Multicloud Managed Services Providers

Multicloud Managed Services Providers is an old category name. Forrester's last edition under it is The Forrester Wave: Multicloud Managed Services Providers, Q1 2023, and the research stream that replaced it merged this market with application modernization into one evaluation. The Q1 2023 scorecard is this article's subject.

The final edition under this name: The Forrester Wave: Multicloud Managed Services Providers, Q1 2023

The Q1 2023 Wave evaluated eleven providers on twenty nine criteria: Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, HCLTech, IBM, Infosys, NTT DATA, Rackspace Technology, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro.

Five Leaders surfaced publicly: Tata Consultancy Services, Accenture, HCLTech, Infosys, and Deloitte. Five Strong Performers: Capgemini, Wipro, NTT DATA, IBM, and Cognizant.

The differentiators of that era were the ones the next category would absorb: breadth of capabilities from advisory through operations, the ability to invest in capability expansion, and deep hyperscaler partnerships and certifications.

What the Leader citations actually were

TCS took the top Current Offering ranking, praised for balanced application and infrastructure strengths, operational prowess, FinOps expertise, and its Cloud Exponence platform. The FinOps detail is the one that aged best: cloud cost management became the category's center of gravity within two years.

HCLTech's Leader placement ran on its Cloud SMART suite, dedicated hyperscaler business units, managed services competency across the top hyperscaler programs, and a vision built around network architecture and security.

Infosys was cited for its long-standing cloud management technology and its Cobalt program, positioned as a fit for migration and modernization partnerships.

The 2023 leaderboard was a maturity picture: the firms that had built productized cloud management, FinOps, hyperscaler-certified delivery factories, rather than staffing-and-billing shops. The tier column measured who had industrialized the multicloud operation.

The 2020 baseline and the trajectory

The Q4 2020 edition, the market's first under this name, evaluated eleven providers on twenty four criteria, with Leaders Deloitte, Accenture, Rackspace Technology, Infosys, and Capgemini.

Set the two editions side by side and the movement is the story. Rackspace fell out of the Leaders between editions, the pure-play cloud specialist outrun by the global firms' investment capacity. TCS rose into the top spot from the 2020 Strong Performer band. The category was consolidating toward the firms that could fund hyperscaler-grade delivery factories, and the 2023 scorecard recorded the result.

The hyperscaler partnership point deserves emphasis, because it is the market's real gate. The 2023 differentiators, deep hyperscaler partnerships and certifications, were not marketing badges. They were the operational permission to run managed services inside AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud programs at the top tier, and the firms without that permission were structurally capped no matter how good their engineers were. The tier column in 2023 is, in effect, a ranking of who the hyperscalers allowed to scale.

Where the market went

The successor evaluation is The Forrester Wave: Application Modernization And Multicloud Managed Services, Q1 2025, which merged this category with Forrester's application modernization and migration services research. The combined Wave scored fifteen vendors against twenty five criteria.

The merger's announcement makes the reasoning plain: modernization and managed services stopped being two purchases, because the same firms now sell the migration and the operation as one engagement.

The combined edition's tiers carry the continuity and the verdict. Six Leaders: Accenture, TCS, Infosys, Capgemini, HCLTech, and Cognizant. Six Strong Performers: IBM, Wipro, NTT DATA, EPAM, Deloitte, and Tech Mahindra. Three Contenders: LTIMindtree, Virtusa, and Mphasis. Deloitte, a 2023 Leader, fell to Strong Performer in the merged scorecard, while Capgemini and Cognizant climbed.

The merged field is also bigger than the old one, fifteen vendors against eleven, because the merger pulled in the application modernization specialists, EPAM, Tech Mahindra, LTIMindtree, Virtusa, Mphasis, that never appeared in the operations-only scorecard. The old name's market did not disappear. It was absorbed into a larger arena, and the vendors who only played the operations game now compete against firms that play the transformation game too.

What the old scorecard still tells you

The honest limitation is the merger itself. The Q1 2023 scorecard grades multicloud operations as a standalone purchase, and that purchase barely exists anymore. Its criteria, breadth, investment capacity, hyperscaler certifications, are still the right questions, but they are now asked inside a modernization engagement, and the merged scorecard is the current map.

Eleven providers, five confirmed Leaders, and a tier table whose middle was never fully public. This article names what was confirmed and nothing beyond it, and the record's thinness is itself worth noting: an operations market this large kept most of its placements quiet.

The old name's final edition is best read as the roster of the multicloud operations market at its peak of independence, the moment before operations was absorbed into transformation.

Three questions for the merged market

Which engagement are you actually buying: operation or transformation? The merger means the answer may be both, but the old scorecard graded one and the new one grades the other. Know which column applies to your contract before you benchmark it.

Where is the FinOps line in the SOW? TCS's 2023 citation aged the best, because cost management became the category's center. Ask for the FinOps deliverables, savings targets, and the mechanism that returns them to your budget.

What happened to your account team in the merger? The firms that absorbed this market reorganized around modernization engagements. Ask which team runs your estate now, and whether the names you signed still exist in the new structure.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

See also Modern Application Development Services, where to even be scored in this category a firm needs at least four hundred fifty million dollars in global application development revenue, which tells you the smallest name on this Wave is still a giant.

The nearest existing coverage on this site is Application Modernization And Multicloud Managed Services: forrester merged two evaluations, modernizing software and running it afterward, because customers already preferred a single supplier across both by a four to one margin. A quieter customer fear explains why some buyers still resist that combination.

The related category on this site is Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure. The five Leaders in Gartner's 2025 quadrant didn't change from the year before, but Broadcom's VMware licensing shakeup did, and Nutanix's second straight Leader placement is the market's answer to who benefits.