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AI Agents: What Are They, and How Will They Impact the AI PC Space in 2025?
Over the past several quarters, OEMs have focused on incorporating local AI-powered features into their new PC releases, with initial neural processing unit (NPU)-enabled use cases leveraging AI to further enhance collaboration experiences and extend battery life. However, AI agents take the NPU’s functionality a step further, combining the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with other resources to partially or fully automate a wide range of tasks, including responding to emails, booking hotel stays, or opening and closing IT help desk tickets.
AI Buzz Sparks IT Infrastructure Shifts, but Privacy and Strategic Challenges Are Impacting Adoption
The industry enthusiasm surrounding AI has quickly led to shifts in organizations’ strategic priorities and expected investments such as demand for servers. Despite the hype, few organizations have operationalized GenAI to date. Instead, most are focused on overcoming initial barriers to adoption, including understanding the business implications of this new technology frontier.
GenAI, IT Modernization and Strategic M&A Drive Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service Growth
Top hyperscalers Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are capturing legacy Oracle and SAP workloads as customers continue to migrate to the cloud to not only outsource their IT operations but also drive lasting business value. Though the geopolitical outlook is increasingly uncertain, we expect customers will continue to prioritize more traditional “lift and shift” migrations, and steps vendors are taking to deliver more integrated solutions could help.
Harnessing AI and Automation in Business Process Outsourcing to Drive Growth Amid Shifting Buyer Priorities
Vendors’ business process outsourcing (BPO) businesses continue to benefit from the ongoing shift in buyer priorities from innovation and growth toward business resiliency and optimization. Buyers are investing in automating business processes to free up costs, providing pathways to growth for vendors with AI-powered and platform-based offerings.
Emerging Consultancy Trends: Talent Management and Innovation in the Spotlight
Technology continues to threaten the nature of consulting engagements, requiring consultancies to showcase value and deliver on outcomes. Greater investment in talent frameworks, structure and skill will equip staff to lead client discussions and effectively leverage technology to assist workflows. Partnerships remain a core piece of the technology integration, bringing in new expertise and go-to-market opportunities that enable consultancies to meet a wider variety of client needs. Client retention remains a priority across consultancies but will require the firms to effectively deliver value through services.
Federal IT Spending Will Remain Robust in FFY25 Amid AI Prioritization
Since coming into office, the Biden administration has fueled an unprecedented federal IT bull market. While the White House’s proposed federal civilian technology budget of $75.1 billion for federal fiscal year 2025 (FFY25) is the smallest increase in several years (up less than 1% compared to $74.5 billion in FFY24), it is still an increase of more than 14% from $65.8 billion in FFY23, and up 25% from $60.1 billion in FFY21, the last year of the prior administration. FFY25 has started with a continuing resolution (CR), as have most of the last several fiscal year. The impact of the latest CR on the largest federal systems integrators may be limited to shorter-cycle programs in their order books, but some disruptions to larger, longer-term engagements are not out of the question.
Meet MAMAA: The Top 5 Hyperscalers Shaping the Future of Digital Ecosystems
TBR research shows only the Tier 1 hyperscalers can transcend most, if not all, of the major lifestyle categories to provide a seamless end-to-end ecosystem experience, touching all aspects of people’s lives, primarily due to their scale and access to resources.
Growing Infrastructure as a Service Commitments and Competitive Dynamics
Market leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft have highlighted that customers are signing larger cloud contracts with longer terms. At least in the case of AWS, customers are increasingly applying their cloud credits toward one- or three-year subscription offerings like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.
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Leidos Sees Strong Bookings and Sustained Growth Across National Security, Health and International Sectors
/by John Caucis, Senior AnalystLeidos’ reorganization is delivering positive results, particularly down the company’s income statement, where profitability reached record levels in 1H24. Midsingle-digit top-line growth is being buoyed by strong bookings activity with the Department of Defense and civilian agencies.
Dell Grows Its AI Factory Portfolio with the Integration of New NVIDIA AI Solutions
/by Ben Carbonneau, Senior Data AnalystMuch like its OEM peers, Dell Technologies (Dell) has increasingly made partnering a cornerstone of its strategy, particularly as it relates to the company’s AI business. Dell leverages its AI partner ecosystem to drive the codevelopment of AI solutions like those included in the company’s Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio.
Telecom Infrastructure Services Operating Margin Climbs as Shift to Maintenance Services Offsets U.S. Market Decline
/by Michael Soper, Senior AnalystAutomation, analytics, AI and machine learning will prove critical to helping vendors improve margins. Examples include portions of Nokia’s AVA (Analytics, Virtualization and Automation) portfolio and Ericsson’s Operations Engine. However, with a significant portion of revenue coming from deployment services, RAN-centric vendors will be unable to expand overall telecom infrastructure services margins significantly.
How IT Services Companies Are Preparing to Capture Surge of Local Opportunities in India
/by Jill CookinhamA look at how global companies in the IT and communications sectors are shifting focus from outsourcing to tapping into India’s domestic market due to its rapid growth
GenAI Use Cases: Where Enterprises Are Investing Now and What’s Next for Multimodal AI
/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal AnalystGenerative AI (GenAI) clients are looking for offerings that complement existing technologies and use cases built around customer zero and that deliver fast ROI. In this blog, we highlight some of the GenAI use cases currently seen in the professional and IT services, cloud, IT infrastructure, and telecom industries.
What to Expect: Cloud Provider Market Share Through 2027
/by Catie Merrill, Senior AnalystTBR expects to see incremental strengthening of the professional services capabilities of hyperscalers as well as traditional software players; however, professional services companies, along with India-centric players, have demonstrated their ability to scale vast talent benches to serve clients and act as go-to partners for the biggest cloud vendors.
Digital Transformation Examples: How Vendors Are Adapting to GenAI and Market Shifts
/by Bozhidar Hristov, Principal AnalystAs the most mature digital transformation component, customer experience (CX) has compelled buyers to embark on omnichannel projects to unify insights and processes across the customer life cycle for years now. Vendors have plenty of use cases to rely on, but slower discretionary spend is pressure-testing vendors’ value propositions rooted in trusted algorithms.
IT Service Vendors Shift Focus to Operational Efficiency and GenAI Investments Amid Economic Uncertainty
/by Jill CookinhamIn this quarter’s Fourcast we compare the performance, strategies and industry standing of Accenture, Deloitte, IBM Consulting and Infosys, including a look at Accenture’s extensive investment in GenAI and IBM Consulting’s and Infosys’ risk of falling into a downward trajectory
How India-centric IT Services Vendors Are Navigating Economic Pressures in 2024
/by Kelly Lesiczka, Senior AnalystIn late 2023 and thus far in 2024, the companies within TBR’s IT Services coverage faced pressures within their respective financial services practices, experiencing industry declines from a revenue perspective as higher interest rates limited opportunities and hindered growth trajectories. The India-centric vendors TBR covers — Cognizant, HCLTech, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro IT Services (ITS) — experienced these financial services revenue declines, despite their efforts to embed automation, AI and efficiency-driven services
Edge Computing’s Role in Tackling Latency, Privacy and Resiliency Challenges
/by Catie Merrill, Senior AnalystCloud adoption is on the rise, but for many customers, particularly those deploying workloads across multiple clouds, latency, data flow, privacy and overall business resiliency remain core challenges. Edge computing is an emerging segment in IT, giving customers a way to supplement their cloud and IT core investments by processing data locally for minimum latency and backing it up to an adjacent environment for use cases like analytics and application development.