TBR’s Business Insights

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.

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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.

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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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The U.S. doesn’t have a Spectrum Shortage — It has a Utilization Problem

01.13.26

The mobile industry continues to beat the drum for more spectrum, but it should instead focus on fully utilizing the spectrum already allocated. TBR notes there are vast tranches of spectrum in the U.S. market that are broadly underutilized, either for technical or economic reasons. And challenges will only worsen as the industry aims to bring upper midband frequencies into the fray, which have greater propagation challenges and are less suited for macro coverage.

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How India-centric IT Services Vendors Are Navigating Economic Pressures in 2024

09.25.24/by Kelly Lesiczka, Senior Analyst

In 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

09.09.24/by Catie Merrill, Senior Analyst

Cloud 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.

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How Agility and Governance Are Key to Thriving in the Evolving Partner Ecosystem

09.08.24/by Bozhidar Hristov, Principal Analyst

Mature 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.

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Accenture Partners: Niche Providers Add Depth to Drive Long-Term Opportunities

09.05.24/by Bozhidar Hristov, Principal Analyst

As 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.

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NVIDIA 2Q24 Earnings Recap: Capitalizing on AI Infrastructure Demand and Strategic Ecosystem Collaborations

09.03.24/by TBR

With 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.

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Peraton Revenue on Track for $8B Despite Shaky Start to 2024

08.09.24/by James Wichert, Analyst

TBR 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.

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Implementing a Comprehensive Strategy: Infosys Enhances Talent Development, Sales Efficiency and Profitability

08.08.24/by Bozhidar Hristov, Principal Analyst

Infosys 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

08.08.24/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

As 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.

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Adapting to Market Needs: How Consultancies are Investing in Talent and Partner Ecosystems

08.06.24/by Kelly Lesiczka, Senior Analyst

While 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.

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How AI Is Revolutionizing Cost Efficiency and Customer Experience in Telecom

08.05.24/by Chris Antlitz, Principal Analyst

TBR’s latest telecom research indicates customer care, which includes contact centers, will be profoundly transformed by AI. Though traditional AI has been utilized in customer care for many years (e.g., chatbots and interactive voice response), GenAI will take customer care to an advanced state. TBR estimates that GenAI could reduce the costs of running contact centers by up to 80%, and this is an area telecom operators are keenly interested in as they remain focused on cutting expenses across their businesses.

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