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Partnerships, Not Products, Will Define How Consultancies and Native AI Companies Share Value in Agentic AI Era
Just like supporting startup programs, many traditional IT services companies and consultancies have struggled to adequately put themselves in their alliance partners’ shoes. And when those partners are startups or immature native AI companies, that struggle will be harder in the absence of leadership, strategic direction and sustained investment. But that’s the potential downside. The upside is that consultancies are perfectly positioned to be change management specialists, helping their largest clients adopt the best new AI.
Human Capital Management in the Age of (Agentic) AI
Fundamentally HR management remains a back-office function that IT services companies and consultancies can use to drive managed services engagements. And TBR’s research shows that managed services can lead to additional consulting opportunities, particularly when managed services providers (whether a traditional IT services company or consultancy) partners smartly with technology companies, leveraging the data and insights generated through back-office platforms to uncover issues and opportunities.
GenAI Outcomes or Autonomous AI Architecture: Where Should CIOs Focus?
What good are AI-enabled solutions if an enterprise’s IT environment and architecture can’t handle the data orchestration demands and IT becomes a roadblock to faster, better, clearer insights from AI, rather than the business accelerator expected of IT departments in the AI era? After more than a decade of consultancies and IT services companies helping IT departments become business drivers, will inadequate architecture slow down AI adoption and AI agents at scale?
Amdocs Is Well Positioned to Continue Absorbing Market Share in the Telecom Industry; AI Is a Key Growth Vector
Although TBR believes it is very early days for agentic AI branding, Amdocs’ early foray into this emerging area and thought leadership underscore how the company is seeking to move into new and adjacent areas as it expands its offerings, especially around consulting, design and transformation enablement.
HCLTech’s Expanding KYC Journey: From Technology Provider to Trusted Compliance Partner
By evolving its KYC offerings across platforms and clients, HCLTech has shifted from tech implementer to outcomes-driven partner.
DOGE drives civil sector slowdown; defense contractors gear up as Trump’s budget shifts billions to military priorities
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.
Geopolitics with Purpose: EY-Parthenon Drives Strategy, Not Just Awareness
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
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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IT Service Vendors Shift Focus to Operational Efficiency and GenAI Investments Amid Economic Uncertainty
/by Jill CookinhamIn this quarter’s Fourcast we compare the performance, strategies and industry standing of Accenture, Deloitte, IBM Consulting and Infosys, including a look at Accenture’s extensive investment in GenAI and IBM Consulting’s and Infosys’ risk of falling into a downward trajectory
How India-centric IT Services Vendors Are Navigating Economic Pressures in 2024
/by Kelly Lesiczka, Senior AnalystIn late 2023 and thus far in 2024, the companies within TBR’s IT Services coverage faced pressures within their respective financial services practices, experiencing industry declines from a revenue perspective as higher interest rates limited opportunities and hindered growth trajectories. The India-centric vendors TBR covers — Cognizant, HCLTech, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro IT Services (ITS) — experienced these financial services revenue declines, despite their efforts to embed automation, AI and efficiency-driven services
Edge Computing’s Role in Tackling Latency, Privacy and Resiliency Challenges
/by Catie Merrill, Senior AnalystCloud adoption is on the rise, but for many customers, particularly those deploying workloads across multiple clouds, latency, data flow, privacy and overall business resiliency remain core challenges. Edge computing is an emerging segment in IT, giving customers a way to supplement their cloud and IT core investments by processing data locally for minimum latency and backing it up to an adjacent environment for use cases like analytics and application development.
How Agility and Governance Are Key to Thriving in the Evolving Partner Ecosystem
/by Bozhidar Hristov, Principal AnalystMature alliance partnerships have enabled vendors across the spectrum to collaborate as they realize the value of the ecosystem. Cultural, portfolio and leadership DNA have shaped vendors’ behavior when it comes to go-to-market efforts and partner strategies, which is not surprising given that vendors often lean on what they do best when pursuing opportunities.
Accenture Partners: Niche Providers Add Depth to Drive Long-Term Opportunities
/by Bozhidar Hristov, Principal AnalystAs Accenture’s revenue continues to grow, so does the share of revenue from its top 10 partners, reducing the share of sales from the rest of its alliance partners. With Accenture’s top 10 alliance partners helping to generate close to 50% of the company’s total sales, it remains to be seen whether Accenture will be able to retain its other partner relationships in the long term.
NVIDIA 2Q24 Earnings Recap: Capitalizing on AI Infrastructure Demand and Strategic Ecosystem Collaborations
/by TBRWith the introduction of its OVX storage validation program, NVIDIA is able to verify the efficacy of storage solutions from partners, including Dell Technologies, NetApp and Pure Storage, in combination with OVX servers to ensure enterprise-grade performance, manageability, security and scalability for AI workloads. This helps enterprises pair the right storage solution with their NVIDIA-certified OVX servers, which are available from partners such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo and Supermicro.
Peraton Revenue on Track for $8B Despite Shaky Start to 2024
/by James Wichert, AnalystTBR anticipates that Peraton will continue to more efficiently convert its backlog (last reported at $24.4 billion in the middle of 2022) into revenue while the company also keeps capitalizing on federal budget priorities favoring civilian, defense and healthcare agencies. A government shutdown in 4Q24 could still disrupt Peraton’s expansion, but TBR believes Peraton will still reach between $8.0 billion and $8.1 billion in annual revenue during 2024, representing growth of between 2.6% to 5.2% over 2023.
Implementing a Comprehensive Strategy: Infosys Enhances Talent Development, Sales Efficiency and Profitability
/by Bozhidar Hristov, Principal AnalystInfosys Cobalt, Infosys Topaz and now Infosys Aster will continue to act both as the backbone of IT services modernization and as access points to generative AI (GenAI)-related opportunities. With many of its peers are pursuing similar strategies and poaching key Infosys executives to emulate success, the company needs to remain vigilant and maintain transparent communication with stakeholders to avoid client and talent confusion and secure its long-term success.
GenAI Disruption: Rewriting the Business Models of Tech Titans and Consultancies
/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal AnalystAs the efficiencies of automation, analytics and AI begin benefiting technology companies themselves, not just their enterprise clients, TBR sees the latter half of 2024 as fundamentally business model disruptive for pretty much every technology company we cover, from McKinsey & Co. to Infosys to Dell Technologies to Amazon Web Services to IBM to Ericsson to NVIDIA.
Adapting to Market Needs: How Consultancies are Investing in Talent and Partner Ecosystems
/by Kelly Lesiczka, Senior AnalystWhile macroeconomic uncertainty remains across markets, the consultancies look to develop core services such as around AI, partnerships and networks of physical centers to strengthen client engagements and continue advisory discussions. Increasing technology complexity, operational cost-driven optimizations and data strategies will draw on consultancies’ core experience to successfully drive digital transformation programs.