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GenAI Outcomes or Autonomous AI Architecture: Where Should CIOs Focus?
What good are AI-enabled solutions if an enterprise’s IT environment and architecture can’t handle the data orchestration demands and IT becomes a roadblock to faster, better, clearer insights from AI, rather than the business accelerator expected of IT departments in the AI era? After more than a decade of consultancies and IT services companies helping IT departments become business drivers, will inadequate architecture slow down AI adoption and AI agents at scale?

Amdocs Is Well Positioned to Continue Absorbing Market Share in the Telecom Industry; AI Is a Key Growth Vector
Although TBR believes it is very early days for agentic AI branding, Amdocs’ early foray into this emerging area and thought leadership underscore how the company is seeking to move into new and adjacent areas as it expands its offerings, especially around consulting, design and transformation enablement.

HCLTech’s Expanding KYC Journey: From Technology Provider to Trusted Compliance Partner
By evolving its KYC offerings across platforms and clients, HCLTech has shifted from tech implementer to outcomes-driven partner.

DOGE drives civil sector slowdown; defense contractors gear up as Trump’s budget shifts billions to military priorities
The Trump administration’s recent “skinny” budget proposal for FFY26 suggests that nondefense spending will fall from around $720 billion in FFY25 to approximately $557 billion in FFY26, representing a 23% decline. Contractors with any level of exposure to the civilian sector can expect agency reorganizations, layoffs, budget reductions and in-depth contract reviews within civil agencies for the remainder of FFY25 and likely into at least the first half of FFY26. The pace of new awards has already slowed significantly at some civilian agencies, as has the rate of new bookings on existing civilian engagements.

Geopolitics with Purpose: EY-Parthenon Drives Strategy, Not Just Awareness
TBR has long maintained that the Big Four firms have an inherent advantage against all competitors when it comes to understanding and advising on geopolitical risk. Perhaps only the U.S. government has the same global spread of talent, with professionals in nearly every country, most intimately aware of local business, economic and even political trends. When EY-Parthenon showed off its Geopolitical Advisory team recently, TBR wanted to know: Is this something special?

Manufacturing Growth Slows, But EMEA IT Services Vendors Find Lifeline in Public Sector Wins
This quarter, we look at Accenture, Atos, Capgemini and IBM Consulting in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market, and compare how their industry diversification, portfolios and localization strategies position them for revenue growth. Atos and Capgemini, the two IT services companies whose EMEA revenue makes up over half of total revenue, experienced a steady decline in trailing 12-month (TTM) year-to-year revenue growth in recent quarters. Yet, Accenture and IBM were better able to maintain growth as macroeconomic conditions deteriorated in recent quarters.

Capgemini to Acquire WNS for $3.3B, Tripling BPO Revenue and Accelerating AI Ambitions
The acquisition undoubtedly serves as an important stepping stone to transform Capgemini’s BPO offerings, which are housed in its Operations & Engineering segment, yet Capgemini must be strategic with its approach, balancing new clients’ expectations with the introduction of incremental GenAI and agentic AI capabilities. Capgemini’s recent investments in partner-enabled portfolio offerings position the company well for a large change in the segment, such as its new agentic AI offerings announced with Google Cloud in April and its NVIDIA NIM-powered industry-specific agentic AI solutions and agentic gallery.

DOGE Federal IT Vendor Impact Series: Maximus
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.
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Top 10 Impacts for CI & MI Teams in 2023
/by adminIn February of 2023 TBR surveyed its clean service teams on the state of competitive and market intelligence in 2023. One megatrend stood out in those results — change. In this blog post, we address the megatrend of change and dive into 10 subtopics that standout.
Challenges Facing Telecom Infrastructure Services Vendors
/by adminWhile the specific challenges differ by vendor, geography and/or TIS service line, TBR consistently hears about four major pain points that are broadly impacting most providers of telecom infrastructure services: wage and benefits inflation, worker and subcontractor shortages, navigating government incentives and stimulus, and ability to differentiate.
Where to Start with an Alliance Partnership
/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal AnalystAlliance partner prospecting will start with requests from the stakeholders for more information about a specific vendor — a request, basically to understand, Who are those guys?
Technology Alliances Are Evolving
/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal AnalystTBR has been evaluating the changing nature of technology alliances through its subscription and commissioned research for decades. A series of best practices have emerged, most often developed by young technology companies, while the commercial impediments seem more acute for legacy vendors with their employees’ resistance to change. The balance of this document will discuss the successful approaches vendors have shared with TBR, and what end customers and small technology companies have shared with us as the anachronisms associated with legacy partner program structures.
Assessing Vendor Partnerships
/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal AnalystTBR interviews with leaders of small SaaS vendors have shown a consistent blueprint for successful engagement with big vendors that consists of three major elements: Are you a strategic fit with the large vendor? How do you approach the large vendor for top-down attention within the firm? And how do you initially engage the large organization for positive, bottom-up, word-of-mouth marketing inside the large vendor?
Build a Successful GSI Alliance Program in 5 Steps
/by adminTBR views the path to a successful GSI alliance program as a five-step process, with many small steps, tasks and requirements associated with each step. Technology vendors may be anywhere in this journey, depending on the maturity of their GSI alliance program, if they have one. It should be noted that this is our perspective, based on the support we have given companies along this journey with our research and advisory services. We have drawn elements of this framework from ASAP’s Alliance Life Cycle framework to make it specific to ISV-GSI partnerships.
PwC India Update: Sustained Outcomes and Trust
/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal AnalystIn early March, TBR met with Arnab Basu, PwC India’s Consulting Leader to discuss developments in India and how the firm’s presence and activities have changed in recent years. The following reflects that conversation, as well as TBR’s ongoing research around PwC, the other Big Four firms, and the broader management consulting and IT services market.
Analytics, AI and digital transformation reach tipping point in acceleration
/by TBRDiscover the two main forces shaping TBR’s outlook for the digital transformation market and how they can help you capture analytics and insights opportunities while reducing and managing expenses
Top 5 Questions To Ask When Creating Market And Competitive KIQs
/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal AnalystDeveloping and deploying KIQs requires creativity and precision, mixed with experience, so we wanted to share five tips we’re learned from over 20 years in this business
Ensuring Competitive & Market Intelligence Models Suit Your Needs
/by adminThere’s no one playbook or set of “hacks” that can help you build models that are actionable for addressing your business challenges. For that, only collaboration and iteration (read: hard work) will do. However, there are a number of key success factors that we believe can help ensure that a CI/MI.