TBR’s Business Insights

Who Will Win the AI Services Race in the Next Wave of AI?

04.21.26

This quarter, TBR FourCast looks at Accenture, Capgemini, HCLTech and IBM Consulting, comparing how their underlying data strategies, especially related to engineering and integration, prepares them for advanced AI adoption.

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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

How IT Services Companies Are Preparing to Capture Surge of Local Opportunities in India

10.11.24/by Jill Cookinham

A look at how global companies in the IT and communications sectors are shifting focus from outsourcing to tapping into India’s domestic market due to its rapid growth

GenAI Use Cases: Where Enterprises Are Investing Now and What’s Next for Multimodal AI

10.07.24/by Patrick Heffernan, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Generative AI (GenAI) clients are looking for offerings that complement existing technologies and use cases built around customer zero and that deliver fast ROI. In this blog, we highlight some of the GenAI use cases currently seen in the professional and IT services, cloud, IT infrastructure, and telecom industries.

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What to Expect: Cloud Provider Market Share Through 2027

10.04.24/by Catie Merrill, Senior Analyst

TBR expects to see incremental strengthening of the professional services capabilities of hyperscalers as well as traditional software players; however, professional services companies, along with India-centric players, have demonstrated their ability to scale vast talent benches to serve clients and act as go-to partners for the biggest cloud vendors.

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Digital Transformation Examples: How Vendors Are Adapting to GenAI and Market Shifts

10.02.24/by Bozhidar Hristov, Principal Analyst

As the most mature digital transformation component, customer experience (CX) has compelled buyers to embark on omnichannel projects to unify insights and processes across the customer life cycle for years now. Vendors have plenty of use cases to rely on, but slower discretionary spend is pressure-testing vendors’ value propositions rooted in trusted algorithms.

TBR Fourcast - IT services vendor strategies and performance comparison

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IT Service Vendors Shift Focus to Operational Efficiency and GenAI Investments Amid Economic Uncertainty

09.30.24/by Jill Cookinham

In 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

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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

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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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