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

Aligning assets with partners’ complementary solutions: 2019 strategy may be critical for Wipro in 2020

03.27.20/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

As we look at significant changes coming to the IT services landscape and focus on agile shifts toward a post-COVID-19 world, strategies launched in the last 12 months may prove to be critical for some vendors’ long-term success. Understanding Wipro’s February 2019 moves can point to how the company might perform throughout 2020. Wipro has […]

COVID-19: Impact on IT organizations

03.26.20/by Angela Lambert, Principal Analyst and Practice Manager

We asked 205 IT leaders who are decision makers for cloud purchasing about the current impact of COVID-19 on their companies and their expectations for the future. These responses were collected between March 17 and March 24. Initial findings show disruption to ongoing projects and increased importance of cloud capabilities in the future. The impact […]

Two Back, Three Forward: How will this pandemic change digital transformations? A few early signs

03.24.20/by admin

In our new weekly blog series Two Back, Three Forward, we look at two numbers in TBR reports from the prior week as well as three numbers from our upcoming reports, highlighting the analysis TBR provides and the vast amount of data — the numbers — we’re working with every day. It’s all about the […]

COVID-19 and IT: Pains, changes, pockets of opportunity

03.20.20/by admin

COVID-19 creates pain, change and even pockets of opportunity for the IT industry There is still a fog of uncertainty around COVID-19’s impact. What is clear, however, is this outbreak is unlike any event in living history. The long-term health crisis, economic disruption and social disruption are occurring at levels that were unfathomable just months […]

Two Back, Three Forward: Go-to-market strategies matter now more than ever

03.17.20/by admin

Establishing realistic expectations for AI potential requires vendors to address economies of change management first, technology second

03.13.20/by admin

AI is one of the technologies that will help standardize the digital transformation (DT) market and turn the wildly loose use of the term digital into tangible business results. Though the technology sparks urgency for many buyers to accelerate the execution of their DT programs, they need to carefully balance messaging with external and internal […]

Two Back, Three Forward: Growth in the Western Hemisphere

03.11.20/by admin

TBR predicts total enterprise spend on edge infrastructure will grow at a 41% CAGR through 2024 to almost $120B

03.10.20/by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Webscale drives projected forecast for enterprise edge On Feb. 26, TBR senior analysts Nicki Catchpole and Stephanie Long were joined by hundreds of professionals across multiple vendors and verticals for TBR’s first webinar on the enterprise edge. The session, The emerging and evolving landscape of enterprise edge computing, focused on the components of the enterprise […]

Insights from TBR’s inaugural Enterprise Edge Compute Market Landscape

03.09.20/by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

The edge computing market spans a spectrum of use cases that meet various customer needs, including sensitivity for latency and analytics. According to TBR’s 1Q20 Enterprise Edge Compute Market Landscape, while the edge is not new, its use for low-latency-dependent applications and close-to-the-data computing has increased and will continue to do so to support connected […]

Perspecta prepares to move beyond NGEN loss

03.06.20/by admin

2020 will be critical as Perspecta attempts to make up for its NGEN-R bid loss, with federal spending priorities providing an avenue for growth “Perspecta delivered steady top-line results in 4Q19 as it posted a very strong book-to-bill ratio (1.4) and continues to win new deals in areas of strategic importance for both Perspecta and […]

Free Data & Analysis

Subscribe to Insights Flight today!