ISG Honors Capgemini, HCLTech, and Hexaware with 2025 Star of Excellence™ Awards
ISG Star of Excellence Awards: Capgemini, HCLTech, and Hexaware were recognized as Client Champions in the 2025 ISG Star of Excellence Awards for their exceptional customer service, based on direct feedback from enterprise clients.
Focus on Customer Experience: The awards highlight the increasing importance of customer experience as a strategic priority for service providers, with insights gathered from over 240 service providers across various industries and regions.
Recognition of Additional Awards: The gala dinner also honored winners in other categories, with Capgemini receiving the most awards overall, followed by HCLTech.
Role of AI in Provider Relationships: As AI becomes essential in business strategies, enterprises are demanding more from their service providers, seeking partners that can enhance agility and support long-term technological visions.
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- Modernization Strategy Shift: According to ISG's report, U.S. enterprises are shifting their modernization strategies towards business-led transformation, leveraging AI to interpret legacy systems, thereby maintaining operational continuity and enhancing agility in complex environments.
- AI-Driven Operations: Many companies are embedding AI-driven operations and automation into mainframe environments, utilizing enhanced AIOps for predictive monitoring and self-healing capabilities, significantly reducing downtime and manual intervention, thus improving system reliability.
- DevOps Standardization: U.S. enterprises are standardizing DevOps pipelines and API-enabled architectures to integrate mainframes with distributed systems, accelerating code release speed and improving consistency, which supports incremental modernization without disrupting critical workloads.
- Role of Service Providers: The ISG report highlights the crucial role of service providers in enabling secure, phased transformation, combining AI with structured modernization practices to achieve faster business outcomes while maintaining control over operations.
- AI-Driven Workflows: The ISG report indicates that European enterprises are increasingly integrating generative AI (GenAI) into standardized workflows during mainframe modernization, utilizing AI-driven workflows built on deterministic engines to coordinate analysis, rule explanation, and test creation, thereby enhancing efficiency and accuracy.
- Data Sovereignty and Compliance: Organizations are placing greater emphasis on data sovereignty and regulatory demands during modernization, expecting clear evidence-based assurances regarding data storage locations, workload operations, and encryption key access, which enhances trust in AI platforms.
- Incremental Modernization Strategy: European enterprises are shifting from large-scale, one-time mainframe replacements to gradual, carefully managed modernization programs to reduce risk and maintain compliance, allowing core systems to remain stable while avoiding disruptions caused by a shortage of specialized skills.
- Cautious Human-AI Collaboration: While increasingly utilizing GenAI in mainframe modernization, enterprises are adopting a cautious approach, especially in critical systems, emphasizing human review and decision documentation at key stages to mitigate risks and ensure accuracy.
- Unified Data Platform: An increasing number of enterprises are adopting the Databricks platform, leveraging the Lakehouse architecture to unify data environments, addressing fragmentation and rising AI adoption costs, thereby enhancing decision-making efficiency and business responsiveness.
- Accelerated AI Integration: Organizations are utilizing Databricks' capabilities such as MLflow and Mosaic AI to expand AI from pilot programs to enterprise-wide deployments, significantly improving workflow efficiency and the effectiveness of data analytics, helping businesses tackle macroeconomic challenges.
- Strengthened Governance and Compliance: In the face of growing regulatory pressures, enterprises are implementing fine-grained access controls and data lineage tracking through Databricks to ensure compliance and accountability, while optimizing cloud resource usage and enhancing cost visibility.
- Critical Role of Service Providers: The ISG report highlights the essential role of service providers in helping organizations optimize Databricks capabilities, driving strategic goals in the integration of data, AI, and governance.
- Record Market Value: The global technology services market achieved a first-quarter annual contract value (ACV) of $39.4 billion, marking a 29% year-over-year increase, the highest growth rate in four years, indicating sustained demand for cloud and managed services that drives market expansion.
- AI-Driven Growth: ISG has raised its 2026 XaaS growth forecast to 25%, reflecting a surge in enterprise investment in AI infrastructure, which is expected to propel sustained growth in the coming years, particularly in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) sector.
- New AI Index Launch: The newly launched ISG AI Index reveals a significant impact of AI on technology services, with the overall index up 77% since the end of 2022, and IaaS soaring by 160%, indicating that AI is reshaping market dynamics and accelerating digital transformation for enterprises.
- Managed Services Recovery: After two quarters of decline, managed services rebounded with an ACV of $11.2 billion, up 3% year-over-year, while IT outsourcing (ITO) saw a slight dip; however, business process outsourcing (BPO) achieved a robust 62% growth, highlighting strong demand for industry-specific services.
- Significant Infrastructure Growth: Since its launch in December 2022, the ISG AI Index indicates that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has surged by 160%, demonstrating that AI technology is rapidly reshaping this sector and prompting companies to invest heavily in data center capacity to meet rising demand.
- Strong Software Performance: Software as a Service (SaaS) has seen a 53% increase during the same period, reflecting strong market demand for AI-driven solutions, while managed services have only grown by 0.3%, indicating that this area is still in the build-out phase with significant future potential.
- Robust Composite Index Performance: The ISG AI Index has risen by 77% since inception, reflecting the profound impact of AI on the global technology and business services industry, particularly in infrastructure where capital expenditures have increased by 265%, showcasing corporate confidence in future growth.
- Positive Future Outlook: ISG plans to include additional metrics in the next edition of the AI Index, such as AI sentiment, demand signals, and enterprise readiness, further revealing the impact of AI across various market segments and helping businesses better seize market opportunities.
- Earnings Announcement Date: Information Services Group (III) is set to announce its Q1 2023 earnings on April 16 before market open, with consensus EPS estimate at $0.07 (flat Y/Y) and revenue estimate at $60.8 million (+2% Y/Y).
- Historical Performance Review: Over the past two years, III has beaten EPS and revenue estimates 75% of the time, indicating a strong track record of financial performance and market confidence.
- Forecast Revision Dynamics: In the last three months, EPS estimates saw no upward revisions and one downward revision, while revenue estimates experienced one upward and two downward revisions, reflecting a cautious market outlook on the company's future performance.
- AI Business Growth Potential: The company aims for 50% of its revenue to come from AI-related business through a dedicated acceleration unit and ongoing business expansion, highlighting its strategic positioning in the rapidly growing AI market.






