Frequently Asked Questions
The Tercera 30 is an annual research report that identifies the top 30 software ecosystems that offer the greatest opportunity for IT services firms to build, scale, and grow a channel-led business.
Tercera publishes the list to help founders and leaders of technology services firms understand where the best partner opportunities lie and how the software ecosystem landscape is evolving. It reflects Tercera’s ongoing commitment to advancing the AI and tech services sector through research and insight.
The report is designed primarily for founders and leaders of services and services-as-software firms, but it is also useful for software partner leaders, investors, bankers and analysts tracking ecosystem trends and growth potential.
The Tercera 30 is published annually. Each year’s list changes to reflect new technologies, shifts in software vendor strategy, and emerging market demand for services.
Services firms can use the report to identify promising software ecosystems to align with, benchmark their partner strategy, and anticipate how platform and services demand will evolve in the next one to two years. Picking the right software partner to build around is based on many factors, but the Tercera 30 is a good place to start.
This year’s report introduces new company categories, incorporates expanded data sources, and places greater emphasis on AI’s impact on partner ecosystems. It also integrates a new qualitative research process that includes AI-enabled interviews and a survey of more than 300 technology services firms. There are six new firms introduced to the list that weren’t on last year’s list.
The 2025–2026 report replaces “Challengers” with “Market Builders” to better reflect the changing technology landscape. Many software companies are now choosing to remain private. The new structure enables us to group companies around the maturity of their ecosystems rather than their ownership status.
Tercera evaluates more than 200 partner-friendly vendors annually, narrowing the list to 30 based on a combination of quantitative scoring and qualitative insights from industry data, interviews, and surveys.
Vendors are assessed across four weighted areas: market size and potential (15%), brand and growth potential (35%), potential for external services (35%), and qualitative market insights (15%).
In addition to financial and market data, Tercera uses interviews with software executives and enterprise buyers, proprietary survey data from 321 IT services firms, and input from analysts, bankers, and other third-party research sources.
No. The Tercera 30 is not a ranked list. It is a curated selection of the most promising software ecosystems based on their growth outlook and services potential. We’re not trying to be Gartner here.
AI played a bigger role in data collection and analysis, but it was paired with significant human oversight and creativity. Tercera used Bridgetown Research’s agentic research platform to conduct AI-assisted interviews and to help analyze the resulting structured and unstructured data. This process enabled us to look at a broader group of players.
Market Anchors are large, mature ecosystems with established partner programs. Market Movers are fast-growing vendors with evolving ecosystems. Market Builders are higher-growth, earlier-stage ecosystems with significant potential for first-mover partners.
Six major trends define this year’s landscape: the rise of AI agents, data’s central role in the AI era, Systems of Record defending their turf, the convergence of services and software, the revenue advantage of a vertical focus, and accelerating M&A across the software and services.
While 2024 emphasized cloud maturity, verticalization, and ecosystem diversification, the 2025–2026 report marks a shift toward AI enablement, data-centric growth, and consolidation. Many 2024 patterns persist, but the locus of opportunity has moved from cloud infrastructure to AI and data platforms.
AI is creating new categories of services around agentic solutions, data integration, and governance, while also blurring the line between software and services. Partners that combine AI fluency with domain expertise are best positioned to win. For more on this, read our recent report, A New Services Playbook for the AI Era.
While the best opportunities right now appear to be in the data platforms that underlie AI, the future of tech services will be defined by adaptability and innovation. The firms that thrive will build multi-ecosystem strategies, balance human and machine intelligence, and help clients safely scale AI across business processes.
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