to-year and 7.0% sequentially, to $239.6 million, in 1Q25. Contract terminations and stop work orders have surged, upending around $115 million of ICF’s FY25 revenues as of May 1 and $375 million of its backlog. Solicitations and award activity also began to slow as DOGE started assessing contracts, causing ICF’s pipeline of opportunities also to contract from $11.2 billion in 4Q24 to $10.5 billion in 1Q25.

 

ICF was already struggling with unfavorable year-to-year comparisons as it was letting small business contracts that it inherited through its wave of digital modernization-focused M&A activity from 2020 to 2022 roll over while it faced delays on some programs for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The Trump administration has quickly dismantled USAID, a client that ICF holds multiple, lucrative engagements with, including a $236 million contract to facilitate the Demographic and Health Surveys initiative, within just a few months.

 

ICF’s programmatic business has been severely disrupted by the chaos at USAID and at other federal civilian agencies, with its consulting and engineering services work rapidly being scaled back. These types of engagements with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which as ICF’s single largest customer in 2024 was responsible for 25% of the company’s $2.02 billion in revenue, are also under intense scrutiny. While ICF’s IT modernization work has not experienced any substantial disruptions thus far, solicitations and award activity have slowed down.

 

Being selective and pursuing optimal fixed-price contracts has helped ICF shed its margin laggard status in TBR’s Federal IT Services Benchmark over the last two years. While stop work orders and other impediments disrupt ICF’s economies of scale on federal engagements, the vendor has been able to mitigate some of the resulting impact on its operating margin by leveraging the demand for its highly lucrative commercial energy programs. For example, ICF’s operating margin of 7.9% in 1Q25 decreased 40 basis points on a year-to-year basis but increased 20 basis points sequentially.

How ICF will navigate 2025

ICF’s core federal client base is under unprecedented political pressure that will likely continue, given the Trump administration’s recent “skinny” budget proposal for federal fiscal year 2026 (FFY26). If enacted, non-defense spending will fall from around $720 billion in FFY25 to approximately $557 billion in FFY26, representing a 23% decline. This would result in five of ICF’s eight largest federal clients’ budgets being significantly reduced, upending the rapid expansion that the Biden administration nurtured over the last four years.

 

HHS’ discretionary spending would notably be slashed by more than 26% from $127 billion in FFY25 to $93.8 billion in FFY26 if this proposal is approved. This would negatively impact several health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which ICF has gained traction with after spending more than $600 million on M&A between 2020 and 2022 to penetrate the rapidly developing market. While several opportunities in the federal health market would be lost or meaningfully scaled back, the newly created “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) initiative could be a proving ground for ICF.

 

ICF can capitalize on the more than $500 million the MAHA program is set to receive in FFY26 by leveraging its public health research and ICF Next arm to help the new HHS initiative reach people and have an effective impact. Additionally, building out ICF’s existing fraud, waste and abuse capabilities to make them more applicable to agencies is another way for the company to ensure it is aligned with the Trump administration’s priorities.

TBR anticipates that the vendor will also explore ways to make its IT modernization and digital transformation work more agile while increasingly booking these types of engagements as fixed-price, outcome-based contracts, given the Trump administration’s preference for this contracting method. At least 50% of ICF’s IT modernization and digital transformation engagements are already fixed-price, outcome-based contracts.

 

Defense discretionary spending will not be reduced, according to the Trump administration’s skinny budget proposal and could even surpass $1 trillion when factoring in the House and Senate Armed Services Committees’ proposed defense reconciliation bill. ICF has made progress in the defense market over the years, with approximately 3% of ICF’s overall revenue coming from the Department of Defense (DOD) in FY24 and the vendor providing R&D as well as other services to an array of clients. While ICF will jockey for new opportunities to support the DOD and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), TBR does not anticipate ICF will make meaningful progress in penetrating this space barring a drastic shift in M&A or alliance activity.

 

Although the majority of vendors in TBR’s Federal IT Services Benchmark have been keen to publicly share updates regarding their partnerships with hyperscalers and other allies over the last year, ICF has been largely reluctant to provide any news on its alliance activity. ICF will need to embrace its partners, leaning on commercial IT peers and hyperscalers to ensure it can successfully compete against top-tier vendors while bringing its portfolio more in line with the Trump administration’s goals.

 

Although ICF has relied on M&A activity in the past to rapidly build out its digital modernization business and expand its capabilities with low-code/no-code platforms, ICF is not likely to do this again anytime in the foreseeable future. ICF will not purchase any federal IT companies during 2025 due to the ongoing uncertainty in that space. ICF’s leadership team has, however, indicated that they are open to making another tuck-in acquisition in the burgeoning and highly lucrative commercial energy market.

 

ICF’s presence in the commercial energy market has been quickly growing and helped spur margin growth for the company while also bringing in additional revenue. TBR anticipates that the vendor will increasingly lean on this space and leverage its state and local client base to try and offset the disruptions plaguing its federal-facing operations. The health and social programs client market will continue to comprise a shrinking portion of ICF’s revenue in the near term.

 

Its contribution already declined from 42% of ICF’s revenue in 2023 to 38% in 2024. While there are still opportunities for ICF in the federal sphere and IT modernization is undoubtedly a long-term priority for the Trump administration, given DOGE’s efforts to reduce the headcount of agencies, the vendor will struggle during 2025. ICF’s full-year revenue growth guidance currently ranges between -10% and 0%, which translates to between $1.82 billion and $2.02 billion in revenue, during 2025. TBR suspects that ICF’s operating margin will decline from 8.2% in 2024 to 7.8% in 2025 as the tumultuous environment prevents economies of scale.

 

TBR’s DOGE Federal IT Impact Series will include analysis of Accenture Federal Services, General Dynamics Technologies, CACI, IBM, CGI, Leidos, IFC International, Maximus, Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC. Click here to download a preview of our federal IT research and receive upcoming series blogs in your inbox as soon as they’ve published.

 

Hitachi Digital Services Brings IT + OT + AI to Mission-critical Systems

From May 20 to 21, 2026, in Dallas, Hitachi Digital Services hosted close to 100 analysts and advisers for a two-day summit featuring Hitachi leaders, clients and technology partners. The following reflects TBR’s observations from the event, informal conversations with Hitachi leaders and clients, and TBR’s ongoing analysis of the overall IT services and professional services space.

Hitachi Digital Services perfectly positioned to take advantage of IT-OT convergence and AI adoption

Two tectonic technology shifts happening now and opening massive revenue opportunities play straight into Hitachi’s strengths, positioning Hitachi Digital Services for significant growth over the next five years. With IT and OT convergence accelerating and enterprises increasingly adopting AI at scale, Hitachi Digital Services can rely on Hitachi’s engineering DNA, deep expertise in specific industries, and firsthand experience in manufacturing as the foundation for a build-integrate-operate value proposition. The analysts and advisers event highlighted how well Hitachi Digital Services brings the entire Hitachi company to its clients, remains rooted in Hitachi’s engineering approach to everything, and maintains its focus on strategic priorities, even as the market shifts all around them.

 

Although smaller than the typical IT and professional services firms covered by TBR, Hitachi Digital Services warrants close attention in the coming years. Its distinctive business model, strategic direction and performance — particularly its combination of IT, OT, AI and domain expertise — position Hitachi Digital Services as a potential outlier in the IT services landscape.

Hitachi’s broader capabilities and assets help Hitachi Digital Services deliver unique combination of IT, OT and AI

Though only a two-day event, Hitachi included an impressive breadth of client speakers and panel participants, all from Hitachi Digital Services’ core industries, while also bringing technology partners into the discussion, occasionally simultaneously. One major telecom player described their relationship with Hitachi Digital Services as a client and with Hitachi overall as a go-to-market technology partner. An automotive client praised Hitachi Digital Services’ ability to “make our problems their problems to solve” and called out Hitachi’s “asset knowledge,” which blended IT capabilities with OT experience.

 

During onstage presentations and informal discussions with TBR, clients noted the importance of Hitachi Digital Services’ ability to seamlessly tap into the larger Hitachi organization and bring deeply technical engineering expertise to bear. Not surprisingly, clients attending the event also noted their well-established relationships with Hitachi, reinforcing Hitachi Digital Services’ messages around sustained focus on clients’ evolving issues. TBR’s assessment of Hitachi Digital Services’ client service value proposition and technology partner alliance strategy could be best summed up by a comment from a cloud vendor on stage with Hitachi Digital Services: “showing up together with Hitachi, delivering results, day after day.”

 

On Day 1 of the summit, a senior Hitachi Digital Services executive said the company maintained an “R&D and engineering first, consulting second mindset,” a sentiment echoed throughout the event. Another executive noted that innovation “starts with Hitachi engineering R&D.” Discussions around IT-OT convergence and Industry 5.0 included elements of consulting but remained rooted in engineering. For example, when discussing IT and OT convergence, Hitachi leaders described the company’s state-of-the-art railcar manufacturing plant in Maryland, a real, physical, operational test bed for digital innovations and Hitachi Digital Services’ IT + OT + AI value proposition. For Industry 5.0, Hitachi executives discussed Hitachi Digital Services’ overall AI strategy and noted the confluence of human and AI collaboration aided by AI agents.

 

In TBR’s view, the consistent undercurrent of engineering and R&D separates Hitachi Digital Services from peers in the IT services and consulting space, in part because of the credibility behind Hitachi’s “engineering first” assertion. Any company can say it has engineering capabilities; Hitachi builds railcars.

Domain expertise and organizational intelligence needed for broader AI adoption and agentic AI

Regarding AI, leaders at Hitachi Digital Services emphasized that effective AI begins with deep knowledge. Hitachi brings a strong foundation in business, operations, design, manufacturing and maintenance — an extensive base of expertise that it leverages to power its AI initiatives. In short, Hitachi Digital Services professionals argued they have more robust intelligence to feed into AI models and algorithms than most peers. Hitachi leaders also highlighted the company’s focus on organizational intelligence and its long-standing capabilities around “capturing the intelligence of complex organizations.”

 

In TBR’s view, Hitachi’s only complex organization likely provides a useful starting point for understanding the applicability of AI in organizational intelligence. Regarding agentic AI, Hitachi Digital Services leaders said AI agents must be specific to a domain, such as industrial AI, engineering AI or cybersecurity AI — an assertion that plays to Hitachi’s strengths. They also expect agentic AI adoption will accelerate in 2026, particularly around process and application modernization. One Hitachi Digital Services leader anticipated a shift from “minimum viable product” to “minimum viable agent,” a neat turn of phrase that might indicate both a shift toward a more consulting-focused mindset and internal pressures to deploy more AI-enabled assets. TBR notes that every one of Hitachi Digital Services’ competitors is working through those same shifts.

Mission-critical IT + OT + AI

In TBR’s view, Hitachi Digital Services’ ability to lean on the broader Hitachi company’s engineering expertise and real-world physical assets provides Hitachi Digital Services with clear separation from peers in the IT services space. If Hitachi Digital Services can deliver results in mission-critical — and constantly moving — settings, such as railway operations, clients in less dynamic environments can be assured of its capabilities.

Hitachi leaders noted shifts in the broader IT and OT spaces, such as the greater attention being paid to cybersecurity risks in OT and CFOs being generally more aware of the costs of funding fully separate IT and OT systems, which TBR believes may accelerate IT-OT convergence. Complemented by AI and infused with domain expertise, Hitachi Digital Services, in TBR’s view, should maintain a clearly differentiated position within the digital transformation and IT services space.

 

As a potential partner for large ISVs and cloud hyperscalers, Hitachi Digital Services’ combination of IT, OT and AI capabilities provides easily understandable differentiation. For large enterprises in Hitachi Digital Services’ target industries, Hitachi’s track record in mission-critical environments and the company’s sustained R&D and innovation create a compelling value proposition.

 

TBR will be more closely tracking Hitachi Digital Services’ evolution, particularly as IT-OT convergence accelerates and Hitachi Digital Services’ role in the broader ecosystem grows.

 

Graph: Degree of Consideration for Expanding Alliance Relationships (Source: TBR 1H25)

Atos Is Starting to Regain Client Trust and Develop Commercial Opportunities That Will Generate Revenue in 2025

After years of instability and declining performance, Atos enters 2025 with new leadership, improved liquidity and early signs of commercial momentum, positioning the company for gradual recovery and long-term stabilization

Over the past several years, constant organizational changes have challenged Atos’ operations, weighed on the cost structure, and created uncertainty among clients, partners and employees around the company’s viability. Additionally, numerous changes made to its go-to-market approach and CEO team since 2019 — when Thierry Breton, Atos’ CEO for 11 years, left the company — have pressured Atos’ financial performance. On Feb. 1, Philippe Salle became Atos’ chairman and CEO. With a new CEO in place and a completed financial restructuring plan, Atos is working on gradually accelerating commercial activities and stabilizing its financial performance.

 

During 1Q25 Atos remained in an unfavorable position compared to its peers as the company’s revenue continued to decline year-to-year due to contract completions and terminations, lower business volume, and a reduction in scope of low-margin contracts. Revenue growth remained negative for the eighth consecutive quarter; however, Atos’ commercial activity began to improve with growth in order entry and an increase in the company’s book-to-bill ratio.

 

After completing its financial restructuring plan in December and limiting cash expenditures in 1Q25, Atos has strengthened its liquidity profile, which will allow for more investment flexibility and assist in stabilizing the company’s financial performance over the midterm. Although it will take time for new deals to convert into revenue, the positive trends in commercial activities indicate Atos is starting to regain clients’ confidence. TBR continues to expect 2025 will be a transformative year for Atos as the company solidifies client, partner and shareholder confidence; accelerates commercial activities; and rightsizes its cost structure to normalize profitability levels.

 

Unlock the potential of generative AI (GenAI) in your enterprise by understanding the critical role of unstructured data management — Watch “The Emerging Data Ecosystem” on demand now

Increased defense and infrastructure spending in the EU provides revenue expansion opportunities for Atos and its competitors

Recent legislative changes in the European Union (EU) emphasizing digital transformation, cybersecurity and technological sovereignty are influencing public sector IT spending trends, including increased defense and infrastructure spending. For example, the Artificial Intelligence Act from August 2024 introduced a risk-based regulatory framework for AI systems in the EU. According to the Act, public sector organizations that deploy AI must comply with strict requirements related to high-risk applications and AI systems, leading to higher spending in areas such as compliance, infrastructure modernization, AI-related training, and monitoring and incident reporting.

Atos is expanding activities with clients in the public sector utilizing its established expertise

The public sector is an established industry for Atos that accounts for more than 25% of the company’s total revenue annually, in TBR’s estimates, but over the past several quarters, Atos completed several contracts and saw a reduction in business volume in the vertical. These changes pressured the company’s revenue growth in the segment, notably in the U.K. & Ireland, which is a leading geography for Atos’ public sector activities, as well as in France and Germany. For example, in 2024, the Tech Foundations business line completed its business process outsourcing (BPO) contracts in the public sector in the U.K. & Ireland, which is part of Atos’ strategy to reduce underperforming activities in BPO. During the same period, Eviden’s Digital business line also completed contracts and experienced a decline in business volume in the public sector in the U.K. & Ireland and in Central Europe.

 

Atos will continue to reorganize its public sector business to improve performance while leaning on its established name to attract new clients. In March Atos won a five-year, £150 million (or $197 million) deal with U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to transform its service desk and provide end-user services for 34,000 employees. In April the Eviden business line won a €50 million ($57 million) deal with Serbia’s Office for IT and eGovernment to deploy a National AI Factory that consists of an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) and an AI-dedicated supercomputing platform. Atos will utilize its expertise in digital workplace services along with capabilities in AI, machine learning, analytics and automation.

 

Also in March, Eviden won a deal with Tisséo, the public transport authority of Toulouse, France. In January Atos extended its deal with the U.K. state-owned National Savings and Investments (NS&I) bank to provide core banking, payment, reporting and B2B services through March 2028.

Capgemini draws on client proximity, delivery resources and partner ecosystem to build momentum in public sector

Although Atos has an opportunity to expand activities with public sector clients, especially in its core geography of Europe, the company’s competitors are also actively pursuing opportunities in the sector. Capgemini has well-developed public sector capabilities and continues to gain momentum in the industry, notably in Europe, utilizing its established brand, client proximity, combination of onshore and nearshore service delivery resources, and collaboration with the partner ecosystem.

 

Capgemini is working with more than 15 ministries of defense across the EU and greater Europe as well as international agencies and strengthening relationships with more than 20 defense manufacturing providers. The company is also combining capabilities around digital engineering, data and AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation to enable activities in areas such as military transformation, supplier network improvement, production management delivery and quality standards assurance and working with defense organizations around integrating workforce management and data and AI technologies. At 15.2% of revenue in 2024, the public sector represented Capgemini’s third-largest revenue-generating industry, following manufacturing at 26.7% of revenue and financial services at 21.3% of revenue.

Accenture’s Health & Public Service industry group remained the fastest-growing sector for the 10th consecutive quarter

In April 2024 Accenture acquired Intellera Consulting in Italy, adding 1,400 employees to Accenture’s regional operations to support public administration and healthcare sector clients. In January 2024 Accenture acquired 6point6 in the U.K., which will support Accenture’s efforts to rotate U.K.-based skills in areas such as cloud, data and cybersecurity and create a conduit for new revenue opportunities with clients in the public and healthcare sectors seeking to modernize IT infrastructure.

 

TBR expects Accenture’s investments across Europe within the last 18 to 24 months, such as in the U.K. (for health and capital projects) and Italy (public services and capital projects), will help the company’s Health & Public Service industry group fuel steady growth. Further, investments in Industry X capabilities, as well as sovereign cloud offerings with partners like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, will also bolster Accenture’s regional opportunities as EU countries look to increase spending on defense and infrastructure.

Measures taken by DOGE will challenge vendors’ performance in the U.S. federal sector

While IT services providers are seeing growth opportunities in the public sector in Europe, they are preparing for potential disruptions in public sector revenue performance in North America, specifically in the U.S. federal sector due to Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives. Measures taken by DOGE have put federal contractors, including Accenture and IBM Consulting, on edge, given the companies’ extensive work supporting federal agencies. The initial DOGE push has primarily targeted consulting projects.

 

We estimate that Accenture’s overall business consulting revenue trends at about 14% of total revenues, which means that $750 million to $1 billion of Accenture Federal Services’ annual revenue is at risk of disruption. We believe Accenture’s holistic portfolio and long-term relationships with many government agencies could help the company maintain its incumbent position.

 

TBR expects IBM Consulting’s 2025 revenue in the U.S. federal sector, which accounts for less than 10% of the business’s revenue, or approximately $2 billion in annual revenue, to be negatively affected by DOGE initiatives, as IBM stated during its earnings call that two contracts were negatively impacted in 1Q25. With federal systems integrator competitors facing similar challenges, we expect some of them to try to contest awards IT services providers had previously won and overtake their position through more flexible pricing options or packaged service offerings. For example, Booz Allen Hamilton and Leidos have filed a protest with the Department of Energy to review a $3.5 billion contract for IT support that Accenture won in January 2025.

 

TBR’s DOGE Federal IT Impact Series includes analysis of Accenture Federal Services, General Dynamics Technologies, CACI, IBM, CGI, Leidos, ICF International, Maximus, Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC. Click here to download a preview of our federal IT research and receive upcoming series blogs in your inbox as soon as they’ve been published.

Salesforce Fills Its Data Governance Gap, Assembling an End-to-end Platform to Power Agentic Workflows

Informatica acquisition is big step in already robust platform strategy

As agentic AI begins to blur the lines between applications and platforms, Salesforce continues to demonstrate its intent to lead in embracing change. Ever since the company’s 2018 acquisition of MuleSoft, purchasing platform vendors has, on average, been an every-other-year occurrence — and Salesforce continued this pattern in May when it finally entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica. This marked the culmination of a yearlong pursuit, as the two companies were unable to reach an agreement at a rumored $11 billion price point in April 2024.

 

Waiting paid off for Salesforce, which is now expected to close at a price point of $8 billion — $3 billion less than the previously rumored figure. While the acquisition cost decreased due to a decline in Informatica’s publicly traded stock price, the company’s IP only became more relevant to Salesforce’s data and AI strategy over the year. As Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff put it, the merger will result in “the most complete agent-ready data platform in the industry.” It is a bold statement, but there is merit to the claim — Salesforce’s cohesive platform portfolio aligns well with the company’s Agentforce ambitions.

 

Informatica is an important addition to this cohesive portfolio. Data governance and management was a lingering capability gap — one of growing importance due to the lack of standardized data formats across acquired IP and the third-party applications offered via AppExchange.

 

Connecting customers’ entire front-office estate to Agentforce will require these data formats to be standardized across these systems, compelling Salesforce to offer these capabilities natively. This will bring Salesforce a big step closer to delivering on its promise to offer customers a unified, end-to-end portfolio capable of supporting agentic workflows. Selling the story and delivering on customers’ ROI expectations will be the next step, requiring Salesforce to be an innovator in contextualized model development as the company looks to unlock new use cases.

Informatica and its place within Data Cloud

With Informatica, Salesforce will gain a data management and governance leader. TBR covers Informatica’s product development strategy in greater depth in the recent special report Data Quality & Governance Pillars, and Ecosystem-led Approach Mark Informatica’s Entry Into Agentic AI. To quickly reiterate some of the big takeaways:

  • Informatica has become more ambitious over the past year in its agentic AI pursuits. The company argues that agents that can reason and act across workflows require far more than large language models. They need clean data, reliable orchestration and deep context. Informatica views its metadata-rich foundation — anchored in CLAIRE (Cloud-scale AI-powered Real-time Intelligence Engine) — as a critical advantage in this emerging stack. With this foundation, the company will target the AI opportunity from two angles. As TBR describes in the special report linked above, the two approaches include “Informatica for GenAI, in which customers use IDMC’s [Intelligent Data Management Cloud] data management capabilities to enable enterprises’ GenAI use cases; and GenAI from Informatica, where customers leverage Informatica’s GenAI offerings.” CLAIRE Copilot entered general availability at the event, while CLAIRE GPT, which is already used by over 550 customers, continues to automate cataloging, data access and metadata queries. In addition, Informatica made its formal entry into the agentic AI space. Eight new CLAIRE Agents were announced — focused on core data management tasks like quality, ingestion, lineage and modernization — and are scheduled to enter preview in the second half of 2025.
  • Ecosystem development is a major priority for Informatica as well. The firm highlighted its expanding relationship with both Microsoft and Salesforce. Microsoft and Informatica continue to deepen their ties, most notably with the integration of Informatica Data Quality as a native application within Microsoft Fabric, while CLAIRE Copilot, built using Azure OpenAI, reinforces the alignment. Still, this development is occurring outside the Salesforce umbrella. Under Salesforce ownership, integrations between Informatica and Microsoft will likely be deprioritized. However, the impact of the acquisition on Informatica’s broader relationships with third-party SaaS vendors will depend on Salesforce’s commitment to maintaining its open ecosystem approach.

Meanwhile, the company’s standard platform assets are likely of greater relevance to Salesforce. Informatica’s IDMC will bring ingestion pipelines and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tooling purpose-built for hybrid environments — something Salesforce would otherwise need to build or buy elsewhere. And with Informatica’s governance and metadata engine (CLAIRE), Salesforce will gain explainability and policy controls that are critical for deploying AI in regulated environments.

 

In short, Informatica will equip Salesforce with the ingestion and governance layers Data Cloud is missing — layers that are now prerequisites for scaling AI credibly in the enterprise. Crucially, Informatica’s prebuilt integrations and policy automation tools lower the barriers to entry for enterprise teams experimenting with agents, accelerating time to value for Agentforce deployments.

Salesforce is looking for a way to accelerate top-line performance with an end-to-end portfolio capable of powering automated workflows

Informatica joins MuleSoft, Slack, Own and Tableau in the ranks of large IP purchases Salesforce has made in pursuit of its platform-meets-application layer vision. While AI is still a relatively new part of this conversation, building a platform backbone and centralizing workflow management around Slack is a concept that has been around since the business messaging application was acquired in 2020.

 

The emergence of agentic AI brings a powerful new technology to drive deeper automation, which aligns perfectly with this existing goal but also elevates the need for a robust, well-rounded data layer. Agentic outcomes are contingent upon access to quality, standardized data and metadata, and the ability to natively offer modern governance capabilities via Data Cloud will help Salesforce deliver the positive ROI it is chasing with Agentforce.

 

This moves Salesforce closer to realizing the CRM-plus-data-plus-AI vision that the company’s leadership has been championing. That said, execution remains to be seen. MuleSoft and Tableau are healthy growth drivers for Salesforce, but Data & AI makes up just $1 billion of the company’s $37.2 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) as of CY1Q25. Agentforce contributes only $100 million in ARR.

 

Despite Agentforce’s triple-digit year-to-year growth, this scale means the contribution is not enough to move the needle in terms of total top-line performance. TBR continues to believe this will come with time as the still-nascent platforms mature in the market, though this will require the company to sustain the platform’s triple-digit growth in the short term, followed by high-double-digit growth in the medium term.

 

Internally, Salesforce is hiring into its sales teams and setting a goal for each of its account executives to land an Agentforce deal within the year. Ecosystem development will complement this strategy as Salesforce works with IT services partners to sell Agentforce and accelerate time to value for early adopters. TBR’s conversations with ecosystem channel partners have led us to suspect that the platform’s growth will accelerate in the future, but Salesforce will need to execute in the days and months ahead.

Informatica purchase will be margin accretive in CY2026

To briefly touch on the economics of the transaction, Salesforce anticipates the acquisition will be accretive to operating margins and cash flows by the end of the second year post-integration, so TBR does not expect it to derail the progress the company has made in establishing a new margin floor.

 

Near-term impacts are expected but should roll off quickly, allowing Salesforce to continue enjoying the ample free cash flow it has earned through its disciplined approach to cost-cutting. This will provide the company with meaningful liquidity, positioning it to remain a strategic acquirer long-term, as evidenced by the less splashy Convergence acquisition, which was announced in May.

Long-term acquisition strategy

TBR expects Salesforce to focus on integrating Informatica before committing to other large purchases. That said, smaller IP- and talent-driven acquisitions in the AI space will likely ramp up, similar to the recently announced acquisition of Convergence, an AI startup focused on agentic AI research. These smaller acquisitions will play a role in Salesforce’s portfolio development strategy.

 

Moreover, the company’s operating efficiency plan more than doubled free cash flow between 2023 and 2025, providing Salesforce with the capital to fund an accelerated acquisition strategy. AI will be a primary target of these acquisitions, though vertical-specific front-office solutions could also be major considerations as the company broadens its portfolio to create new native applications to connect to Agentforce.

Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica is not only additive but also connective

By bringing governance, metadata and ingestion capabilities in-house, Salesforce will fill critical platform gaps that limit the company’s ability to scale Agentforce and deliver on its broader AI vision. The pieces now fit: a unified stack spanning CRM, data and AI. Execution, of course, is the next hurdle.

 

Agentforce is still in the early days of development, and the company’s ability to drive meaningful ARR from the platform will depend on sustained growth, smart ecosystem plays and clear ROI for customers. But once Informatica is in place, Salesforce will be better equipped to turn its AI ambitions into enterprise outcomes — and to do so in a unified way.

PwC Japan: Trust, Unity and Focus

On April 15 and 16, PwC Japan hosted over 20 analysts, a partner and PwC executives for a day and a half summit at the company’s Technology Laboratory in Tokyo. Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Innovation Officer Kenji Katsura set the tone when opening the meeting by explaining that over the course of the event attendees would be hearing from leaders across PwC’s businesses — including audit, tax, deals and consulting — highlighting the importance of PwC’s strategy to deliver the full range of the firm’s expertise to clients. While ensuring that PwC’s services remain highly relevant to clients in Japan, the firm’s GTM strategy is closely aligned with its global network. This alignment allows PwC Japan to leverage the best practices and innovations from across the network while also contributing homegrown insights and advancements that can benefit clients worldwide.

The event included demos, presentations and one-on-one breakouts that allowed analysts to gain firsthand knowledge of PwC Japan’s evolving strategy. Demonstrating culture and an understanding of local business dynamics still provides an important nuance that allows PwC to elevate the value of its services, especially in the current uncertain geopolitical environment, as having highly country-specific capabilities and dedicated staff may become a greater asset than more explicitly globalized organizations. The following write-up summarizes TBR’s takeaways from the event and provides a glimpse into what we believe will set the next chapter of PwC’s business.

 

As a node in PwC’s ever-expanding ecosystem, Technology Laboratory brings art and science together through physical assets

Starting with a hands-on demo led by Technology Laboratory lead Shinichiro Sanji, PwC’s Technology Laboratory team demonstrated the pivot the firm has begun making in its interactions with clients, where the outcome of workshops has evolved beyond the art of the possible and into tangible solutions backed by the use of physical assets. Responsible for PwC’s tech-driven go-to-market strategy, which builds a business pipeline through cross-industry collaboration, Technology Laboratory in Tokyo is a first of its kind and enables the firm to demonstrate how it can interlink buyers beyond the traditional IT and/or finance functions into operational technology.

 

The cocreation of assets with commercial and public clients as well as academia will also help PwC demonstrate understanding and connectivity of physical AI and revamp industries where industrialized robotics are heavily in use. The Experience Center also remains an integral part of the Technology Laboratory’s success as creating future scenarios based on market and industry trends necessitates market insights delivered through multidisciplinary skills teams. With the Technology Laboratory and Experience Center housed adjacent to each other, it streamlines collaboration and interaction between teams when needed, while maintaining enough separation to enhance the unique value each team contributes during client workshops.

 

Meanwhile, as PwC strengthens its local relationships, it also continues to build nodes across its member firms that demonstrate an appetite for innovation and support client needs. For example, the firm recently announced the opening of the OT Cyber Lab in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the expansion of PwC’s Reinvention Lab in Australia, where it added hands-on capabilities for clients to test out advanced technologies.

We see PwC’s Business Experience Technology (BXT) and Business Model Reinvention (BMR) frameworks as the connecting glue between the various labs across PwC member firms, especially as the BXT raised the bar high for the firm’s consultants to drive outcomes. Now BMR provides a structured approach for the labs to have guided conversations with clients around their functional technology needs.

Maintaining continuity in executing against strategic priorities brings PwC closer, one member firm at a time

Following the Technology Laboratory demo, Masataka Kubota, Chair and Territory Senior Partner, PwC Japan Group CEO, kicked off the event by setting a high-level agenda centered on five megatrends: Climate Change, Tech Disruption, Demographic Shift, Fracturing World and Social Instability. These themes guided PwC’s presentations across its Assurance, Tax, Advisory and Consulting practices, with each area exploring or delving deeper into these trends.

 

PwC executives’ emphasis on reinforcing the alignment of PwC Japan and PwC Global strategies around BMR, trust, sustainability, and AI and data closely resonated with what TBR heard in a pair of similar events in the fall of 2024 in EMEA and the U.S. Kubota further amplified PwC member firms’ efforts around unity. PwC Japan’s regional customization and diversity remain vital to the firm’s success, especially as local clients lean on the company’s expertise and guidance to navigate choppy international market conditions.

 

Masaki Yasui, PwC Japan Group’s Consulting leader, continued the discussion, providing an update and insights into the firm’s line of business. Doubling in size in terms of people since late 2018, PwC Japan’s Consulting practice now houses 5,130 of the firm’s more than 12,700 employees in Japan and has grown at a double-digit rate for around 10 years — a pace that is expected to be sustained through 2030, according to Yasui. This will be an impressive achievement for PwC Japan’s consulting business, given the macroeconomic headwinds and impact on discretionary spending and consequently on consulting opportunities.

 

According to TBR’s management consulting research, consulting revenue experienced a deceleration in 2024 of 3.1% year-to-year, down from 8.1% in 2023, a trend we expect to continue throughout 2025.

Deploying tech-enabled arbitrage model will test PwC’s readiness to transform its professional services model, with consulting being most ripe for it

Leaning on the firm’s ongoing success rooted in its client-centric approach, focus on priority accounts, portfolio expansion and investment in growth areas provided a strong foundation for PwC Japan’s consulting growth. While these efforts are not unique to PwC, we believe what has helped the firm thus far is its collaborative culture across lines of business, making it appealing for partners to be part of. Growth will likely come from PwC Japan investing in new services to meet demand with BMR, strengthening its digital core, and front-office transformation serving as the lead in parts of the clients’ discussions.

 

Meanwhile, focusing on multinational clients while tapping into the power of PwC Japan’s Business Network will help the firm bridge opportunities with global clients in and outside Japan, further amplifying the need for better member firm collaboration. PwC Japan recognizes the evolving professional service market dynamics and has built out a new three-layer model for sustainable growth, with the key separation between the first and second layers being less human-dependent. Executing on the second and third layers, which are largely focused on accounting for changes in staffing and commercial models enabled through data intelligence and data monetization, will once again test PwC Japan’s collaborative culture, as often such initiatives are more challenging to be sold and managed internally than to bring externally with clients.

 

Many professional services companies grapple with similar challenges largely because of the time and materials (T&M) commercial model that consulting companies typically employ for such services. Developing data monetization and a fee-for-service type of model essentially requires companies like PwC to depart from the T&M model. We believe PwC Japan is one step ahead of many of its competitors in that regard as its consulting business has largely been driven by fixed-price engagements, making it easier to bridge into the fee-for-service setup it is looking to pursue as part of its layers two and three strategies.

 

The challenge for PwC Japan will be to educate other member firms on how to approach the opportunities, as elsewhere T&M remains the predominant commercial model. Further, PwC Japan, just like other member firms, sees managed services as part of its ability to continue to grow its business. While it is still a small portion of the current revenue composition (about 4% to 6% at the global level, according to TBR estimates), the firm continues to explore avenues to augment that gap, with leaning on its tax and cyber practice capabilities, delivery partners, and acquisitions among its top choices.

PwC’s Industrial Structural Transformation framework: A road map to the firm’s ability to execute through integrated scale and packaged services

Here lies the opportunity for PwC: developing a framework that demonstrates unity and focus while relying on its core success around trust. During the event, PwC unveiled an Industrial Structural Transformation (IST) framework, which we believe provides the necessary road map to execute against the firm’s aspiration of what the next chapter of the firm might look like. Bringing together all parts of the business — Assurance, Tax, Advisory and Consulting — and replicating them across industries while using data intelligence and a fee-for-service commercial model can help PwC build a foundation that resonates across all member firms.

 

Starting with use cases in Japan across segments like mobility provides a glimpse into how the framework can be applied as the evolution of AI extends into the physical world, and how the architecture of the entire industry can be transformed beyond the use of the software to include the business and social rules. Developing the backbone of going to market through integrated scale is the first step. Executing against it, especially bringing use cases outside of Japan to other member firms, which often deal with their local client issues, can prove to be a rewarding challenge.

Three key areas which PwC Japan discussed at length during the event — sustainability, risk management and tax — brought to light the closer collaboration and applicability of the framework at scale between the various parts of PwC’s portfolio. Sustainability and risk management bring together assurance and consulting while tax provides a conduit for closer collaboration with consulting.

 

Developing solutions that are function-specific provides the necessary horizontal connection across these areas while relying on the firm’s industry knowledge to demonstrate value and deliver outcomes. We believe a large portion of PwC’s success will come from including its technology partners at every step of development, deployment and management of its IST framework as partner feedback and knowledge management have become as critical as ever to understand how professional services companies go to market.

Application of technology solutions beyond the marketing hype elevates PwC Japan’s soberness and readiness to support the global network in handling macro disruptors

Virtually no market discussions today exclude data and AI. Takuya Fujikawa, PwC Japan Group Chief AI Officer, Data and AI Leader, took the opportunity to provide an update on the firm’s data and AI practice at the onset of the second day of the event. One important nuance struck TBR about PwC Japan’s portfolio: its applicability of AI across multiple domain areas, rather than simply drilling down on generative AI or agentic AI, which have been the predominant focus in similar settings. Adhering to open data principles while relying on its industry and functional expertise provides a strong foundation for the firm’s data and AI portfolio with examples around threat intelligence, intelligent business analytics or power market analytics highlighting various use cases.

 

With PwC US recently launching the Agentic Operating System, we expect PwC Japan to lean on these experiences and capabilities and follow suit with agentic AI solutions that meet local client needs for driving efficient operations. We expect the rollout to be bidirectional and other member firms to look to collaborate with PwC Japan on emulating its portfolio offerings. Scaling the use of such solutions will fit nicely and support PwC Japan consulting’s three-layer growth model, especially around the data intelligence and data monetization opportunities and the tech-enabled arbitrage model.

Additionally, discussions throughout the second day provided deeper insights into other strategic domains of PwC Japan’s portfolio, such as sustainability and trust, including cybersecurity. Common themes across value creation enabled through technology amplified the need for better alignment among practice areas within PwC Japan, especially as buyers’ focus in each area has shifted toward translating respective market challenges to business implications.

 

Within sustainability, PwC remains focused on creating customer value by emphasizing cross-business themes, including decarbonization and biodiversity, with most of the opportunities centered on government reporting mandates, further demonstrating the need for collaboration between audit and consulting services.

 

Withing trust, leadership highlighted cybersecurity and cyber intelligence services – both important elements of PwC Japan’s strategy – including its collaboration with delivery partners, such as with TIS Inc. for use of remote monitoring, alert responses and emergency interventions, among other security services.

Enabled by a humble and gracious culture, PwC Japan sets the bar high for what’s next in the firm’s strategy evolution

Just as technologies arm PwC consultants with tools to solve complex business challenges, the Technology Laboratory provides the enabling environment for all presentations, as regardless if executives spoke about audit and assurance, tax, advisory or consulting, they all leaned on a piece of technology that helped them connect the dots between art of the possible and the answer through the tangible.

 

As macroeconomic uncertainty persists, PwC has realized that instead of trying to fix issues outside its control, it is better to focus on its own transformation to prepare for addressing client challenges. We recognize there is still an opportunity for the firm to strengthen relationships with both internal and external stakeholders, including its alliance partners. Building a strong, common foundation for member firms is a crucial first step for integrated scaling. This involves connecting the Technology Laboratory and Experience Centers to deploy BXT and BMR at scale. Leveraging their experience with fixed-price contracts, they can then pivot toward fee-for-service models, providing the necessary frameworks for collaboration.

 

PwC Japan Group and its leadership set the bar high for its member firm counterparts in what it would take for the firms to work together more closely. Starting with better service line collaboration and portfolio offerings rollouts to establishing common KPIs and shared services are some of the prerequisites, and PwC Japan seems to have the ingredients to make it work all together. And while clients are less worried about how a firm operates and are more focused on solving their business and technology problems, working with a vendor that has its own house in order certainly makes it an easier partnership.

Oracle Strategy: Large Backlog and New Government Contracts Boost Vendor’s Long-term Outlook

What is Oracle’s overall business strategy?

Oracle’s current business strategy centers on streamlining customer success efforts, enhancing partner collaboration, and expanding multicloud infrastructure. By consolidating its services under the Oracle Customer Success Services (CSS) umbrella, the company has improved life cycle support for clients, reduced overlap with systems integrators, and equipped partners with tools like the Cloud Success Navigator to enhance implementation and renewal outcomes.

 

NetSuite mirrors this with innovations like SuiteSuccess Anything as a Service for SMBs, emphasizing productized success and faster time to value. Simultaneously, Oracle’s deep industry expertise continues to differentiate it in vertical markets where SaaS vendors have struggled to gain traction. Its growing multicloud presence — especially through alliances with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — supports a global push for regional availability and compliance, allowing customers to run Oracle databases more flexibly across platforms.

 

Oracle is also aggressively targeting the public sector and international markets through partnerships with government-facing ISVs like Palantir and Adarga, deploying their AI solutions in Oracle’s compliant cloud regions. The company plans to invest heavily in expanding its infrastructure in key regions like the U.K., reflecting its plans to establish a broader a geographic and strategic footprint.

Oracle’s Go-to-market strategy

Launching a single customer success organization has helped Oracle foster more collaboration with partners, innovate more quickly with new services, and drive renewals and expansions among existing customers.

 

Enterprises: Consolidating under Oracle CSS has helped Oracle better focus on serving clients across the life cycle, including the initial preparation, implementation and managed services phases. CSS has also helped make room for partners to better engage with Oracle around Day 1 services, from implementation to go-live, and as a result, we suspect Oracle Consulting’s overlap with systems integration (SI) partners is greatly diminishing.

 

In addition to launching new white-glove support services, CSS is focused on giving partners the right tools to advance Oracle deployments. The biggest example is Cloud Success Navigator, which recently became generally available to Fusion customers for free. The tool was built with partners and includes features to guide customers and partners through best practices, offer education on new feature releases, and drive more collaboration between partners and Oracle’s own customer success resources to keep customers’ Fusion projects on track. In our view, Customer Success Navigator is an example of how Oracle has evolved and is now more willing to share best practices, and in many cases IP, with partners.

 

SMB: NetSuite is similarly making enhancements to its customer success portfolio, with a new Anything as a Service (XaaS) edition within Suite Success. Suite Success is part of NetSuite’s approach to productize customer success with prebuilt templates, modules and guided best practices to reduce time to go-live and improve product renewal rates, two leading customer success metrics tracked by SaaS vendors.

 

Vertical: While many SaaS vendors have tried and failed to successfully launch “industry clouds,” Oracle has long offered its own suite of bespoke industry applications, often sourced through acquisition but increasingly built from the ground up. Based on feedback we have heard from many global systems integrators (GSIs), Oracle partners appreciate steps the company is taking to deliver specific solutions designed to deliver value to the customer, and Oracle’s industry prowess complements many GSIs looking to put industry “wrappers” around SaaS solutions.

Geographic: Quickly expanding the availability of its database services in the cloud regions of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a top priority. By the end of 2025, Oracle’s databases are expected to be available in an additional 13 Azure regions across all geographies.

 

Unlock the potential of generative AI (GenAI) in your enterprise by understanding the critical role of unstructured data management — Watch “The Emerging Data Ecosystem” on demand now

Oracle’s partner strategy

Oracle has been expanding work with government-led ISVs, hosting their AI software in certified OCI regions both at home and abroad

As evidenced by its recent partnership with Palantir, Oracle has been working with ISVs that sell into governments to host their software in OCI government regions. In early 1Q25 Oracle partnered with Adarga, a U.K. company that offers an AI-based intelligence tool for public sector agreements. As part of the new agreement, Adarga’s platform — Vantage — will be deployed in Oracle’s U.K. Government cloud, which complies with local government requirements.

 

The Vantage platform reportedly leverages an ecosystem of over 35 AI models to support defense agencies’ mission requirements in real time. Oracle has been heavily investing in the U.K. market and has been gaining traction with the U.K. government, which recently deployed the entire Fusion back office as part of an ongoing vision to shift toward a shared services model. More recently, Oracle announced plans to invest $5 billion over the next five years in new U.K.-based infrastructure.

 

As is the case with Azure, Oracle is expanding its database alliance, adding new regional availability so customers can run Oracle databases in Google Cloud data centers outside the U.S. In January Oracle announced it will expand into eight additional Google Cloud regions over the next year, including in international markets like Japan and India. Aside from entering new markets, both companies also plan to double capacity in existing regions where Oracle Database@Google Cloud is supported, including London; Frankfurt, Germany; and Ashburn, Va. Additionally, the companies are adding cross-region disaster recovery so data can be replicated on a standby database in a separate Google Cloud region.

 

In the past we have discussed how Oracle is leveraging the IoT networks and APIs from telcos to power the Oracle Enterprise Communications Platform (ECP). This quarter, Oracle partnered with Vodafone Business in a similar capacity, progressing with its strategy of working with telcos to expand the reach of the Oracle Communications portfolio and help customers connect more devices and networks to their cloud services. Specifically, Oracle will leverage Vodafone’s Global SIM, which gives access to over 580 networks, and Vodafone’s IoT network, which reportedly delivers connectivity in more than 180 countries.

Oracle’s resource management strategy

Now that all 3 hyperscalers are on board with its multicloud database strategy, Oracle focuses on expanding global reach within their data centers

With the Oracle Database@AWS service entering limited preview in 4Q24, Oracle is now officially delivering its database services across all hyperscale clouds. The company’s big focus now is on expanding the availability of its services in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and GCP data centers. The Microsoft Azure alliance is the most mature, offering the most availability, but in January Oracle announced it will expand availability to eight additional Google Cloud data centers while doubling the capacity in existing regions where the service is available, including London; Frankfurt, Germany; and Ashburn, Va. It is still early days for the Oracle Database@AWS service, with availability limited in the AWS’ U.S. East region, but both companies will make services available in additional global data centers throughout the year.

 

Leveraging the data center infrastructure of its peers through the multicloud database strategy could give Oracle the flexibility to invest capex dollars more strategically. Additionally, to support Oracle Alloy and sovereign cloud deployments in APAC, Oracle is staffing operations teams in markets like Japan and Thailand.

What is Oracle’s AI strategy?

Following in the footsteps of its peers, Oracle gives SaaS customers a way to build, orchestrate and manage AI agents as part of an ongoing value paradigm shift

TBR’s research shows that customers want to use AI agents out of the box but also want to build their own agents using enterprise data. Many SaaS vendors have recognized this value shift and, to stay competitive, are launching new AI capabilities designed to help customers build and manage their AI agents; Salesforce’s launch of Agentforce and Workday’s new Agent System of Record platform are top examples.

 

Though later to the market, Oracle has similarly recognized this trend. In 1Q25 Oracle launched AI Agent Studio, a new tool that allows Fusion SaaS customers to choose from among the 50-plus prepackaged agents that already exist within the Fusion suite and build entirely net-new agents leveraging prebuilt templates based on natural language prompts. A big differentiator for Oracle will be that Fusion customers can use the AI Agent Studio tool for free, which continues to suggest that Oracle’s AI strategy is all about delivering more automated experiences that will drive adoption and upgrades from within the legacy install base. Oracle’s AI pricing and level of integration between the applications and the underlying database and infrastructure will continue to be core differentiators, but AI Agent Studio was a long time coming and a step Oracle needed to make to keep pace with the market.

 

On the infrastructure side, expanding the availability of multicloud databases is one of Oracle’s biggest strategic priorities. Microsoft is Oracle’s most established multicloud database partner, and between the Oracle Database@Azure service and interconnected regions, this alliance serves over 450 customers. As such, Oracle will be expanding more widely with Azure over the next 12 months, as Oracle databases become available in 18 additional Azure regions, bringing the total Oracle Database@Azure region count to 26.

 

Oracle is one of the nearly two dozen cloud and software companies included in TBR’s research portfolio. Our unique research includes financial data that goes beyond just reported data, revenue and growth benchmarks, into go-to-market analysis, ecosystem and partnership teardowns, and market sizing and forecasting. We look at leading vendors in financial and business model analysis and add marketwide perspectives and direct insights from end-customer primary research. This combination of perspectives allows TBR to quantify the financial returns being generated from leading vendor strategies and identify where the market is headed based on feedback from customers making cloud investment decisions. Claim your free preview of TBR’s cloud and software research: Subscribe to Insights Flight today!