TBR’s Business Insights

Who Will Win the AI Services Race in the Next Wave of AI?

04.21.26

This quarter, TBR FourCast looks at Accenture, Capgemini, HCLTech and IBM Consulting, comparing how their underlying data strategies, especially related to engineering and integration, prepares them for advanced AI adoption.

Anthropic, OpenAI and Palantir: Who Gains and Who Loses in the Federal Fallout

04.16.26

Insights into how important the recent developments between Anthropic, OpenAI and Palantir are considering the implications for the largest agency (DOD), within the single largest buyer of IT in the world (U.S. Federal Government), relating to the single largest technology priority (AI).

Technology Business Research, Inc.

Salesforce Highlights Strengths in Innovation and Relationships at Agentforce World Tour

04.14.26

With the recent hype around the “death of SaaS” and other pressures on the business models of technology companies, Salesforce’s growing presence, success, and apparent disruption of competitors and alliance partners alike underscore Salesforce’s strengths in creating stickier client relationships and continually innovating, two qualities essential in the agentic AI age.

Pexels, Canva Pro

Federal IT Spending Trends: Why Growth Is Contracting and Where It Is Shifting

03.30.26

The Trump administration has proposed a double-digit increase in defense spending, which will flow through to IT budgets in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community, particularly in areas of national security, which will receive top priority. Federal IT acquisition is also slowly pivoting to embrace outcome-based contracting, while the DOD looks to accelerate IT purchasing by adopting new and innovative IT procurement approaches.

Katherinasim, Canva Pro

Governance Becomes a Prerequisite for Success with AI

03.30.26

Governance was a recurring theme across content sessions and executive meetings at Mobile World Congress 2026. As telecom operators move from experimentation to operational in AI, creating a corporatewide, centralized framework for data management, model oversight and regulatory compliance is becoming essential. Without clear governance, AI initiatives often remain fragmented across business units, leading to inconsistent outcomes, duplicated efforts and limited enterprise impact.

Getty Images via Canva Pro

New Growth in Consulting Is Emerging from an Unexpected Place: Managed Services

03.18.26

A scaled managed services practice trained in spotting consulting opportunities and armed with AI-enabled solutions will unquestionably win some management consulting market share. More significantly, from TBR’s objective view, is whether the Big Four firms can manage their staffing, brand promise and technology alliances to take advantage of the managed services practices they’ve already built and use those opportunities to return to robust management consulting growth. Maybe, but probably not all four. The next two years will be telling, and TBR expects the existing differences between the Big Four will become even more pronounced.

Skills Shortage Will Challenge the Scaling of Sovereign AI in 2026

02.20.26

AI-related skills will remain scarce across both buyers and ecosystem partners as the rapid pace of innovation and the technical complexity required to enable sovereign AI continue to hinder adoption. These challenges, combined with a lack of clearly defined and compliant use cases among sovereign customers, gaps in sovereign cloud infrastructure availability and steep AI learning curve faced by ecosystem partners, will constrain meaningful investment and implementation of sovereign AI throughout 2026.

PaaS Revenue Will Outpace SaaS Revenue for Cloud Software Vendors

02.17.26

Enterprise customers are prioritizing the modernization of their existing SaaS estates rather than adding new applications, driven by market saturation, accumulated technical debt, and a growing imperative to become AI-ready. As IT buyers shift their focus toward modern platforms, traditional SaaS leaders should expect their PaaS segments to continue significantly outperforming their core SaaS businesses in revenue growth.

Dee Angela, Canva Pro

Alliances Will Extend Beyond Core Offerings as AI-driven Sales and Marketing Reshape Ecosystems

02.12.26

IT services companies have their limits, and clients have preferred technology vendors, leading IT services companies to look to alliances to drive new growth. We have seen this pattern before, but in 2026 we will see IT services companies extend those alliances into devices, connectivity and even silicon, requiring a multiparty alliance approach that will strain commercial models, sales strategies and alliance leaders across the ecosystem.

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Human at the Center: EY Combines Data and Corporate Social Responsibility to Solve World Hunger

07.14.23/by Bozhidar Hristov, Principal Analyst

In June TBR attended an awards ceremony for the EY Open Science Data Challenge, which gave a glimpse into how well the firm mixes data and corporate social responsibility programs to solve society’s biggest problems, including world hunger.

How Are IT Infrastructure Vendors Helping Customers Navigate Uncertain Economic Conditions?

07.13.23/by TBR

Automation of management tasks has risen in priority as IT organizations seek to shift the balance from tactical to strategic actions while adapting to post-pandemic ways of working.

Exploring the Industrial Metaverse: A Glimpse into the Future

07.05.23/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Offering users an immersive, real-time experience, the industrial metaverse draws on existing cloud-to-edge technologies to simulate, optimize and simplify complex systems across industries, predominantly manufacturing.

Facilitating Simplicity: KnowledgeRiver’s Analytics Tool and Its Secret to IT Services

06.30.23/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

More technical minds can argue about simplicity for simplicity’s sake; I’m interested in the various approaches IT services vendors have been deploying to meet that growing client demand, and I’m constantly contrasting what I hear and see to a firm we spoke to late in 2022, KnowledgeRiver.

Conducting Competitive Intelligence Research – A How To

06.26.23/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Patrick M. Heffernan, Principal Analyst and Practice Manager, has strong opinions on what it takes to conduct useful competitive intelligence research, and in this blog, he dives into three steps for producing research that will support your business goals and help you win in your industry.

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