Information Services Group Inc. (III) Business
This page reproduces the company's own Item 1 Business text from the linked SEC filing. It is filer text, not grepcent analysis, scoring, or investment advice.
Informational only - not investment advice. See Disclaimer.
Item 1. Business
Unless the context otherwise requires, Information Services Group, Inc., the registrant, is referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025 (the “Form 10-K”) as the “Company,” “ISG”, “we,” “us” and “our.”
Our Company
Information Services Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: III) is a global AI-centered technology research and advisory firm. A trusted partner to more than 900 clients, including 75 of the world’s top 100 enterprises, ISG is a long-time leader in technology and business services that is now at the forefront of leveraging AI to help organizations achieve operational excellence and faster growth. The firm, founded in 2006, is known for its proprietary market data and research, in-depth knowledge and governance of provider ecosystems, and the expertise of its approximately 1,500 professionals worldwide working together to help clients maximize the value of their technology investments. For more information, visit www.isg-one.com. The content on our website is available for informational purposes only. It should not be relied upon for investment purposes, nor is it incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10 K or any other filings.
Our Company was founded with the strategic vision to become a leading, high-growth provider of information-based advisory services. We continue to believe that our vision will be realized through the acquisition, integration and successful operation of market-leading brands within the data, analytics and advisory industry.
Our private and public sector clients continue to face significant technological, business and economic challenges that we believe will fuel demand for the professional services we provide. We are focused on providing unique solutions that solve key client problems. In the private sector, for example, we believe that companies will continue to face significant challenges associated with globalization and technological innovation, including the need to decrease operating costs, increase efficiencies, compete against new market entrants and evaluate and adopt increasing numbers of emerging and transformational technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Similarly, public sector organizations at the national, regional and local levels increasingly must deal with the complex and converging issues of outdated technology systems, reduced budgets and an aging workforce.
Overall, we believe the global marketplace dynamics at work in both the private and public sectors support growing demand for the professional services, analytics, platforms and advice ISG can provide. In this dynamic environment, the strength of our client relationships greatly depends on the quality of our advice and insight, our unique and valuable datasets, the independence of our thought leadership and the effectiveness of our people in assisting our clients to implement strategies that successfully address their most pressing operational challenges.
We are organized as a corporation under the laws of the State of Delaware. The current mailing address of the Company’s principal executive office is Information Services Group, Inc., 400 Atlantic Street, Stamford, CT 06901. Our telephone number is (203) 517-3100.
Our Services
ISG is a leading global provider of digital transformation and technology advisory services, helping organizations optimize performance, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation. Our expertise spans sourcing advisory, cloud and data analytics, managed governance and risk services, network and software advisory, technology strategy and operations design, change management, and market intelligence. We serve both private- and public-sector clients across the globe, supporting them through periods of expansion, consolidation, and transformation. By combining functional domain expertise with extensive empirical data and proprietary market intelligence, we enable clients to make informed strategic decisions and achieve measurable business outcomes.
The Company’s operating model is designed to extend our market leadership, enhance growth opportunities, and deliver long-term value to all stakeholders. We believe that our services address clients’ most critical priorities—advancing their digital transformation journeys and maximizing the return on their digital investments. To meet these needs, ISG operates through two global client solution areas: ISG Digital, which focuses on developing technology, transformation, sourcing, and digital solutions; and ISG Enterprise, which helps clients manage change and optimize core operations across information technology, finance, human resources, and training.
Our core solutions are supported by ISG Research, which provides extensive market analyses, provider evaluations, and data-driven insights; the ISG Network and Software Advisory portfolio; and our proprietary digital platforms—ISG GovernX®, ISG Inform™, and ISG Tango—that enable clients to improve supplier management, benchmark operational performance, and accelerate sourcing decisions. These offerings are increasingly enhanced with AI capabilities that deliver automation, analytics, and decision support across engagements. We continue to expand our industry-specific expertise in areas such as banking, insurance, and smart manufacturing.
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Every client engagement leverages our Solution Hub, which integrates ISG’s global knowledge base, tools, and intellectual property to deliver tailored solutions. Engagements are executed through our ISG iFlex™ global delivery model, which enables the efficient deployment of resources worldwide, ensuring consistent quality, scalability, and responsiveness across time zones and geographies.
Our Competitive Advantages
We believe that ISG’s long-term strategy is supported by the following set of durable competitive advantages that reinforce our market position and ability to execute effectively:
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| ● | Independence and Objectivity ISG operates solely as a technology and business advisory firm, maintaining independence from vendors and service providers. This objectivity allows us to deliver unbiased, fact-based advice that aligns with client interests and supports long-term trusted-advisor relationships. |
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| ● | Proprietary Data Assets and Market Intelligence With over 30 years of benchmarking and sourcing experience, ISG has built a proprietary data repository encompassing millions of real-world data points. These assets inform our advisory, research, and platform solutions, enabling clients to make informed, data-driven decisions and benchmark performance against industry peers. |
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| ● | Deep Domain and Industry Expertise Our consultants bring an average of more than 20 years of experience across technology, operations, and industry domains. This depth of expertise allows ISG to address complex digital transformation challenges and deliver customized, high-impact solutions. |
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| ● | Recognized Brand and Integrated Solutions ISG is recognized globally as a leading advisory firm in digital transformation and technology research. Our integrated service portfolio—spanning sourcing, strategy, analytics, governance, and change management—strengthens our client relationships and enhances our brand equity. |
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| ● | Global Reach and Scalable Delivery Model Through our presence across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, ISG delivers consistent, high-quality service worldwide. Our iFlex™ delivery model and Solution Hub enable scalable execution, agile resourcing, and seamless collaboration across geographies and time zones. |
We believe the above strengths are central to our ability to successfully advise and support our clients to address any business challenge.
Our Strategy
ISG’s current strategy is to extend our global market leadership in digital transformation advisory by deepening our data, platform, and AI-enabled capabilities while broadening our recurring revenue base.
Key priorities are as follows:
Continue to Build on our Proprietary Data Sets and Market Intelligence.
Our key strength lies in the information, data, analytics, methods, and other intellectual property that we own. This foundation ensures our operational assessments, strategy planning, deal structuring, negotiations, and other advisory services remain truly independent. With each project, we aim to expand and refine our intellectual property, offering an ever-growing and distinctive source of information, data, and analytics for our clients.
We use nearly 10 million real-world data points from benchmarking and sourcing contracts to enhance our advisory, benchmarking, and platform processes, giving us a unique advantage that's hard to duplicate. Our proprietary intellectual property is safeguarded by various legal and contractual measures. We are committed to protecting its value and enforcing our rights whenever necessary. Consequently, we have established rigorous policies and procedures for the ownership, usage, and protection of intellectual property across all parties, including our employees.
In today's AI-driven digital marketplace, ISG Research assists enterprises in addressing emerging challenges, preparing for future opportunities, and maintaining a competitive advantage. ISG Research specializes in facilitating connections between technology buyers and sellers, including major services, cloud, and software providers. Our advisory services provide ISG Research with a comprehensive
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view of the technology and sourcing landscape. Our research encompasses traditional analyst coverage as well as direct feedback from market practitioners working with some of the largest enterprise clients on their transformation initiatives.
ISG monitors over 180,000 unique technology service contracts and annually evaluates more than 4,000 service and software providers, offering valuable insights into pricing, capabilities, and provider stability. When large organizations seek to assess potential partners, they rely on ISG Research for thorough evaluations of capabilities, pricing structures, breadth of offerings, and historical performance. With rapid advancements in technology, particularly artificial intelligence, ISG Research is well-equipped to guide enterprises in avoiding trends driven by hype and focusing on meaningful outcomes. Additionally, ISG Research supports providers in navigating the marketplace through market intelligence, client retention programs, pursuit assessments, and client satisfaction benchmarking.
Continue to Invest in and Scale “Platform-Enabled” Solutions.
We continue to develop and enhance our portfolio of platforms, namely ISG GovernX, ISG Tango and ISG Inform, which are critical to our delivery model.
ISG GovernX®. We continue to expand our Supplier and Contract Management capabilities powered by our GovernX® platform, a recognized vendor compliance and risk management solution. This offering provides clients with a strategic and disciplined approach to supplier relationships and large contract management. Our suite of offerings includes supplier performance improvement, reducing spending, third-party risk mitigation and supplier-based management. Based on ISG’s 25 years of managing relationships on behalf of clients, we have a robust dataset that enables us to partner with clients to deliver improvements to their business processes and to benchmark the performance of their operations against the broader market. GovernX leverages AI to support automation across the management of third-party supplier relationships, including contract and project lifecycles and risk management. Enterprises leverage the platform to deliver more value from their outsourcing spend. GovernX users can manage new contracts and proactive renewals, make timely amendments and handle contract terminations on one platform. The platform integrates with enterprise applications, such as ServiceNow, and is connected to ISG Research offerings, including contract benchmarks, assessments and total-cost-of-ownership evaluations. Additionally, GovernX clients can mitigate supply chain risks and support business continuity through integrated data feeds and real-time alerts.
ISG Tango. Our ISG Tango sourcing platform is an AI-embedded solution that enables enterprises and public sector organizations to quickly evaluate business requirements, identify desired outcomes, accelerate provider identification and selection, collaborate with providers on developing the right solution. Through our advisory and platform-enabled sourcing work, we influence billions of total contract value each year across services, software and cloud.
ISG Inform. We continue to invest in ISG Inform™ 2.0, an enhanced version of our data-as-a-service solution that provides benchmarking capability to track digital transformation and application development maturity and performance against industry peers. ISG Inform 2.0 provides a quantified view of the health of the user’s enterprise IT landscape through a series of easy-to-read visual dashboards that display key performance indicators for infrastructure, applications and digital capabilities compared with industry peers. Data and insights are drawn from the ISG total cost of ownership and sourcing databases.
Preserve and Expand Our Market Share Positions.
We expect the trend toward operational efficiency led by accelerating adoption of AI-based technologies to play an increasing role in the demand for our services. We plan to leverage our proprietary operating platform (Tango) to serve the growing number of private and public sector organizations utilizing outside advisors when undertaking cost optimization and transformation programs. We are focused on growing our existing client base by offering integrated solutions that combine our multiple services and capabilities. In addition, leveraging Tango and our iFlex global delivery capability, we will continue to expand our market reach to address the underserved, middle-market clients.
Expand “Recurring Revenue Streams.”
Our recurring revenue streams include such annuity-based ISG offerings as ISG GovernX, ISG Research Lens, ISG Inform and multi-year Public Sector contracts. All are characterized by subscriptions (i.e., renewal-centric as opposed to project-centric revenue streams) or multi-year contracts. As companies begin to recognize the importance of managing the post-sourcing transaction period, managed services have emerged as a revenue driver for the Company, with our offerings delivered through multi-year-managed services contracts. We believe that our experience with outsourcing transactions and software implementation initiatives makes us uniquely equipped to provide research insight and direct support to help our clients manage their transformational projects or act as a third-party administrator. We will continue to pursue opportunities to leverage our experience to make research and managed services an even greater revenue generator for us. The U.S. public sector, particularly state governments, local municipalities and higher education, presents a significant opportunity for ISG. Systems are typically outdated, maintenance is expensive and the workforce charged with maintenance is aging. There is a need to refurbish systems to reduce the cost of operations (particularly because governments’ tax revenues are under pressure). We
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believe we are well positioned as a third-party, objective advisor with no affiliation to the software providers. ISG will continue to invest in the evolution of these services, with an aim to drive increased AI adoption, greater profitability and even more value for our clients.
Scale Our Emerging Services.
We seek to evolve our capabilities and offerings to align to the constantly evolving technology landscape and the future needs of our clients. ISG invests in a portfolio of future offerings with the objective of evolving our service portfolio and relationships with clients further into AI-centered Advisory, Organizational Change Management (OCM), Training-as-a-Service (TaaS) and Software Advisory. These are all areas in which we are investing in an attempt to drive increased revenue and expand client relationships.
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| 1. | AI Advisory Services: ISG partners with clients throughout their AI adoption journey, providing comprehensive assessments of opportunities and readiness across data, talent, operating models, security, and responsible-AI frameworks. We develop multi-year strategic roadmaps encompassing governance, milestones, and value objectives. ISG’s AI Advisory offers unbiased procurement guidance and access to a targeted network of AI platforms and specialized implementation partners, as well as optimization of legacy services and external contracts for enhanced AI-driven efficiency. Implementation is overseen through rigorous program management that monitors key performance indicators (KPIs), risks, and controls; progress, realized value, and recommended next steps are communicated to management via regular dashboards and board-level updates. |
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| 2. | Organizational Change Management (OCM): ISG offers OCM services designed to help clients align their organizations with the overall transformation journey, a role that becomes even more vital as AI-enabled change expands the scope of business process and workforce transformation. Our approach reduces uncertainty, resistance and costly turnover by focusing on stakeholder management, targeted communications, organizational alignment, and training enablement. We establish a clear organizational baseline—mapping structure, spans, layers, and roles—then design the target operating model to support technology programs, clarifying changes to structure, roles, decision rights, incentives and performance measures. Our comprehensive change plans cover stakeholder engagement, communications, leadership alignment, capability building, training and adoption support. We drive adoption with ISG’s change pillars: leadership alignment, stakeholder management, targeted communications, customized learning and training (including TaaS), culture and employee experience work, and disciplined project delivery—supported by a digital OCM platform and change analytics to monitor sentiment and risk. Adoption and behavior change are tracked against defined KPIs and milestones, with resistance addressed early, and we provide periodic dashboards and board-level communications on progress, outcomes and next steps. |
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| 3. | Training-as-a-Service (TaaS): ISG provides TaaS and outsourced managed learning services designed for organizations that need custom learning content and digital learning platforms but have limited resources. These organizations often require ongoing training solutions to support a workforce that is constantly changing. ISG’s TaaS uses agile methods and rapid content development tools to quickly produce training materials, while digital adoption platforms (DAP) help integrate learning into daily work routines. Services on offer include training advice, analysis, strategic planning, custom content creation, delivery support, learning software subscriptions, administration, and assessment. |
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| 4. | Software Advisory: ISG Software Advisory partners with clients to optimize their strategic software suppliers and ecosystem by leveraging market insights, research analytics, and deep expertise to validate architecture, requirements, bill of materials, utilization, and compliance. We advise across the full software lifecycle—including strategy and architecture validation, provider selection and contracting, deployment and adoption, renewals and governance. Our approach helps reduce costs, manage software assets, mitigate compliance risks, and resolve audit issues. We support major independent software vendor (ISV) negotiations and enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernization, optimize IaaS/PaaS commitments and cloud financials, and reduce audit exposure through robust software asset management. Additionally, our advisory connects clients to buyer guides presenting a point of view on top providers by subsegment, enabling faster, lower-risk decisions and sustained value realization from software investments. |
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| 5. | ISG Network: ISG streamlines enterprise network solutions, addressing growing demands for technologies like SD-WAN, SD-LAN, SD security, 5G, UCaaS, and CCaaS that are essential for digital transformation. As clients seek secure, scalable, and efficient networks amid rising complexity and Internet of Things (IoT) expansion, ISG Network Select helps them quickly identify optimal solutions with up-to-date vendor data and insights for better pricing negotiations. |
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Preserve Our Financial Positions.
As the Company pursues new growth strategies, we remain committed to maintaining a strong financial foundation with both flexibility and liquidity. Our main priorities for available cash are investing in growth, paying dividends, buying back shares, and lowering debt. We expect our healthy cash flow and stable balance sheet to continue supporting the firm's long-term business strategy.
Deepen Industry Expertise.
We remain committed to enhancing our market-facing organization through continued investment, aiming to drive revenue growth while delivering comprehensive services to clients spanning approximately 20 industries. We have designated nine global sectors—Banking and Financial Services, Consumer Services, Energy and Utilities, Health Sciences, Insurance, Manufacturing, Media and Technology Software and Services, Public Sector, and Private Equity—as priorities for focused account leadership and in-depth solutions.
Consider Acquisitions and Other Growth Opportunities.
The business services, information, and advisory market is characterized by considerable fragmentation. Our established market leadership and strong brand recognition position us advantageously to grow through strategic acquisitions and other expansion opportunities. Integrating firms that offer complementary services and products would enable us to enhance and diversify our service portfolio as well as deepen our domain expertise. We will evaluate and may actively pursue joint ventures, mergers, and acquisitions with other organizations.
Our Proprietary Data Assets and Market Intelligence
One of our core assets is the information, data, analytics, methodologies and other intellectual property we possess. This intellectual property underpins the independent nature of our operational assessments, strategy development, deal structuring, negotiation and other consulting services we provide to our clients.
With each engagement we conduct, we enhance both the quantity and quality of the intellectual property we employ on behalf of our clients, thus providing a continuous, evolving and unique source of information, data and analytics.
This intellectual property is proprietary, and we rely on multiple legal and contractual provisions and devices to protect our intellectual property rights. We recognize the value of our intellectual property and vigorously defend it. As a result, we maintain strict policies and procedures regarding ownership, use and protection of our intellectual property with all parties, including our employees.
Clients
We operate in over 20 countries and across numerous industries. Our private sector clients operate primarily in the manufacturing, banking and financial services, insurance, health sciences, energy and utilities and consumer services industries. Our private sector clients are primarily large businesses ranked in the Forbes Global 2000 companies annually. Our public sector clients are primarily state and local governments (cities and counties) and authorities (airport and transit) in the United States and national and provincial government units in the United Kingdom, Italy and Australia.
Competition
Competition in the sourcing, data, information and advisory market is primarily driven by independence and objectivity, expertise, possession of relevant benchmarking data, breadth of service capabilities, reputation and price. We compete with other sourcing advisors, research firms, strategy consultants and sourcing service providers. A significant number of independent sourcing and advisory firms offer similar services to us. We believe we set ourselves apart with our data repository of recent, comparable transactions and benchmarking data, our depth of experience and our sourcing and technology implementation expertise, all of which are critical to implementing and managing successful transformation projects for business and governments.
Employees
As of December 31, 2025, we employed 1,290 people worldwide, of which 1,254 are full-time employees.
Our employee base includes executive management, service leads, partners, directors, advisors, analysts, technical specialists and functional support staff.
We recruit advisors from service providers and consulting firms with direct operational experience. These advisors leverage extensive practical expertise derived from experiences in corporate leadership, consulting, research, financial analysis, contract negotiations and operational service delivery.
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All employees are required to execute confidentiality, conflict of interest and intellectual property agreements as a condition of employment. There are no collective bargaining agreements covering any of our employees.
Our voluntary advisor turnover rate has ranged between 11% and 13% over the last three years.
Human Capital Management
ISG strives to employ the brightest, most innovative people in the industry, so that we can provide world-class solutions to our clients. Employees at ISG are anchored in our core values, which include trust, integrity, respect, passion, entrepreneurship, balance and mentorship.
Our almost 1,300 employees, located in over 20 countries with more than one-fourth in the United States, perform a variety of different roles. We are participants in the competitive research and advisory industries. Attracting, developing and retaining talented people in advisory, research and other positions is critical to executing on our strategy. Our ability to compete effectively depends upon a number of factors, including learning opportunities, compensation/benefits, work environment, career opportunities and a culture of inclusivity. To make this happen, we have certain programs, training, policies and practices in place, including the following:
ISG WorkLife
We have also introduced ISG WorkLife, which is a series of progressive, best practice, Next-Gen HR offerings designed to improve the quality of our employees’ work-life experience, while helping us achieve our firm-wide objectives. ISG believes this will help us attract and retain productive talent. Some of the key offerings here include:
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| ● | ISG Cares, our enhanced volunteering program, which, among other things, provides employees paid time off to attend to charitable pursuits. |
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| ● | ISG Academy, our global learning and development program. |
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| ● | ISG Aspire, our global mentoring program. |
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| ● | ISG iRefer, which allows the Company to attract talent through employee referrals, for which employees may earn referral bonuses. |
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| ● | ISG iTime, which provides flexible paid time off arrangements for employees in certain countries. |
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| ● | ISG Brand Ambassador, which highlights and encourages our people’s community support and charitable pursuits while elevating the firm’s global brand. |
We understand that employees have varied interests both in and outside of the workplace. These programs, and others under ISG WorkLife, provide employees with the opportunity to pursue these activities. This allows us to attract and retain productive employees and enhance diverse perspectives.
Learning
ISG’s success depends on the knowledge and productivity of our employees. To that end, the Company invests a significant amount of time and money into providing development opportunities. Our ISG Academy is robust in offering learning in such topics specific to the employee’s industry and functional areas, leadership and people management, certifications and software and technical skills, among others. In 2025, substantially all learning and development activities were delivered virtually. Our digital certified professionals participated in more than 20,000 aggregate training hours across various programs, representing an average of approximately 15 hours of training per professional devoted to learning and development during the year.
Available Information
Our Internet address is www.isg-one.com. The content on our website is available for informational purposes only. It should not be relied upon for investment purposes, nor is it incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any other filings. We make available through our Internet website under the link titled “Investors” our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K, including any amendments or exhibits thereto, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file any such materials with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). Copies of our key corporate governance documents, including our Code of Ethics and Business Conduct for Directors, Officers and Employees, Corporate Governance Guidelines and charters for our Audit Committee, our Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee and our Compensation Committee, are also on our website. Stockholders may request free copies of these documents, including our Annual Report to Stockholders, by writing to Information Services Group, Inc., 400 Atlantic Street, Stamford, CT 06901, Attention: Michael A. Sherrick, or by calling (203) 517-3100.
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Our annual and quarterly reports and other information statements are also available to the public through the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov.