TBR’s Business Insights

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.

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.

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Services weekly preview: Nov. 5-9, 2018

11.05.18/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Well into the third quarter of industry earnings and our periodic assessments of IT services vendors, TBR’s analysts this week will also share their semiannual analysis on vendors in the management consulting space Monday: In 3Q18 Infosys signed 12 large deals with a total contract value over $2 billion, but the company’s delivery framework remains fragile as Infosys […]

Voice assistant volume is increasing

10.31.18/by admin

A survey conducted by Adobe Analytics found that 32% of U.S. consumers owned a smart speaker in September 2018, compared to 28% in December 2017. The report also projected that near half of the U.S. consumer base could own one by the end of December 2018, supported by Adobe Analytics’ finding that nearly 80% of […]

Big Blue opens its arms, and its wallet, to Red Hat

10.30.18/by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Red Hat’s projected growth is enough to justify the hefty purchase price On Oct. 28, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) executives announced a proposed acquisition ― one that will be the industry’s third-largest acquisition should it gain approval. The deal, valued at $34 billion, would bring Red Hat into IBM’s hybrid cloud […]

Whether by R&D or acquisition, money can’t buy SaaS performance

10.26.18/by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

The SaaS market appears to provide an easy opportunity for vendors to garner significant revenue and growth. SaaS is the largest segment of the cloud market — bigger than the IaaS space, which draws so much attention due to leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The SaaS market is also much more fragmented, littered […]

Customer preferences are forming around hybrid and shifting around open source as vendors focus on acquisitions

10.23.18/by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Prebuilt devices are a ray of clarity amid the fogginess of hybrid Hybrid can be a difficult thing to define in cloud computing. The term “hybrid” is overused by vendors but underused by customers, causing general confusion over its definition as well as solid examples of hybrid solutions. An area of the market that cuts […]

ICO as a ‘medicine show’: EY finds abysmal performance in wild west of initial coin offerings

10.19.18/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Last December, EY Global Blockchain Leader Paul Brody recognized the breakout market for initial coin offerings (ICOs) and launched a longitudinal study, centered on class of 2017 companies that is fueled by this new way of raising money for software startups. One year later, as detailed in EY’s report published today, market valuations for the […]

Four by four by four equals four

10.10.18/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Four straight weeks of traveling for work, to four different cities to meet with four different clients, brought out four thoughts about where the IT services and consulting markets stand as we move into the autumn rush of 2018. First, the next few years will finally bring the shift in the consulting model that we’ve […]

Postcards from the edge: Complexity is here — wish it were not

09.27.18/by admin

“Analog dollars to digital pennies” is a phrase used to discuss the continued compression on technology price points as Moore’s Law economics, coupled with continued IP abstraction, creates economic trigger events aimed squarely at legacy business model best practices. Recently, I attended analyst events in New York City — one sponsored by Lenovo and one […]

As the 2018 finish line nears, will McKinsey continue its breakaway or slip back into the peloton?

09.26.18/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Every six months, we review McKinsey’s performance, analyze its strategy and consider likely scenarios for the firm in the near term Back in June, we said, “If McKinsey truly gains market permission to take digital transformation from design through execution, its peers will be pressured to emulate the firm.” In advance of the November profile, […]

VMware leans on partners IBM and AWS to go increasingly all-in on cloud

09.20.18/by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

What’s new from VMworld on the cloud front? VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas came to a close just a few short weeks ago, but the impact from the slew of cloud-related announcements from VMware and its partners continues to reverberate. After multiple changes in course over the past 10 years as VMware reacted to the […]

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