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.

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TBR projects CSP spend on edge compute infrastructure will grow at a 46.1% CAGR from 2020 to 2025 and reach $100B

10.05.21/by Michael Soper, Senior Analyst

Key Insights The Big Nine hyperscalers will collectively outspend the combined outlays of telcos and cablecos on edge compute infrastructure before the middle of this decade. All Big Nine hyperscalers are investing in the edge in some way. Amazon, Microsoft and Google have global ambitions for edge, though and the hyperscalers intend to partner […]

What happened to smart cities?

09.16.21/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

COVID-19 and cloud have overrun smart cities, for now A question from a client spurred an internal discussion among TBR’s Professional Services, IT Services and Digital Transformation Services Team around smart cities and what the vendors we cover had been doing lately to advance what had been one of the hottest topics in 2017, 2018, […]

Quick Quantum Quips: August quantum developments advance multiple rival architectures, with education and standards rising in importance

08.30.21/by admin

Welcome to TBR’s monthly newsletter on the quantum computing market: Quick Quantum Quips (Q3). This market changes rapidly, and the hype can often distract from the realities of the actual technological developments. This newsletter keeps the community up to date on recent announcements while stripping away the hype around developments. For more details, reach out […]

Deconstructing COVID-19’s impact on IT services and manufacturing

08.11.21/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

For IT services vendors working with manufacturers, resiliency, business continuity, security and digitalization spark new revenue growth During 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected IT services vendors’ revenue growth in industrial solutions, manufacturing and automotive due to country lockdowns across the globe that caused major supply chain and production disruptions. Enterprises in the sector weathered […]

Quick Quantum Quips: July quantum developments encompass the entirety of the ecosystem

08.02.21/by admin

Digital transformation for market, competitive and strategy intelligence

07.15.21/by admin

TBR is the first place we look for a foundational, normalized view to benchmark against core competitors in markets that are important to our firm. — Senior Manager, Strategy, Big Four TBR dedicates a significant portion of our research to the technologies and company actions around digital transformation. We have found that the most impactful […]

CompuCom and the 4 dimensions of employee experience

07.12.21/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

The future of hybrid when your home printer runs out of ink We recently met with CompuCom, an 8,000-person technology vendor providing hardware, software and services across the digital workplace, and discussed the company’s evolving role as the nature of how and where people work changes, especially for professionals inextricably linked to and dependent upon […]

Quick Quantum Quips: Public investment, national rivalries, business restructurings and process innovation heat up

07.01.21/by admin

Accountability comes for decarbonization: KPMG’s Climate Accounting Infrastructure

06.30.21/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Are you really cutting carbon emissions? Not a day goes by without a new sustainability announcement, whether an offering or an acquisition or a commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 202X. Last month McKinsey & Co. announced a new sustainability practice built on an early 2021 acquisition (of U.K.-based Vivid Economics), and earlier this month […]

Will bitcoin become the next gold?

06.14.21/by admin

Cryptocurrency for trading: Speculation or disruption? A recent article in the Economist has triggered a new round of questions about cryptocurrency in general and bitcoin very specifically. This comes on the heels of the EY Global Blockchain Summit where more detailed parsing out of the specifics around decentralized finance, or DeFi, brings greater clarity to […]

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