TBR’s Business Insights

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.

Consulting Will Rebound in 2026

02.10.26

After a period of relative softness, consulting revenues are expected to rebound to high-single- or low-double-digit growth as pervasive uncertainty pushes enterprises to seek external guidance. Demand will be particularly strong around risk mitigation, strategic planning and AI adoption, positioning forward-deployed engineers, supply chain management and people advisory services as leading revenue drivers in 2026.

Bad Debt Expenses Will Rise for CSPs in 2026

02.06.26

In a K-shaped economy that increasingly separates financial winners from losers, the majority of households and businesses on the lower arm of the “K” are under mounting financial strain and are finding it more difficult to pay their bills. As these economic pressures persist, communications service providers (CSPs) should expect bad debt expenses to continue rising, with the potential to meet, or even exceed, levels experienced during the Great Recession.

How Will Advanced AI Impact Pricing, Labor Practices and Client Expectations?

02.05.26

Advanced AI may be front and center in IT services strategy, but execution challenges remain a familiar story. Despite ongoing hype around unlocking new efficiencies and nonlinear growth, IT services firms continue to grapple with the reality of needing labor arbitrage in the short term and meeting client expectations.

Gustavo Quiroga Gaitan, Canva Pro

AI Alliances Will Increasingly Target OT

02.03.26

New and expanding partnerships are increasingly targeting the convergence of IT and OT, as system integrators (SIs) align with OEMs, manufacturing ISVs and silicon providers. This momentum is driven by the strong growth potential in high-tech manufacturing, where solutions that improve accuracy, efficiency and safety can be deployed on-site without reliance on rack-scale compute systems in neoclouds or Tier 1 clouds. As a result, while AI has long operated at the edge, these partnerships will accelerate both the sophistication of AI-driven use cases and the pace of solution framework development.

Agentic AI Adoption Is Pressuring Security Architectures to Converge

01.29.26

The emerging pattern of multicloud security consolidation has direct implications for both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, as enterprises reassess detection pipelines, governance models and operating frameworks heading into 2026. Although AWS remains well positioned in analytics-heavy workloads, the company needs to reevaluate its long-established “building block” approach, especially as peers deliver more integrated platforms. For Microsoft, its strengths will continue to be with organizations where Microsoft 365 already anchors their identity and collaboration strategies.

Previous Next

Our most-read analysis, free in your inbox each week!

Fill out the form to the right to subscribe to Insights Flight today

Technology Business Research, Inc.

How has economic uncertainty impacted the cloud applications market in 2022?

10.18.22/by TBR

Cloud applications vendors are pursing growth amid mounting economic uncertainty ranging from inflation challenges to geopolitical concerns — headwinds that are set to linger well into 2023

SAP and SoftwareONE: Persistent value through pragmatic transformation

10.17.22/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Emphasizing pragmatic, incremental transformation over broad digital transformations helps SoftwareONE more easily define its value to clients

Technology Business Research, Inc.

Cloud partnerships prove even more important than expected in 2022

10.17.22/by TBR

The current macroeconomic uncertainty makes cloud partnerships an even more important factor in cloud growth heading into 2023

Technology Business Research, Inc.

Native PaaS services delivered via hybrid architectures shape the cloud market in 2022

10.14.22/by TBR

Throughout 2022 cloud service providers continue to recognize that PaaS services are only as effective as the architecture they run on

Technology Business Research, Inc.

Automation enables business continuity and offsets macroeconomic-pressured human-centered implications

10.13.22/by TBR

Macroeconomic pressures have compelled vendors to reconsider the true opportunity to scale the integration of automation in service delivery.

Technology Business Research, Inc.

5G and edge computing remain top focus areas for telecom industry in 2022

10.12.22/by TBR

Revenue growth from 5G and edge computing remains tepid thus far in 2022, but new use cases for these technologies are likely to emerge and scale as the digital ecosystem evolves

Technology Business Research, Inc.

2022 was a good year for federal IT, but will 2023 be as growth-friendly?

10.11.22/by TBR

Cloud-centered IT modernization, cybersecurity enhancement, and accelerating adoption of digital technologies feature heavily in federal IT outlays in 2022 and will again in 2023

Technology Business Research, Inc.

Will IT services revenue grow despite the competitive talent environment?

10.10.22/by TBR

For the rest of 2022, attracting and managing talent will remain vendors’ core challenge to successfully growing IT services revenue and managing costs