Revisiting TBR’s 2025 Predictions: What We Got Right (and Wrong) About Cloud and Telecom Markets

How accurate were TBR’s 2025 predictions for cloud and telecom markets? In this episode of “TBR Talks,” Principal Analyst and Host Patrick Heffernan reviews TBR’s 2025 telecom and cloud predictions against the year’s actual market developments as well as what these developments mean for our 2026 predictions in an age of AI-enabled research and analysis.

Last year Principal Analyst Chris Antlitz predicted major communication service providers (CSPs) would not realize ROI from 5G investments, which they did not, while Principal Analyst Allan Krans predicted Microsoft Azure would close the gap with Amazon Web Services in the IaaS market, which it did. Patrick walks listeners through each leading analyst’s process for making predictions and discusses with them how AI has and has not changed the way they go about making their market predictions.

Prediction checks:

• Did CSPs realize 5G revenue?

• Did Microsoft narrow the gap with AWS?

• Did government support increase for 6G development?

• Did cloud market overall growth slow?

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Edited by Haley Demers

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Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

Revisiting TBR’s 2025 Predictions: What We Got Right (and Wrong) About Cloud and Telecom Markets

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms, where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors, and chip manufacturers to value-added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional IT services and telecom vendors. 

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be revisiting 2025 Cloud and Telecom predictions with Allan Krans, Principal Analyst for TBR’s Cloud practice, and Chris Antlitz, Principal Analyst for TBR’s Telecom practice.

Prediction check: Did CSPs realize 5G revenue? 

Chris and Allan, welcome back to the podcast. This is season 4, believe it or not, and thank you guys for coming on. We’re recording this at the beginning of the fourth calendar quarter, Q4, for 2025. But what I want to talk about is what you predicted at the beginning of the year, around this time last year, your predictions in the telecom space and in the cloud space. And if you want to expand that and talk about broader predictions across the market, totally open to that. So, I’ll talk about a couple of the predictions and just sort of get a sense of where things turned out, whether or not you think you were right or not. One of the questions, Chris, and I’ll start with you, in the telecom space was around whether or not the CSPs started deriving ROI from their 5G investments. You didn’t think it was going to really happen in 2025. Did it? Did you start to see some change there?

Chris Antlitz, Principal Analyst: So, we’ve seen two things in the last maybe 18 months, I would say. One is that fixed wireless access, which leverages 5G, is generating many billions of dollars for the telecom industry now. The problem is that the amount of revenue that it generates is only a fraction of what the telcos would need to offset how much they’ve invested in the technology itself. So, it’s good, but it’s a tiny piece of what they actually need to generate from. 

And then the second one is network slicing, which telcos need to have a 5G standalone core, which most do not have that. Most of them aren’t even close to having that. You need that in order to do the slicing. And the few telcos that have done that, T-Mobile being one of them, they generate a little bit of money from the slicing. And so, there’s like early glimmers of, you know, revenue generation from 5G that they couldn’t have done on prior generations of the cellular technology. But when you look at the aggregate amount of revenue that it’s bringing in, these are very small numbers relative to the hundreds of billions that the telco industry has spent so far on 5G.

Patrick: And I don’t want to get too far into what’s coming next year, but maybe call out, are there a couple of, you mentioned T-Mobile. Is there anybody else you think is going to start to emulate what they did, do the same kind of thing, see those kind of even small, tiny, tiny bit of ROI?

Chris: Yeah, there’s some telcos in Asia, there’s some telcos in Europe that are doing similar things. Personally, I think T-Mobile is like the front runner here in many cases, they were just faster to the market. They have the 5G standalone core. They have the right spectrum assets to do things like carrier aggregation and better propagation characteristics. So, they have a lot of the ingredients that are needed to do this at scale and in the way that it should be being done, essentially.

Patrick: Right. Okay. All right. So, one for one so far. 

Prediction check: Did Microsoft narrow the gap with AWS?

Allan, you talked about last year, you talked about Microsoft narrowing the gap with AWS in terms of infrastructure as a service and platform as a service market share. That should be kind of easy to measure. I mean, did they start to close the gap or not? How close? And you also predicted Microsoft taking leadership in that space in 2027. Still on track for that?

Allan Krans, Principal Analyst: Yeah, still on track. The growth rates have really been quite different. Not new, but AWS very close to 10%, getting close to single digit growth the way that things were going, and Microsoft, you know, above 25% in terms of the infrastructure level. There has been an acceleration for both companies, actually, partially driven by some of the AI services at the infrastructure level that are being utilized. And so, I think that’s still on track, although the relative levels have changed a little bit. I think the big curveball, though, has been the resurgence of Oracle at the infrastructure level and the focus on the remaining performance obligation really being a key metric to measure the at least pre-commitments for AI services that are just incredibly significant. You have Oracle over $400 billion booked in terms of those commitments for- largely through an OpenAI deal, Microsoft not too far behind. And so, the disparity between that book of business and actually realizing it. I think one of the other big things that developed through the year was just building the capacity with data centers and energy and physical infrastructure from NVIDIA and everything that’s going on with the chip space to fill that short-term void in terms of getting those services up and available to actually realize hundreds of billions of dollars in booked revenue, that’s the real challenge. So, I think that’s part of what will define the competitive landscape as we go into next year.

Patrick: Yeah, excellent. I know we’ll talk about that in an upcoming episode when we go over year 2026 predictions. Just one quick thought in reading your cloud predictions for last year, or for this year, but that you made last year. I don’t think Oracle was even mentioned. So it was, they really were a surprise contender in the space this year, right?

Allan: Yeah, big surprise. They’ve kind of, it’s been a very, you know, they’re fourth or fifth in terms of the rankings for the hyperscaler landscape, which is way far down. There’s a huge disparity between the top two with Microsoft and AWS and the rest of the market. But this position in AI and some of the other political issues that have seem to be going their way in terms of opportunities for big customers have really changed that. And so, we hear a lot of, I think the verbiage was “the big three plus Oracle.” We’re hearing that more often in terms of the landscape for the infrastructure level.

Prediction check: Did government support increase for 6G development?

Patrick: Yeah, excellent. All right, so AI and politics. All right, so we’re two for two. AI and politics, a good segue back to telecom to talk about R&D and government. And the investment in R&D and the emphasis around R&D, and then also government support for the telecom industry and what’s coming next. Again, something you predicted last year was going to be important. How did that pan out over the course of 2025?

Chris: Yeah, so the industry is still relatively early with 6G R&D, but I’d say we’re about in the, you know, transitioning from the first third to the second third of the focus on the investment and the specifications. But in terms of that journey, we are seeing a lot of government involvement, especially on the DoD side. Some of those areas are helping with the investment, working with the industry, working with academia. There’s other government entities that also are involved. So, there’s funding around. And then in other countries, there’s various government set up entities that are helping with stimulating the market for that technology. I think that the private sector has been talking a little bit about 6G, but it’s been eerily quiet. 

Patrick: Hmm.

Chris: And even on the government side, it’s been pretty quiet from what it was, even just a year or two ago. And I think part of the reason for that is, AI is drowning everything else out.

Patrick: Right. Well, that’s true. I mean, you can’t go 30 minutes in any conversation without talking about AI. I do know we talked in early 2025, Chris, we talked about governments, particularly in Europe, investing more in telco and connectivity overall because of a defense spending surge. Did it happen or is it still- it’s a coming thing?

Chris: So, Europe moves incredibly slow. And what they did actually move quite fast on was getting funding set up. But now comes the hard part. Actually, the funding part is the easy part. The real hard part is orchestrating and building an ecosystem of innovation and real depth to that, not surface level. And Europe has several problems, one is brain drain. They’re losing people. A lot of their best talent comes to America. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris: This is just the reality, and there’s various reasons for that. But they need to really figure out how do they build something of lasting value in terms of economic opportunity, and they need regulatory reform. That’s where the hard part comes in. And that part has, they still have a long way to go.

Patrick: Yeah, I had lunch recently, but just by chance with the CTO of a very large connectivity provider that shall go unnamed, because he was very pessimistic about Europe, about just the ability to change and the ability to move at a pace that would reflect the market demand and the market need and all that. So that’s on the commercial side, then you add the government side, it’s probably just another extra layer of that.

Chris: The one interesting thing though just to add, the geopolitical and the security situation in Europe has really stirred people to attention. And it has stirred the pot quite a bit. And so, for example, like 5G and 6G technology can be leveraged for drone detection, drone, you know, like a, you can use the network as like a radar system. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: ISAC is what it’s called, the acronym for it. These types of technologies, you need to have innovation in 5G, 6G, and they, I mean, even just given some current events that have happened there in Denmark and Estonia

Patrick: Poland.

Chris: And Poland, yeah. I mean, this is very top of mind and you’re starting to see like people really starting to just push forward with things that otherwise would have been just nice ideas, but wouldn’t have actually gone anywhere.

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So, I would say this time it’s a little different for Europe. And the key reason is there’s a security consideration here.

Prediction check: Did cloud market overall growth slow?

Patrick: Right. Right. And I’m curious now, because I hadn’t thought about it in terms of the cloud space, but maybe that’s something we can talk about too, because the last prediction I want to talk about, Allan, that you made was around the overall cloud market showing signs of maturation, most likely visible in the form of gradually slowing growth rates in 2025. So, two  questions then. Were you right that the growth rate gradually slowed in 2025. And then to Chris’s point about a shooting war kind of making people sit up and pay attention, has there been any kind of flow over into the cloud space in Europe because of what’s been happening?

Allan: Yes. So, in terms of the overall market, it was better than I predicted coming into the year. 

Patrick: Okay.

Allan: A lot of that is based on the AI and the GenAI services. If you back that out, it’s probably a slowing growth environment. However, those are real opportunities, and it’s going to be real for quite some time. They’re being realized more over the past couple of quarters at the infrastructure level. There’s still a lot of models and services being piloted at the software as a service level. Agentic really grew in terms of the focus and the belief that that’s how a lot of these are going to come to life in the SaaS solution space over the couple months. So probably a lot more, we would have focused a lot more on Agentic going into the year, but we just don’t know. 

And then in terms of how that manifests in opportunity in heavily regulated European geographies, you know, I still think the market overall is going to the biggest players. It’s being consolidated with- at the very top of the infrastructure, at the software as a service level. And so, there’s been pockets of sovereign players, local providers, but they’re not really capturing market share in a way that creates unique clouds for unique countries. It really is the sovereign build-outs for the large global providers that have come to be how these services are delivered across borders in Europe.

Patrick: Right, yeah, it makes total sense. And to be honest, I’m a little glad you were at least a little bit off on that because I talked to our colleagues, Boz and Angela, and they were three for four, so it’s better to have everybody at three. If you had done better than them, then I’d have some explaining to do.

Allan: Sure, it’s a passing grade.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah, it’s a passing grade, absolutely. 

The predictions process

So, two last questions, one for each of you. Just thinking about predictions, and Chris, you’ve been doing this for a long time. So, 10+ years here at TBR, making predictions every year. I wonder if you could reflect a little bit on the process of making predictions as you come to the end of one year and coming into the next, and sort of how that’s changed over the last few years for you, and how you see that sort of changing going forward.

Chris: Yeah, so I try to look through everything with economic lenses, because the economy is dictating what is actually going to happen. So, let me give you an example. 5G is great. Okay, it’s a great technology. But if you don’t have the business case for it, and if it can’t stand on its own, and if you don’t have the ecosystem of players that are motivated and incentivized to innovate on that technology, it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen in the way, unless you have government distortion. It’s not going to happen in an organic way, right? You’re talking about the cloud business with Allan here. That’s an organic- it’s its own animal. It morphs on its own, it is self-sustaining, it has very defined use cases, business cases there. But for some of the things that go on in telco, maybe that’s not the case. So, what I try to do is look through an economic lens and then look at telecom through that lens and then start to ask like what kinds of things that are going on in the macro economy, maybe on the micro economy in some aspects. And then how might the telecom industry respond or have different behaviors based on what’s going on in the broader economy? That’s kind of how I try to shape the predictions that I’m making.

Patrick: Are there certain go-to sources for your economic outlook?

Chris: Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, top two. There’s others, but those are the top two.

Patrick: You rely on those two primarily, yeah. Excellent. 

How AI plays into making predictions

And Allan, let’s wrap up with sort of what’s coming next in the process, and that’s you mentioned AI, we mentioned AI, we have to mention AI. Certainly, there’s an opportunity to use tools to do predictions, but in your experience of making predictions, and when you think about what you’re going to do this year, have you factored in how you would or wouldn’t use AI to either help you make your predictions or make the predictions for you, I hate to say it.

Allan: Oh, sure. Yeah. And we’re doing this really across the whole research spectrum is first step is go out and see what everyone can access virtually for free through the AI services, just to get a starting place and to make sure that ours are so much better, more insightful and valuable for our readership and going from there. So, that’s certainly built into the process across the board. But a lot of the predictions are based on- they’re designed for the people that are already consuming our research. So, it’s things that we pick up in conversations and briefings, in interviews with end customers, in alliance and ecosystem conversations. And so, there’s a wrapper that inherently makes it valuable coming from that perspective, going deeper and thinking about things that could change, what the impact would be. I’m really calling out the things that would be most impactful in the market, I think, because you can predict, when you go out to the AI services, there’s a lot of high level, a lot of kind of baseline predictions that really aren’t valuable in and of themselves. It’s got to go 5 steps deeper into the competitive landscape, the ecosystem landscape, wrapped with that financial and economic lens that I think really makes our predictions valuable for readers.

How has the audience you write predictions for changed?

Patrick: Yeah, and for our readers specifically, and I guess maybe one more question for each of you on that. When you think about who you’re writing for, has that changed for you in the last few years? Like who, yes, you’re writing for our clients. All right. But I mean, of our clients, not names of companies, but personas or the kinds of roles that you think you’re writing for, reading these predictions.

Allan: Yeah, I mean, I think the big shift has been that it’s no longer just writing to SAP strategy executives so they can go out and beat Oracle one-to-one in direct competition. It’s much more about how they can work with different partners on the services side, on the now the AI model side, on the channel side, so they can have a more effective value proposition, reach more customers. So, I think that broader perspective where we’re really bringing in the connections between a lot of the core readership about how they can work together is a big difference.

Patrick: Yeah. Chris, what about you? Is there a different set of readers you think you’re writing for now?

Chris: I think it’s pretty much the same. I like to focus on the more strategic things, the big picture things, the things that really impact a broad set of people and things that they should be keeping in mind. And it’s shaping the narrative of what we’re seeing in the market and those trends. And that’s kind of how I’m thinking about it.

Patrick: Right.

Chris: Who I’m writing to is that broader audience.

Patrick: Right. Excellent. Well, thank you guys. We’ll come back in a couple of months and talk about the prediction that you’re making for 2026. And then a year from now, we’ll sit down and hopefully go four for four. So, we’ll see. Excellent. Thanks.

Chris: Thanks.

Allan: Thank you.

Patrick: Next week, I’ll be speaking with Angela Lambert and Boz Hristov for a retrospective on their 2025 predictions. 

Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis that my guests bring to this conversation every week. 

Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.

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