Earnings call transcript: ISG’s Q3 2025 reveals AI and managed services growth

Information Services Group Inc. (ISG) reported its Q3 2025 earnings, highlighting significant growth in its managed services and SaaS segments. According to InvestingPro analysis, ISG maintains a "GOOD" overall financial health score, with particularly strong momentum in recent months. Despite a slight dip in stock price, the company remains optimistic about its future, driven by innovations in AI and cloud technology. The stock saw a decrease of 3.7% during regular trading hours, closing at $5.67, and continued to fall slightly in premarket trading. InvestingPro analysis suggests the stock is currently undervalued based on its Fair Value assessment.

Key Takeaways

• Managed services in the Americas surged by 15%.
• SaaS segment’s annual contract value (ACV) increased by 18% year-over-year.
• The as-a-service market forecast was raised from 21% to 25%.
• AI-enabled services are central to ISG’s innovation strategy.

Company Performance

ISG’s performance in Q3 2025 was marked by robust growth in managed services, particularly in the Americas, which saw a notable 15% increase. The company’s SaaS segment also demonstrated strong performance with an 18% rise in ACV year-over-year. This growth aligns with broader industry trends, as the as-a-service market continues to expand.

Financial Highlights

• Managed services globally: Up 1.5%
• Americas managed services: Up 15%
• SaaS segment ACV: $4.8 billion, up 18% year-over-year
• As-a-service market growth: Up 29% year-to-date

Market Reaction

ISG’s stock price fell by 3.7% during regular trading hours and continued to decrease slightly in premarket trading. This decline comes despite strong performance in key business areas, suggesting that market sentiment may be cautious or that expectations were set high. According to InvestingPro data, analysts maintain a bullish outlook with price targets ranging from $5.50 to $8.00, and the stock has delivered an impressive 87% return over the past year. The company’s P/E ratio of 34.96 reflects market optimism about future growth potential.

Outlook & Guidance

ISG maintained its full-year managed services forecast at 1.3% growth but increased its as-a-service forecast from 21% to 25%. The company anticipates mid-3% growth in managed services for 2026, driven by continued investment in AI and cloud technologies. These projections reflect confidence in the ongoing demand for technology-led solutions.

Executive Commentary

Steve Hall, Partner and President of ISG EMEA, emphasized the fundamental role of AI in transforming business operations: "We’re beyond the hype a little bit on AI, and it’s really fundamental replatforming that we’re seeing with organizations." This sentiment underscores ISG’s strategic focus on AI as a key growth driver.

Risks and Challenges

• Potential challenges with prevailing wage regulations could impact staffing costs.
• H-1B visa policy changes may affect talent acquisition strategies.
• The retail and CPG sectors face ongoing challenges, which could impact related service demand.
• Market consolidation may lead to increased competition.

Q&A

During the Q&A session, analysts inquired about the implications of H-1B visa policy changes, the 2026 market outlook, and challenges in the retail and CPG sectors. ISG addressed these concerns by highlighting its strategic focus on AI and technology-led solutions to navigate these challenges effectively.

Full transcript - Information Services Group Inc (III) Q3 2025:

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: Hi everyone, and welcome to the third quarter 2025 ISG Index Call. My name is Stanton Jones, and with me today is Steve Hall, Partner and President, ISG EMEA, Namratha Dharshan, Chief Business Leader for ISG India, and Mark Smith, ISG Chief Software Analyst. This is our 92nd consecutive ISG Index Call. For those of you that have been joining us for many years, thank you for investing some of your time with ISG today. For those of you that may be on your first Index Call, just some quick background. The ISG Index measures the overall health and growth of the technology industry, which includes both managed technology services and cloud-based software and infrastructure services. We do this by tracking and analyzing annual contract value, or ACV, as a leading indicator of where revenues are likely to be in the future. Just think of ACV as bookings.

With that, Steve, I’ll turn this over to you to kick us off.

Steve Hall, Partner and President, ISG EMEA, ISG: Great, Stanton, thanks a lot. And welcome, everybody. Ninety-second consecutive quarters is great. Let’s kind of take away the five key takeaways from the year to date and the quarter. I would say first of all, we really continue to see enterprise shifting towards cloud-first platforms. The as-a-service market, which includes infrastructure and software as a service, was up nearly 30% year to date. It was really led to infrastructure deals tied to AI. The hyperscalers really saw amazing growth, as we’ll talk through later. SaaS is also performing consistently well, though, and we saw growth across IT service management, collaboration, and analytics. I think the key part is I think we’re beyond the hype a little bit on AI, and it’s really fundamental replatforming that we’re seeing with organizations. On the managed services side, the growth was pretty sluggish. The Americas showed solid performance.

It was up 15% year to date with really strong results in financial services, ITO, and engineering. The global services market was essentially flat. Most of that drive came from EMEA and Asia, where delayed decision-making continued to dominate the conversation. Across both regions, we’re seeing deal scope, but just not close to date. Third, I would say deal activity is really rebounding with strength in the smaller deals and on the mega deals, so really both ends of the markets. The mega deal volumes were stable this quarter. Smaller deals, and this is really the first time this year, those deals in the 5 to 10 million ACV range are really going again. That’s really a good sign that transformation-led programs and more targeted modernization efforts are taking place, and the return of some discretionary spend. One of the biggies this quarter was really the H-1B policy changes.

I think long-term, we’re going to see added costs and complexity to sourcing. Most of you know the new $100,000 visa fee introduced in September is really reshaping how firms think about labor-based delivery. It raises the cost floor for offshore, likely accelerates moves towards automation, local hiring, and more diversified talent models. I’m going to talk about that more, but I think the key is clients will look to have more visa-resilient delivery structures as they go forward. Finally, we can’t have an index call without really talking about AI adoption. It’s really accelerating and disrupting some of the legacy BPO. We’re seeing real efficiency gains now, 30%+ in software engineering and customer support specifically. It is coming at the expense of some traditional BPO volumes.

We’re going to talk about this a little bit later, but we saw a big drop in BPO. The good news is we think the overall market is going to expand in this area because of new areas to grow into. Short-term, it’s certainly having an impact with AI-infused backgrounds. Let’s take a look at what’s going on in the broader market. In Q3, the global combined market continued its upward trajectory with solid performance across both managed services and SaaS. This quarter again reinforced what we’ve seen throughout the year, and priorities have shifted. Cloud, infrastructure, and AI-first strategies are really central to the spending. Year to date, as you can see, the combined market is up 18%. As-a-service is up 29%, while managed services was just up 1.5%. The divergence again really speaks volumes. For the as-a-service, it really accounts for over 65% of the volume now.

The managed services up 1.5% was all based on the growth in the Americas, which was up 15% year to date. The good thing is that was really driven by growth in financial services, ITO, and engineering. We’re seeing a really healthy mix of large-scale renewals and smaller outcome-based awards coming back to the market, particularly in the U.S. The bad part is that strength wasn’t really global. EMEA and Asia remain soft. Deal flow weighed down by delayed decision-making and reduced discretionary investment. In Europe, we had energy costs, tariff concerns, escalating geopolitical tensions, Ukraine, NATO, political volatility, and France. We can kind of go down that list that just delays decision-making within the EMEA markets. Meanwhile, the as-a-service continued, as I said, 65% of the market. We’re really seeing investments turn more to SaaS, continue to do cloud.

Cloud growth is again really driven by everything that we’re seeing on AI. Service management, collaboration tools, and analytics are really driving that market. Before we shift into the details on ITO and engineering, I do want to touch on the H-1B policies a little bit. In late December, the U.S. administration introduced the $100,000 fee on each new H-1B visa. There was obviously a lot of dynamics going on at the beginning. That settled, this was a significant policy shift with really immediate implications for the global delivery. The new fee effectively eliminates the cost advantage of using H-1B labor for lower wage roles in the U.S., especially in support roles, QA, junior development. Going forward, we expect H-1B sponsorship to be concentrated on high-value senior roles where the ROI still holds up. There was a lot of uncertainty that was implemented with it.

There’s a clause on national interest exemption, which remains loosely defined, making long-term planning difficult to do. It also adds risk to the overall talent strategies for organizations. An example of this is the lottery system was modified as well to really favor high-end skills. In the new system, these skills will be given four lottery tickets, the senior skills, while the lower end or non-critical skills receive one. You’ve got a higher probability, obviously, of being selected in the pool. Combined, we think that this is really going to skew the market towards high-end talent being awarded. Combine that with what’s happening with the national interest exemption. We think those roles will primarily go to the big tech providers. The timing is also critical. Enterprises are already deep in automation and AI adoption.

We’re likely to see a further acceleration of that trend, particularly in software development, testing, and support, where we already see automation and AI being very effective. In terms of who’s impacted, who’s not, I think in general, the large Indian providers have done a good job over the last several years, really mitigating some of their reliance on H-1Bs. I think those firms are going to be OK. What you’ll see is higher offshore ratios, which will reduce that risk to H-1Bs, and their global delivery frameworks will have to adjust accordingly. It means likely more growth in Mexico, Colombia, potentially Canada, other areas as you go forward. Smaller Indian firms are also really less directed because they’ve really pulled back on the use of H-1Bs because they just weren’t getting them through the lottery.

They already are heavily reliant on lower cost offshore talent, but it does leave them more exposed to delivery disruptions if clients push for alternative models to be on site or other things. You’ll see some hiring in that space. I think the global tech firms and diversified service providers are more likely to shift towards offshore and nearshore. They are going to blend local hiring with increased use of AI and automation. Those tech firms are also likely to receive the national exemption. I think the one thing that we are missing in this whole conversation is the prevailing wage. In general, the prevailing wage threshold is gaining traction. That is essentially saying that you have got to pay the prevailing wage in whatever city the client is as they go forward. If that changes, even senior level visa hires could face higher cost barriers.

This could further reshape the global talent, absolutely having to meet more of an immediate impact on margins and growth there. I think the bottom line here is the model is really evolving. We know some things. There is still a lot to figure out. It is not really going to take effect until April of 2026. The announcement was for the October lottery. There will be a lot of time for organizations to kind of manage and mitigate their risks as we go forward. Stanton, why do you not take us through the ITO business?

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: Sure, thanks, Steve. As a reminder, ITO includes areas like applications development and maintenance and infrastructure, managed services, network, and cybersecurity. In the third quarter, the ITO segment was down 2% year on year. However, as you can see here on a year-to-date basis, it was up 5%. Year to date, this segment of the market’s on pace for a record number of awards. Turning to award type, 19 of the 22 mega awards that have been awarded year to date are ITO awards. We think that’s a signal that we continue to see strong preference for bundling technology scope in order to drive scale and cost savings. I’ll talk a little bit more about mega deals here in just a minute. The Americas accounted for all of the ITO growth so far in 2025. Through nine months, the Americas ITO ACV is up 25%, and EMEA is down 11%.

As you can see on the right-hand side of the slide here, by functional area, ADM was up 3% year to date, and infrastructure was up 12% year to date. Much of that was based on strength in data center activity. Let’s move on to our second service line, which is engineering services. In the third quarter, engineering services was up nearly 60% year over year. On a year-to-date basis, it’s up 36%. Large multinational providers like DXC, HCLTech, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro are driving much of this growth. As a collective, these large providers have won nearly half of the engineering awards in 2025 and more than 40% of the ACV. As you may recall, we started splitting engineering out from BPO at the beginning of this year.

One of the reasons we did that is that we believe engineering is starting to scale based on a couple of factors. Number one, the average contract value of an engineering services deal is up 26% year to date, so the deals are getting bigger. Number two, historically, much of the activity in this segment was in the smallest deal category, but that’s changing as well. Year to date, the number of deals in the $10 to $40 million ACV range is up 14%. We think this is a signal that deals in this space are starting to scale beyond smaller projects, and the success of the larger players is partly responsible for this dynamic. Finally, as you can see on the right-hand side of the slide here is the distribution of engineering annual contract value. Nearly 70% of the ACV in this segment is split between software engineering services.

Think about things like customer-facing products and commercial software platforms and embedded engineering. Here, think about things like control units, firmware, and processors inside of physical devices. Let’s go ahead and move on to our final service line, BPO. Namratha, over to you.

Namratha Dharshan, Chief Business Leader for ISG India, ISG: Thank you, Stanton. In the third quarter, the BPO segment generated about $1.8 billion in ACV, and that was down 16% year on year. We’ve not seen a single quarter of growth in 2025 compared to 2024. In fact, nine of the past 11 quarters, the BPO segment has now seen year-on-year declines, showing signs of long-term decline in this space. However, BPO did see a sequential gain of 8%. It was the second straight quarter where BPO has stabilized and seen quarter-on-quarter growth. Year to date, BPO ACV is down 22% in comparison to 2024. Let’s look at the functional areas. We saw broad-based weakness. The largest segment, industry-specific BPO, generated about an ACV of $1.9 billion. That was down 17% year to date. The second largest functional area, customer experience, saw an ACV of $1.2 billion, which was down 13% year to date.

Now, given the decline in ACV in the last several quarters, we also conducted a revenue analysis of the top 50 BPO players. As you can see here, more than half of the companies of the top 50 have an organic growth rate of less than 3%, while there are some providers with more than 3% growth, but that’s largely due to some of the acquisitions that have happened in this space. Now, given the BPO ACV decline and slow growth in revenue, let’s take a look at what is really impacting this industry. The BPO market seems to be in a reset mode, and several factors are actually contributing to the changes that are happening in this market. There’s a marked shift towards technology-led solutions in BPO that includes data, AI, and engineering services, and that is increasingly blurring the lines between BPO and ITO services.

As the nature of BPO engagements is changing to more technology-driven, providers are notably focused on repositioning and enhancing their technology capabilities, either organically or through M&A. For example, as highlighted during the previous quarter, Capgemini and WMS was one such acquisition where we see high synergies between BPO and ITO services. Another example is Genpact, acquiring Exponential Data to strengthen their data and AI capabilities with a deep focus on design and engineering. Obviously, this change is also pushing the BPO providers to make a significant shift in hiring patterns. BPO players are now focused on hiring for specialized skills such as AI, data science, and platform engineering skills.

Another trend that we have highlighted for the last few quarters is how AI is not only enabling new efficiencies with some of the prominent use cases in BPO, but we’ve also started to see how it is disrupting the traditional revenue streams. Finally, providers are under revenue pressure, not just because of these rapid shifts, but also because we see some enterprises are hesitant to commit to large-scale BPO transformation and instead choosing FTE-led engagements until they see the real impact of AI. Now, despite all these shifts in the market at ISG, we continue to see strong pockets of BPO work, and we are currently advising some very large BPO deal activities, including several that will likely come to the market with over $1 billion of TCV.

As we said earlier, we do see significant levels of pricing pressure both on BPO and ITO due to both intense competition as well as AI. To understand this deeper, I’ll hand it over to Steve to walk us through some of the emerging pricing models. Steve, over to you.

Steve Hall, Partner and President, ISG EMEA, ISG: Great, thanks a lot, Namratha. I think that last point is critical that you said. We really do see a lot of activity in our pipeline. More importantly, on the BPO side, I think we’ve got to look at the integration with GBS, shared services, GCCs, and sort of this whole confluence of how organizations and enterprise think about delivering services in sort of this agentic age. Let me jump over and really talk about price performance because this sort of gets to the heart of what we see from an AI perspective. Over the last couple of years, and this is really focused on ITO and ADM, ISG always tracks the price performance, price productivity. We do that through resource units, what we call RUs. For example, in the infrastructure space, one of the most common resource units is a server image.

Historically, that resource unit would be around $20 at the start of the contract, and then after two years, it would decline by around 10%. The cost would be $18. What we’re seeing recently is that is double. In the case of a server RU, it now costs $16 to support at the end of those two years. Magnify that out across the number of virtual instances and views, you can really see how that kind of collapses. We’re seeing that across really all of the IT and ADM towers, especially in areas that we haven’t seen before, like security, almost tripling compared to historical trends. We think this is really a combination of two things. Number one, the market is incredibly competitive right now. Some growth, you can absolutely bet the service providers are betting on the investments in AI and others to drive that.

I think across the board, everyone is looking at the impact of agentic and saying, what can they do, and being very aggressive in their forward pricing. AI is already having an impact. We’re seeing that built in, and in many cases, the service providers and the clients are banking on it, that they’ll be able to get those productivities in two years, given where we are with the state of the market. One of the things that we want to highlight today is really what we’re calling autonomous level pricing. Autonomy level pricing is essentially focused on where we think the market is going with pricing around AI. There’s been a ton of debate over different ways to price it. How do we move to outcomes? Who gets the net benefit? How do you maybe price on tokens? How do we think of services and software?

Lots of different components. What we think is really happening is a new pricing component that’s still based on the RU, doesn’t replace the RU, but it’s really starting to align with how service providers and clients think of the market and the state of the capabilities of the market. Many of the proposed pricing models just weren’t really aligned with the value and skewed the economics of the services. Our autonomous level pricing really addresses this by aligning the level of automation with enterprise goals and, quite frankly, regulatory frameworks which are evolving rapidly. As you can see here, we’ve got five levels. Level zero is really fully manual, and level one is assisted. You could think of level one as a software developer using GenAI to help develop test cases or develop code.

In the same way with BPO, you may get some information, help answer a question, write an email, do those types of things at level zero and level one. Levels two and three are agents actually executing that task, but you’ve got a human in the loop, and pricing is controlled based upon the degree of the human in the loop that you want. In many cases—healthcare, financial services, anything in the regulatory, even things such as HR—it’s going to be important and mandatory to have that level, that human in the loop. This sort of controls it. At level four, autonomy level four, the work is really fully autonomous and only governed by policies and audits. You can quickly see how the price could change based upon what level of autonomy.

If you’re fully agents, instead of saying, well, we want agent or digital labor, we’re really pricing on the improvements that we get based across that. Why do we do this? First, we think it’s a fair way to look at it. Buyers see significant cost reductions if the autonomy level rises. Providers can continue to maintain margin by not overcommitting upfront, so it eliminates their risk. It allows the variability, so prices can flex based on the real execution behavior, not assumptions. If a client decides that it’s too risky to go to level three and they want to stay at level two, the prices will reflect that. It’s consistent. RUs have been proven for 30 to 40 years in this industry. It’s a great way to help drive it.

We’re anchoring on something that’s well known in the industry, client service providers, which means we can benchmark it, compare, and really drive things through. It also really aligns incentive. It’s safely advancing autonomy, not buyers capturing too much savings, service providers capturing too much savings, waiting for the maturity. It’s actually well aligned with where the market is. It’s risk-averse, which means it balances the risk with it. You’ve got defined tiers, and each tier you’ve got governance roles making the risk very explicit, and it really is proportional. You can map levels to it. You can do service level agreements. You can allocate the risk. You can really do that. It’s not arbitrary. It’s not arbitrary with the pricing of agents or how we think about token counts or how we think about the use of generative or agentic on driving token counts.

We’re working through this process now with multiple service providers. It is being integrated into deals now, especially some large BPO deals. We’re confident and hopeful that this approach is really going to bridge the gap between the manual processes and really tomorrow’s autonomous one. I’ll leave this slide up just a second. If you take a photo of this, it’ll give you the QR code. We’ve really put everything in to explain the whole pricing methodology, what we’re thinking through in our State of Enterprise AI report. I encourage you to download it. Give me just a second to grab the QR code, and it’ll take you directly to the ISG website where you can download it. We expect a lot of conversation on this. Stanton, over to you, and let’s go through the regions.

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: Great, thanks, Steve. Let’s start out with the Americas. America’s managed services segment was up 22% year over year, and that’s the best year-over-year growth rate since 2023. Mega deal activity, as I mentioned earlier, was really strong in the Americas this quarter as well. We’ll talk about even more here in just a minute. Year to date, ACV in the Americas was up 15%, and that’s on the back of the most ever contracts awarded year to date in this region. The good news here is that even though the macro continues to be very uncertain, tech services spending has not only stabilized in the U.S., but we actually see pockets where it’s starting to expand. Moving to EMEA, the story is quite different.

As Steve mentioned, energy costs, tariff concerns, and geopolitical tensions are leading to lots of business uncertainty, which is having a downstream impact on tech services spending. Managed services ACV in EMEA was down 25% year over year. Seven of the past 12 quarters have seen negative year-over-year declines in EMEA, so it’s been a very uneven market over the past three years. Regionally, in EMEA in the third quarter, the Nordics was actually up triple digits, and Southern Europe was up nearly 30%. That said, the larger regions were all down. For example, DACH was down 60%, France was down 30%, and the UK was down 7%. That has a really big impact because just as a reminder, the UK is the largest market in EMEA. That continued quarterly weakness in EMEA is leading to the overall region being down 8%, as you can see here.

Closing out with Asia-Pacific, year to date, managed services has generated $2.5 billion of ACV, and that’s down 26% versus 2024. Most of the larger markets in this region have trended negative this year, and Zed is down 31% year to date, and Japan’s down 26%. The region’s second largest market, which is India, was up 5% year to date. I’d say on the ground in this region, we’ve actually seen a slower pickup of AI-enabled services and the associated operating cost reductions that they can provide. We are starting to see a pickup here as clients look to reassess their incumbent relationships and take advantage of these new opportunities. Okay, before we jump into our industry update, let’s take a little deeper dive into what’s happening in the Americas.

As Steve mentioned earlier, we’re seeing large deal activity remain strong, but what’s different today is that we’re seeing a return of smaller discretionary deals. However, what’s important to note here is that this change is almost exclusively happening in the Americas. As you can see here, the number of deals with an ACV between $5 million and $9 million is up 15% compared to this point last year in the Americas. On the quarter, the number of these small deals is up almost 50%. We think that’s a potential signal that we’re starting to see a loosening of discretionary spending in the Americas. This loosening is not happening in Europe. As you can see here, the number of small deals year to date in EMEA is down 26%, and on the quarter, they’re down almost 40%.

This is also one of the data points we use to indicate that discretionary spending remains tight in this region. On the right-hand side of the chart, you can see what’s happening with ACV in mega deals, which are awards with an ACV of $100 million or more. Mega deal ACV in the Americas is up nearly 60% year to date, while in EMEA, it’s almost the exact opposite story. Mega deal ACV is down 40% compared to this point last year. These are two of the data points that we’re using to measure the health and the growth of these two regions and an indicator why we believe we’re starting to see a return to growth in the Americas, while EMEA remains sluggish. Let’s take a look at our industries. As we did last quarter, we’re just going to focus on a few industries here.

However, as usual, the full industry results are available in the appendix and on the ISG website. Let’s start with BFSI. Over the past few quarters, we’ve talked a lot about the weakness in this sector and how that’s impacted the overall industry. The great news here is that it is recovering, and as you can see here, it’s up 8% year to date. That said, recovery is not even. The BFSI sector remains weak. In EMEA, it’s down 12%, but in the Americas, it’s up over 30%. On the ground with clients, we continue to see a lot of work around mainframe to cloud modernization and middle office transformation through a combination of process and technology transformation. Let’s move to energy, which had its best quarter ever with $1.4 billion of ACV. Unlike BFSI, energy is strong in both the Americas and in EMEA.

Year to date, the sector is up 23%. On the ground with clients, we’re continuing to see very strong demand around SAP modernization and transformation. Finally, in retail and CPG, we continue to see a lot of weakness here, as you can see on the far right-hand side of the chart. On the quarter, CPG had its lowest ACV result since 2022, while retail was down nearly 40%. Year to date, the combined retail and CPG sector was down 18%, with much of that weakness coming from EMEA. As we mentioned last quarter, this sector remains obviously under a ton of pressure given the trade uncertainty we’ve seen over the past nine months.

That said, we do want to note that this is actually one of the areas where inside of ISG, as Namratha mentioned, we actually are seeing a significant amount of BPO-related work, specifically focused on cost optimization through transforming and modernizing GBS functions to take advantage of much of the scale and technology that Steve mentioned earlier. Okay, let’s go ahead and shift gears and move to our as-a-service update. Mark, over to you.

Steve Hall, Partner and President, ISG EMEA, ISG: Thanks so much, Stanton. During the third quarter, the SaaS segment generated $4.8 billion in ACV and was up 18% year over year. The 18% year-over-year growth accelerated 730 basis points from last quarter’s year-over-year growth rate, and this represented the fourth straight quarter of double-digit gains. As you can see here in the first three quarters, and year to date, SaaS is up 16% to $14.4 billion. This segment has quietly outperformed expectations with AI viewed as a strategic enhancement that augments rather than replaces enterprise software. The complexity of enterprise systems spanning security, compliance, and integrations makes full AI disruption unlikely, and generative AI is instead boosting productivity through agentic capabilities. While some envision LLMs generating custom software on demand, most users won’t abandon established tools simply to avoid subscription cost.

Each of the regional markets contributed to the growth, with EMEA leading the gains with nearly 22% upside. Asia was also up significantly at 20% year to date. The Americas advanced 13% but has still slightly lagged the highs established in 2022 and represents 60% of the market. Now let’s talk about the SaaS trends. Overall, the top 10 SaaS providers posted a 17% year-to-date growth, which has slightly outperformed the broader SaaS market index. The largest SaaS leaders remain confident in strong adoption and usage of their enhanced new AI offerings, which revenue is expected to follow as these offerings scale within their broader businesses. First, AI, including data, analytics, and platforms, had a 24% ACV year-to-date growth, with continuous evolution of data software with infused GenAI and agentic AI support.

This category is a billion-dollar plus ACV segment that has also exhibited strong performance year to date in 2025. After a flattish performance in 2024, this year, the segment is up 24% year to date, growth as companies such as Databricks, MongoDB, and Snowflake have outperformed the broader SaaS market. Second, the front office application segment and CRM had only a 1% year-to-date growth, with enterprises again making small investments to existing and new software providers in this category. Commerce software underperformed, being down 3% year to date on an ACV basis. In the quarter, ServiceNow announced its market entry to CRM, expanding its focus on customer service and building on top of its CPQ acquisition of Logic.io.

Third, the middle office applications segment saw a 23% ACV year-to-date growth with collaboration, content, and project management categories, but back office ERP only had a 6% ACV year-to-date growth, cooling in 2025 compared to prior years, as software purchases are not the challenge with migrations, including SAP’s continued push to get customers for stepping into S/4 HANA. I will note that HCM is down 18% ACV year-to-date decline, but did grow 19% quarter to quarter, showing some early signals for ACV growth recovery. Fourth, IT platforms like ITSM had a 55% ACV year-to-date growth, led by ServiceNow, with newly announced entrant Salesforce, who has expanded in this very established category, and a trend as mega software writers expand into peer categories. Last, we’ve also observed very high growth in the collaboration segment. It saw a 50% ACV growth year-to-date driven by conversational AI and GenAI tools.

Our ISG buyer’s guide on collaborative and conversational AI found providers like Zoom as a temporary and a leader. As AI increases advances SaaS in many avenues, software vendors face pressure to adopt consumption-based pricing, though the transition is proving difficult and many advancing to value and outcome-based methods. This evolution mirrors past shifts in pricing models and highlights software’s potential vulnerability to structural change driven by AI efficiency gains. As referenced by Steve earlier, the changes in pricing models will continue into 2026. Now let’s talk about infrastructure as a service. On the quarter, we finally saw a broad-based growth return, while hyperscalers kept posting triple-digit AI revenue gains. As we look towards 2026, we’re watching whether supply constraints start to ease. The ramping CapEx for AI and cloud, more servers, more data centers, and in this early phase, scale is a differentiator.

The largest players with the most enterprise cloud consolidation and sovereign cloud wins where control of GPUs, power, and LAN will set the price, pace, and the M&A agenda. Let’s talk about the top trends in this segment. First, continued growth in infrastructure as a service across cloud and cyber with 33% ACV year-to-date growth and regional with Americas at 42% and EMEA at 50% are finding continued demand for a broad range of compute needs, including AI. Second, the big three hyperscalers, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are seeing strong demand with ACV up 42% year to date. Growth is still accelerating, and Azure is outpacing AWS despite AWS’s larger base. If recent quarterly growth rates persist, Azure could catch and surpass AWS in quarterly revenue around 2027. We’re watching for the inflection point where their shares converge.

The reference to big three is expanding to big four to include Oracle, where its RPO is $455 billion, which is up 359% year over year versus 41% in Q4 FY25, driven by four multi-billion dollar deals with three customers and more pending that could push past $500 billion. Third, enterprise demand for digital sovereignty is pushing EU-specific and global hyperscalers to invest. Those sovereign cloud controls are still maturing, and most enterprise spend is early. SAP’s recent steps expanding with Dellus Cloud on Microsoft Azure for the public sector and partnering with Shorts Digit for broader EU needs shows how providers are balancing risk and opportunity. ISG’s buyer’s guide rates Google, Microsoft, and Oracle as leaders with an exemplary rating. Fourth, U.S. data centers are an AI compute arms race.

Hyperscalers are pouring record CapEx and inking big partnership deals to build multi-gigawatt campuses that can meet future AI demand in the U.S. and worldwide. Last but critical and beyond, cloud is cybersecurity and is still growing at a strong double-digit clip with Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and SentinelOne expanding. Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion CyberArk deal that was announced underscores the fast-moving consolidation as fragmented cyber categories converge, echoing themes from our ISG cybersecurity buyer’s guide. Now let’s talk about vertical industries. Our new software report results for an as-a-service across vertical industries examine the health of these essential intersections with enterprises. All the industry segments grew by more than 20% ACV year-to-date growth. While BFSI represents 19% of ACV, I will highlight the top three fastest growing industries. Let’s examine the healthcare industry that represents 10% of the overall revenue.

It was up 29% year to date in a breakout of infrastructure service up 34%. Significant new expansion of healthcare clouds and applications like that of Microsoft with new Dragon Copilot, Oracle’s AI-driven Oracle Health EHR, and Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot Health Actions are examples. For retail and CPG that represents 15% of ACV, it was up 32% year to date with a breakout of SaaS of up 18%. The combination of these two industries is finding new growth innovation from the likes of Snowflake’s retail and CPG cloud, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, and Oracle’s Retail Merchandising Cloud are just examples of these investments. For business services that represent 16% of ACV, it was up 36% year to date with breakout and infrastructure service up 40% year to date.

The overall business services industries have been early adopters to a wide range of AI and application-related SaaS and efforts by ServiceNow and its GenTech and GenAI Now Assist and Workday with its advancing AI platform are focused on the service industries. Each of these highlight industries overall has continued quarterly growth across multiple years. The investments into verticalization of SaaS and even tailored infrastructure are using latest cloud computing-based applications now infused with AI has been advancing substantively. Software writers like NICE, Oracle, and Salesforce have been investing through R&D with new industry offerings to capture the minds for more specific needs of enterprises. Okay, let’s now move on to our leaderboard. Namratha, over to you.

Namratha Dharshan, Chief Business Leader for ISG India, ISG: Thanks, Mark. As a reminder, providers are listed in alphabetical order, and positioning is based on annual contract value signed over the past 12 months. The companies new to the list are denoted with an asterisk, and a reminder that the regional leaderboards can be accessed on the ISG website. Now let’s start with the managed services leaderboard. In the largest group, we continue to see minimal changes in the leaderboard, with the top companies maintaining their strong positions. Several of the leaders we would like to call out in the Big 15 would be Accenture, who’s working alongside Microsoft at Nationwide Building Society to transform their cybersecurity operations. Accenture is also working alongside another partner, and this time AWS at NatWest, on a five-year deal to consolidate its customer data streams into a single bank-wide data platform that’s enabled by AI.

We’ll also highlight Capgemini, who signed a multi-year agreement with Aptiv to provide IT support, infrastructure, and digital operations services. Capgemini also won a contract with Danish firm GN Group to transform its retail vertical chain, implement Salesforce Global Order Management System designed to streamline order processing and enhance customer experience across their 100-plus markets globally. Moving to Building 15, we’d also like to call out LTI Mindtree’s recent seven-year $450 million ISG-advised contract with Archer Daniels Midland, a global food processing and commodities trading company. The agreement involves LTI Mindtree implementing an AI-powered operating model to manage ADM’s IT infrastructure, application management, and cybersecurity services to enhance efficiency and support global growth. In the Breakthrough 15 group, Chinese-based provider NuSoft joined the leaderboard on the strength of a large four-year deal to become the designated supplier of smart cockpit domain controllers of a Chinese automaker.

NuSoft counts Geely, Changan Automobile Group, FAW Group, and GAC Group among its large car-making clients. You will also see ER&D provider L&T Technology Services, who announced an agreement with Tyson Group Steering to establish a software development center in Pune in India. The new center highlights LTT’s expertise in the mobility segment, dedicated to developing safety-critical software for advanced steering technologies while supporting Tyson Group’s global engineering expansion. Finally, in the Booming 15, we highlight several new entrants to the leaderboard. First up, Swedish customer engagement provider Transcom Worldwide, which has won deals at PayPal, Samsung, BNP Paribas, and Teletube. Tata Technologies joined the leaderboard as well. They are an ER&D leader that provides a full range of solutions from concept to production for manufacturers in automotive, aerospace, and heavy machinery industries. Congratulations to all the leaders. Mark, over to you to cover the as-a-service leaders.

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: Thanks, Namratha. In the Big 15, we continue to also see minimal changes in the leaderboard, with the top software companies maintaining their strong positions as hyperscaler providers dominating the growth and including Oracle, as I mentioned earlier. In the Building 15, we saw a couple of new SaaS providers join the leaderboard, as examples with AppLovin and Autodesk. AppLovin developed software and solutions for mobile app monetization and marketing. In the Breakthrough 15 group, this quarter, our leaderboard is popular with data center provider 21Vianet, who has moved up to the Booming 15 and including OVH. You also see well-known software providers such as Databricks, Palantir, and Zscaler. Databricks also signed a Series K term sheet at over $100 billion valuation, surpassed at a $4 billion run rate with a $1 billion plus AI run rate.

Finally, in the Booming 15, CyberArk joined the leaderboard, and they are a cybersecurity company that provides an identity security platform to secure and manage the credentials and access privileges of all identities. The announced $25 billion acquisition by Palo Alto Networks to close in 2026 will bring new potential and a tipping point for future M&A activities. Congratulations to all leaders, and now over to you, Steve.

Steve Hall, Partner and President, ISG EMEA, ISG: Thanks a lot, Mark. I think as everybody in the business can appreciate, this has been one crazy quarter as we’ve gone through. Managed services up 1.5% globally. All of that growth really on the Americas, as we discussed, which was up 15%, really led by the recovery of BFSI, which was up 30%. Good news there. I think on the SaaS side, Mark, you did a great job really covering that. We’re seeing ongoing strong demand both for hyperscalers and SaaS. The market is up 33% year to date, and we really just see strong demand going forward. If we think about what that means for the forecast, we’re going to hold our forecast for managed services at 1.3% for the full year. The Americas is going to have to continue to carry the weight of that, but we expect Q4 to remain challenged, especially in EMEA.

We just don’t see room to raise our full-year forecast on that. We are going to raise our forecast, though, for as-a-service, another 400 basis points. We’re going to go from 21% to 25%. We’re just seeing so much growth. Excuse me. We’re seeing so much growth as we go through that. You will see the increase there. Again, that will go from 21% to 25%. With that, I want to thank everybody and submit. Would you like to start with questions?

Sure, Steve. Thanks a lot, team, for the insightful presentation. My first question is around the demand outlook. Obviously, you have maintained your managed services outlook at 1.3%, but I wanted to understand, you know, the tariff-hit sectors like retail and autos, when are you expecting the discretionary demand to revive back in those sectors? Secondly, your increase in as-a-service outlook to 25%, will that help to revive demand for system integrators around SaaS implementation?

Yeah, let me take the last one first and actually have Mark Smith answer that because I think the SaaS market is driving up, and I do think we see greater opportunities for SIs, and that’s clearly in the case with SAP. Mark, any comments on that?

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: Yeah, no, the demand curve, I think, as we’ve seen in the SaaS segment, has definitely been driven by a lot of the, let’s call it the GenAI and AI platforms. We’re just starting to see a better pickup in the core application segments. As I noted, ERP is up 6%, and I think as many organizations are trying to rationalize their infrastructure to be AI-ready, that’s going to require more services work. We’re already beginning to see those indicators.

You mentioned CPG and retail. As we showed in the data, it’s down significantly. Retail had its worst quarter in, I think, three years. That said, as I mentioned, on a deal activity basis for ISG, that’s super busy right now, especially around cost optimization focused for back, middle, and even starting to get into some front office area like marketing, marketing automation, fulfillment, those kinds of areas. There are definitely mixed signals there, but I also think the consumer is just under a tremendous amount of pressure. In my opinion, I’m no macroeconomist, but in the U.S. specifically, I can speak to that. The U.S. consumer is under a lot of pressure. I think the automotive sector is under a lot of pressure, and I think it’s going to get worse.

You could argue that bodes well for the services sector as more companies need to focus on cost optimization. That’s what we’re seeing, but in some cases, we’re just not seeing it reflected in the bookings.

Steve Hall, Partner and President, ISG EMEA, ISG: Got it. No, that’s really helpful. You know.

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: The last point on that is, you know, retail is a really small part of the overall managed services market. We know the brands really well, and we get excited about the brands, but it’s got a very, it’s got a small impact, really less than 5% of the overall global market with it. It’s really BFSI and manufacturing energy that drives such a big part of the market. Life sciences being up is also very helpful.

Namratha, that’s very helpful. Secondly, I wanted to check around, you know, post the H-1B visa fee hike. Are you seeing any sort of delay in the decision-making out there across the clients, maybe because of operational hurdles or how to plan around the H-1B visa resource? Is anything picking up from ground in the last 20 days?

Steve Hall, Partner and President, ISG EMEA, ISG: Yeah, you know, that Saturday was one of the busiest Saturdays of my life from the time it was announced on the Friday night. I was in Europe, and the Saturday morning and all the calls from both friends and colleagues and clients and reporters. We have not seen clients slow down to the extent that we thought that they could because I think there was a lot of clarity by Monday morning. I think with the White House coming out and clarifying things sort of Saturday afternoon U.S. time helped kind of calm the markets down quite a bit. I think what we see right now is a little wait and see. We understand the direction that they want, you know, that the administration wants to go. We think we can mitigate that risk.

Over the weekend, as you know, because I know you were working just as hard as I was, it was a bit crazy to forecast what was going to happen and what the impact was. We feel like, you know, especially the lottery is going on now, decisions in April, that’s when the first payments will go through. We’ll have a much better perspective of what’s going on. My only concern, quite frankly, is still on the prevailing wage, and that’s the big unknown because the prevailing wage comes down if we’re whatever % under market in certain cities, and those have to be raised immediately. That will absolutely have an impact on margins, and it’s unlikely that those costs will be able to be passed on to a client in many instances. That would be my immediate concern as I look into Q4 and early Q1.

Now, Gareth, I think maybe if last question I can squeeze in.

Of course.

In terms of the HIRE Act, I mean, it was introduced in September, the halting of international relocation of employment. Anything you are hearing, any scare among the clients as to, or among the GCC activity as to how that can play out, although a lot of uncertainties are there, whether it can get cleared or it requires a congressional approval, anything you are hearing on the ground?

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: Yeah, I would say I was actually just in, I think a lot of that HIRE Act, to me, is going to be focused in the customer experience space. I was actually just in the Philippines. I got back a couple of weeks ago as I was speaking at the IBPAP event where around GCCs and what we see happening in GCCs. That came up a couple of times, but it didn’t seem to be, given the degree to which a lot of that customer experience activity emanates out of the Philippines, not a huge concern. I have not talked to a single client that’s brought it up. To me, I would say no, not a significant concern.

Steve Hall, Partner and President, ISG EMEA, ISG: Great.

Great. Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Do you want to open up the questions more broadly?

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: Sure. Thanks, Sami. Yeah, we’ve got time for a couple of questions. Let’s just keep them brief. Namratha, I’ll come to you first. There’s a question around M&A or is IT BPO convergence leading to more M&A?

Namratha Dharshan, Chief Business Leader for ISG India, ISG: Yeah, I think when we highlighted the WMS and Capgemini mergers and acquisitions last quarter, we did say that this could be a signal to the market in terms of M&A sort of picking up, though it may not be of the same size and scale. I think we’re still seeing a lot of active M&A that is happening in the IT and BPO, but that’s largely also focused on some of the capability investments in enhancing all the AI and platform engineering capabilities. Some of the CX in the front office space also saw a lot of mergers and acquisitions, though some were more focused on some of the acquisition of specialized skills. Some were also focused on strengthening their scale presence in the market, given the high competition that is also kind of increasing.

At this stage, I would say predominantly most of the companies in the BPO segment are focused on enhancing their data and AI capabilities. The second segment where we are actually seeing is more around industry-specific capabilities. We’ve highlighted that industry-specific BPO is one of the largest segments under functional area under BPO, and we see that is quite actively picking up where providers are investing in broadening and strengthening their industry-specific capabilities.

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: Okay, thanks, Namratha. We’ve got time for one more question, Steve. We’ve got a number of questions coming in about what we think 2026 is going to look like. What do we think?

Steve Hall, Partner and President, ISG EMEA, ISG: Yeah, everybody wants to know. Everybody wants to kiss the ball. I get it. Listen, we’re coming out of a very difficult quarter on the managed services side, at the 1.3% that we’re talking about. That’s on the low side of where we’ve been, but I do see a lot of green shoots. We’ll have the full forecast by the end of Q4. I’m very optimistic about the growth of BFSI, the continued growth in Americas. I think some of that will translate into Europe as well. I think this is clearly a case where the high tides are going to rise all boats, if you will, because I think we’re going to see so much more spend in other areas, both as Mark went through with infrastructure, as SaaS, what that means for SIs. I’ll say roughly, I think we’ll be in the mid-3% for growth for 2026.

I won’t put the data on it yet, but I think we’ll be in the mid-3% on where we’ll be for growth, which will be good for the industry and further selling the stability and the growth that we have.

Stanton Jones, Presenter/Moderator, ISG: Super. Thanks, Steve. Okay, we’re going to go ahead and close out the call. Sami, as always, a huge thanks to you and your team for hosting the call today. As a reminder, you can access a copy of the slides that you just saw, which includes the regional leaderboards on the ISG website. Don’t forget to download the State of Enterprise AI Adoption, the report that Steve talked about. We thank you very much for joining us today, and we’ll see you on the fourth quarter and full year 2025 call in January. Thanks.

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