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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BearingPoint’s bold triple bet on cars

04.30.20/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Can the Europe-centric consultancy lead the race to remake the automotive industry? In recent years, as nearly every IT services vendor and consultancy has attached itself to an automotive sector client and touted their industry expertise, TBR has followed the routes those vendors have taken and which aspects of the car industry they have focused […]

Quick Quantum Quips: Economic advantage nears as software development advances

04.30.20/by admin

Welcome to TBR’s monthly newsletter on the quantum computing market: Quick Quantum Quips (Q3). Market activity remains strong despite the impact of COVID-19 on daily lives, as researchers spider out through many different elements of the quantum ecosystem in pursuit of scientific discoveries that will bring the quantum era into clearer view and closer proximity. […]

IBM, Atos and SAP report cloud growth in 1Q20 despite COVID-19 pandemic

04.24.20/by admin

As companies begin releasing 1Q20 earnings, TBR is analyzing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the latter half of the quarter. Our findings from earnings this week show: IBM’s cloud business prospered despite the negative impact of COVID-19 on overall revenue as synergies with Red Hat drove subscription sales, which is a testament to […]

COVID-19: Shifting customer loyalties and selling motions

04.23.20/by admin

Recent earnings calls by IBM and SAP triggered two broad yet interconnected thoughts: The current pause in economic activity presents a pervasive period of thinking slow — recalling the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” — for businesses, which could result in persistent share shifts. The tactical need for more digital commerce avenues seems poised to […]

Multiyear bull market in public sector IT spend faces an abrupt end in 2020 as COVID-19 upends global governments

04.17.20/by admin

“The COVID-19 outbreak represents a significant threat to public sector IT investment that has trended steadily upward for the last several years,” says Senior Analyst John Caucis in TBR’s recently published Public Sector IT Services Benchmark. “The full impact, however, may not manifest in public sector vendor fiscal performance until 2H20.” Caucis, Analyst Brian Baker, […]

COVID-19 survey update: Cloud reliance grows

04.16.20/by Angela Lambert, Principal Analyst and Practice Manager

This piece is an update to our blog post in late March that looked at how IT organizations are being impacted by COVID-19, including insights from TBR’s survey of enterprise IT leaders. The blog discussed how we are experiencing the second wave of impacts from the outbreak, in which widespread business disruption is affecting demand […]

COVID-19 preparedness: Looking back to achieve perfect vision for tomorrow

04.15.20/by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Finger-pointing from the vantage of hindsight Last year, nearly 18 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, three former Department of Homeland Security secretaries urged the U.S. government to place cybersecurity at the top of the national threat list. The call to action was issued prior to any knowledge of a looming pandemic, and adherence to […]

COVID-19: Life between trapezes

04.10.20/by admin

Economic activity currently appears more in cessation than recession. It is as if the world is suspended, untethered between two trapezes. As activity resumes, we know inquisitive humans will turn to easy-to-assemble technology to meet the emerging business demands and consumer pain points materializing daily. We will see a flurry of IoT-enabled endpoint applications that […]

Enterprises thinking above and beyond the bottom line

04.07.20/by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Not all news related to the pandemic is bad news Just a couple of months ago, the term “going viral” lightly referred to the match-to-kerosene-like spread of images, videos or other content across borders and populations. Today’s news has literally gone viral, carrying coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak in an unfortunate and devastating new realization […]

Accenture and COVID-19: Challenges ahead

04.06.20/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

COVID-19 will pressure Accenture’s short-term performance but could accelerate adoption of automation as the company maintains pricing agility While a global health pandemic is not something vendors typically prepare for as part of their business continuity plans, for many, including Accenture, the COVID-19 outbreak will certainly test the resiliency of their business models. As a […]

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