TBR’s Business Insights

DOGE drives civil sector slowdown; defense contractors gear up as Trump’s budget shifts billions to military priorities

08.04.25

The Trump administration’s recent “skinny” budget proposal for FFY26 suggests that nondefense spending will fall from around $720 billion in FFY25 to approximately $557 billion in FFY26, representing a 23% decline. Contractors with any level of exposure to the civilian sector can expect agency reorganizations, layoffs, budget reductions and in-depth contract reviews within civil agencies for the remainder of FFY25 and likely into at least the first half of FFY26. The pace of new awards has already slowed significantly at some civilian agencies, as has the rate of new bookings on existing civilian engagements.

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Geopolitics with Purpose: EY-Parthenon Drives Strategy, Not Just Awareness

07.17.25

TBR has long maintained that the Big Four firms have an inherent advantage against all competitors when it comes to understanding and advising on geopolitical risk. Perhaps only the U.S. government has the same global spread of talent, with professionals in nearly every country, most intimately aware of local business, economic and even political trends. When EY-Parthenon showed off its Geopolitical Advisory team recently, TBR wanted to know: Is this something special?

Manufacturing Growth Slows, But EMEA IT Services Vendors Find Lifeline in Public Sector Wins

07.16.25

This quarter, we look at Accenture, Atos, Capgemini and IBM Consulting in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market, and compare how their industry diversification, portfolios and localization strategies position them for revenue growth. Atos and Capgemini, the two IT services companies whose EMEA revenue makes up over half of total revenue, experienced a steady decline in trailing 12-month (TTM) year-to-year revenue growth in recent quarters. Yet, Accenture and IBM were better able to maintain growth as macroeconomic conditions deteriorated in recent quarters.

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Capgemini to Acquire WNS for $3.3B, Tripling BPO Revenue and Accelerating AI Ambitions

07.15.25

The acquisition undoubtedly serves as an important stepping stone to transform Capgemini’s BPO offerings, which are housed in its Operations & Engineering segment, yet Capgemini must be strategic with its approach, balancing new clients’ expectations with the introduction of incremental GenAI and agentic AI capabilities. Capgemini’s recent investments in partner-enabled portfolio offerings position the company well for a large change in the segment, such as its new agentic AI offerings announced with Google Cloud in April and its NVIDIA NIM-powered industry-specific agentic AI solutions and agentic gallery.

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DOGE Federal IT Vendor Impact Series: Maximus

06.11.25

Partnerships will be integral as vendors across the federal IT market look to quickly demonstrate their value to the new administration. While Maximus has historically been quiet regarding its alliance activity, this could change as the vendor aims to avoid falling behind. For example, Maximus recently announced a partnership with Salesforce to augment its CX as a Service efforts. The Maximus Total Experience Management solution is being augmented with the Agentforce platform to provide clients with AI agents tailored to their needs that use data to adapt to citizens’ needs and simplify interactions.

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DOGE Federal IT Vendor Impact Series: ICF International

06.11.25

TBR anticipates ICF will also explore ways to make its IT modernization and digital transformation work more agile while increasingly booking these types of engagements as fixed-price, outcome-based contracts, given the Trump administration’s preference for this contracting method. At least 50% of ICF’s IT modernization and digital transformation engagements are already fixed-price, outcome-based contracts.

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Atos Is Starting to Regain Client Trust and Develop Commercial Opportunities That Will Generate Revenue in 2025

06.06.25

After years of instability and declining performance, Atos enters 2025 with new leadership, improved liquidity and early signs of commercial momentum, positioning the company for gradual recovery and long-term stabilization.

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Oracle Strategy: Large Backlog and New Government Contracts Boost Vendor’s Long-term Outlook

06.05.25

Oracle’s current business strategy centers on streamlining customer success efforts, enhancing partner collaboration, and expanding multicloud infrastructure. By consolidating its services under the Oracle Customer Success Services (CSS) umbrella, the company has improved life cycle support for clients, reduced overlap with systems integrators, and equipped partners with tools like the Cloud Success Navigator to enhance implementation and renewal outcomes.

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DOGE Federal IT Vendor Impact Series: Booz Allen Hamilton

05.30.25

The disruption that has very suddenly overtaken BAH’s civil business has prompted the firm to craft what Rozanski called a “one-time reset” of its civilian operations, including a 7% reduction in global headcount (about 2,500 employees) in 2Q25 that will disproportionately impact BAH’s civilian operations. The decline in civilian award activity has been so abrupt that BAH has not been able to sufficiently redeploy civilian project staff to DOD, IC or commercial sector programs, despite the firm’s expectations that growth will continue in its DOD and IC units in FY26.

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AI Buzz Sparks IT Infrastructure Shifts, but Privacy and Strategic Challenges Are Impacting Adoption

12.20.24/by Ben Carbonneau, Senior Data Analyst

The industry enthusiasm surrounding AI has quickly led to shifts in organizations’ strategic priorities and expected investments such as demand for servers. Despite the hype, few organizations have operationalized GenAI to date. Instead, most are focused on overcoming initial barriers to adoption, including understanding the business implications of this new technology frontier.

GenAI, IT Modernization and Strategic M&A Drive Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service Growth

12.19.24/by Catie Merrill, Senior Analyst

Top hyperscalers Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are capturing legacy Oracle and SAP workloads as customers continue to migrate to the cloud to not only outsource their IT operations but also drive lasting business value. Though the geopolitical outlook is increasingly uncertain, we expect customers will continue to prioritize more traditional “lift and shift” migrations, and steps vendors are taking to deliver more integrated solutions could help.

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Harnessing AI and Automation in Business Process Outsourcing to Drive Growth Amid Shifting Buyer Priorities

12.13.24/by Kelly Lesiczka, Senior Analyst

Vendors’ business process outsourcing (BPO) businesses continue to benefit from the ongoing shift in buyer priorities from innovation and growth toward business resiliency and optimization. Buyers are investing in automating business processes to free up costs, providing pathways to growth for vendors with AI-powered and platform-based offerings.

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Emerging Consultancy Trends: Talent Management and Innovation in the Spotlight

12.12.24/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Technology continues to threaten the nature of consulting engagements, requiring consultancies to showcase value and deliver on outcomes. Greater investment in talent frameworks, structure and skill will equip staff to lead client discussions and effectively leverage technology to assist workflows. Partnerships remain a core piece of the technology integration, bringing in new expertise and go-to-market opportunities that enable consultancies to meet a wider variety of client needs. Client retention remains a priority across consultancies but will require the firms to effectively deliver value through services.

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Federal IT Spending Will Remain Robust in FFY25 Amid AI Prioritization

12.06.24/by John Caucis, Senior Analyst

Since coming into office, the Biden administration has fueled an unprecedented federal IT bull market. While the White House’s proposed federal civilian technology budget of $75.1 billion for federal fiscal year 2025 (FFY25) is the smallest increase in several years (up less than 1% compared to $74.5 billion in FFY24), it is still an increase of more than 14% from $65.8 billion in FFY23, and up 25% from $60.1 billion in FFY21, the last year of the prior administration. FFY25 has started with a continuing resolution (CR), as have most of the last several fiscal year. The impact of the latest CR on the largest federal systems integrators may be limited to shorter-cycle programs in their order books, but some disruptions to larger, longer-term engagements are not out of the question.

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Meet MAMAA: The Top 5 Hyperscalers Shaping the Future of Digital Ecosystems

11.20.24/by Chris Antlitz, Principal Analyst

TBR research shows only the Tier 1 hyperscalers can transcend most, if not all, of the major lifestyle categories to provide a seamless end-to-end ecosystem experience, touching all aspects of people’s lives, primarily due to their scale and access to resources.

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Growing Infrastructure as a Service Commitments and Competitive Dynamics

11.19.24/by Catie Merrill, Senior Analyst

Market leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft have highlighted that customers are signing larger cloud contracts with longer terms. At least in the case of AWS, customers are increasingly applying their cloud credits toward one- or three-year subscription offerings like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.

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Leidos Sees Strong Bookings and Sustained Growth Across National Security, Health and International Sectors

11.18.24/by John Caucis, Senior Analyst

Leidos’ reorganization is delivering positive results, particularly down the company’s income statement, where profitability reached record levels in 1H24. Midsingle-digit top-line growth is being buoyed by strong bookings activity with the Department of Defense and civilian agencies.

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Dell Grows Its AI Factory Portfolio with the Integration of New NVIDIA AI Solutions

11.15.24/by Ben Carbonneau, Senior Data Analyst

Much like its OEM peers, Dell Technologies (Dell) has increasingly made partnering a cornerstone of its strategy, particularly as it relates to the company’s AI business. Dell leverages its AI partner ecosystem to drive the codevelopment of AI solutions like those included in the company’s Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio.

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Telecom Infrastructure Services Operating Margin Climbs as Shift to Maintenance Services Offsets U.S. Market Decline

10.16.24/by Michael Soper, Senior Analyst

Automation, analytics, AI and machine learning will prove critical to helping vendors improve margins. Examples include portions of Nokia’s AVA (Analytics, Virtualization and Automation) portfolio and Ericsson’s Operations Engine. However, with a significant portion of revenue coming from deployment services, RAN-centric vendors will be unable to expand overall telecom infrastructure services margins significantly.

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