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 vendor 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 each Fall. 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 with which to align, 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 or partners to build around is based on many factors, but the Tercera 30 is a good place to start.
This year saw the biggest shift in names, categories, and methodology yet. AI drove that evolution on several fronts: it enabled us to evaluate a larger pool of contenders across three times as many signals, disrupted the way software and services companies partner, and made data and domain expertise more important than ever. All of this has prompted new categories, 11 changes to who’s on the list, and several notable shifts between categories. We are also sharing our Anchors in Tercera 30 Score order for the first time.
Tercera evaluated nearly 300 partner-friendly public and private vendors in 2026 and narrowed the list to 30 based on a combination of quantitative scoring and qualitative insights from industry data, interviews, and surveys.
Anchors are large, AI-forward vendors around which to build a dedicated mid-size services business. Domain Leaders are modern, scalable platforms around which to build a large, domain-focused services business. Builders are partner-forward data and AI vendors that collectively play an increasingly critical role in enterprise AI strategies. Each category represents different types of services opportunities.
We evaluated 18 structured and unstructured scoring signals supported by 30 underlying data points to formalize the Tercera 30 Score, a composite score from 0 to 10 based on five weighted pillars: market opportunity; growth quality; AI readiness and product investment; services opportunity; and Tercera conviction. Collectively, the pillars help us look beyond growth and focus on where services firms have the strongest opportunity to build lasting value.
No single source tells the whole story, which is why we collect and cross-check various data points. In addition to financial and third-party market data, Tercera uses interviews with software executives and enterprise buyers, a proprietary survey of 378 IT services firms, and input from analysts, bankers, and other third-party research sources.
The Tercera 30 was never intended to be a ranked list but rather a curated selection of the most promising software ecosystems around which to build a growing services business. However, for the first time this year, we list the Anchors in order based on their Tercera 30 Score. Actual scores will continue to remain proprietary and available only to our portfolio companies and advisory clients.
AI continues to play a powerful role in data collection and analysis, enabling us to quickly evaluate a broader group of players and significantly more inputs into the Tercera 30 Score. However, some data points require manual collection and human judgment is paramount to the process. Our experts and advisors contribute meaningfully to the evaluation, make judgments on the quality of evidence, and ultimately have the final say on who makes the list and who doesn’t.
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