Impact of COVID-19

How confident are you that you can keep utilization of your servers high? If very confident, then a server-based model can be cheapest, especially if you're confident enough to make a commitment. If not, then PAYG is less risky from a financial perspective – you can grow and shrink as needs dictate, paying only for what you use. COVID-19 has shown that even the best forecasts can't predict everything.

Investors have already basically dismissed the impact so far of the global COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying recession, which stands as the sharpest economic downturn since World War II. Instead, they have been busy piling into the stocks of the companies they expect to profit from a snap-back in tech spending in the coming months.

Using key data points from 451 Research's CPaaS Market Monitor and Voice of the Enterprise: Coronavirus Flash Survey June 2020, we look at how the crisis is influencing the digitalization of the customer experience, and how this could result in increased demand for embedded real-time communications and long-term growth for the CPaaS segment.

With COVID-19 raging and the world's economy in freefall, tech dealmakers struggled to get anything done in Q2. The results for the first full quarter of the public health crisis-turned-economic recession showed that coronavirus basically wiped out a decade's worth of healthy growth in the multibillion-dollar tech M&A market.

In this report, we discuss the state of the installment payments sector in the US and offer our take on the potential acquirers that could consolidate the market, and the targets they are likely to pursue.

In this report, we focus on the potential for M&A across the virtual communications landscape, while in parts 2 and 3 of this series, we examine the people management stack, and the potential for tooling at the empowered edge.

Amid a steep drop in the tech M&A market, purchases of companies with machine learning (ML) capabilities continue to rise. ML's popularity was growing before the COVID-19 outbreak and our surveys suggest that the illness could accelerate adoption.

Our Voice of the Enterprise: Coronavirus Flash Survey June 2020, conducted in late May and early June, gives vendors in the monitoring market reason to hope for sustained demand as digital engagement has spiked in overall importance, likely forever so.

The words ‘COVID-19’ and ‘coronavirus’ have appeared in the records of only about 150 tech transactions so far this year in 451 Research's M&A KnowledgeBase. That's slightly less than one of every 10 prints, a surprisingly small portion of deals given how broadly and deeply our work and our lives have been hit by the outbreak.

The nature of work is changing and, due to the impacts of COVID-19, organizations are adapting to the world of remote work.

Earlier this week, the S&P 500 Index reclaimed the ground it lost as life got locked last spring because of the coronavirus pandemic. The head-spinning rebound in the equity market came faster than virtually anyone thought it would.

Given that we conducted the Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse, Budgets & Outlook survey toward the end of 2019, the results regarding IT spending plans do not incorporate a COVID-19 perspective on IT spending.

Enterprises should focus on scenario analysis and planning and prepare to make rapid decisions as the situation evolves.

Not all businesses have reopened their doors, but Wall Street is certainly humming again. Investors have unreservedly bid up stocks to nearly their pre-pandemic levels and have shown themselves ready to load up on some of the riskier paper out there, IPOs. Shares of sales and marketing software vendor ZoomInfo priced above expectations and then surged some 70% in their debut Thursday.

The COVID-19 outbreak and the sudden need to support a distributed workforce with employees working from home during the quarantine has placed the spotlight on enterprise collaboration and communications.

Many things change during a crisis, necessitating unique and rapid responses. More automation technology vendors are rising to the call by offering their rapid process automation development technologies, applications and even skills free of charge.

In contrast to most other sectors, DC REITs have not withdrawn their annual revenue and profitability guidance. On balance, major datacenter REITs see steady growth ahead and maintained their capital spending plans for the year.

The need to provide a safe environment that complies with new requlation will make the use of voice and contactless interfaces more compelling, driving workplace adoption of voice user interfaces, intelligent assistants and biometric authentication.

Our analysis shows that contactless cards have seen promising early results in the US. We anticipate that this momentum will be furthered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has quickly positioned proximity payments as the most sanitary way to pay.

Spending on datacenter infrastructure is booming, fueled by pent-up demand for technology upgrades and capacity expansions after a temporary lull in the first half of 2019. The effects of the pandemic further accelerated this trend.

As the world is gripped by the COVID-19 crisis, questions have arisen about what this means for providers of digital services, including cloud infrastructure, communications and higher-level software platform services.

As COVID-19 confinements are gradually lifted worldwide, and activities outside people's homes start to resume, how can we make sure that infection downtrends are not reversed, and people are safe?

451 Research's Workforce Productivity and Collaboration team put on our thinking caps and came up with 20 trends, across three main themes where we expect change to happen: the emergence of a new people management stack, growing emphasis on virtual engagements, and more empowerment at the workforce edge.

Our Coronavirus Flash Survey March 2020 showed how enterprises are responding to the drastic changes the COVID-19 pandemic is causing.

In times of uncertainty, common global threats historically have often been – and likely will continue to be – justification to amass and analyze yet even more personal data.

Since coronavirus has shut down almost all commerce that requires a physical presence, from retail stores to restaurants to sporting events, for most businesses digital properties represent the only potential for revenue.

We expect that the COVID-19 impact on cloud-native technologies will end up, in aggregate, to be positive. The 'cloud' sits strategically at the top of the list of IT technologies viewed as most transformative, and any work in progress is prone to acceleration, not retrenchment, for those for whom the short-term negatives of COVID-19 can and will be absorbed.

The sudden shift to large-scale remote work and social distancing has also taken a toll on human resources (HR) and the people function as well.

The importance of being ready to respond to the latest changes, not only in the market but in the broader world, has never been clearer than amid the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The use of data and analytics is already a key differentiator between leaders and laggards across multiple industries. The current coronavirus crisis, and the way in which enterprises respond to it, will likely exacerbate the distance between the 'haves' and 'have-nots.'

Will technology industry conferencing and travel practices be permanently reshaped, or will they ultimately revert to the volume and velocity of activities that were tried (and tired) from the BC (Before Coronavirus) age.

The shift to mass remote work will likely expose how much work across the enterprise has been stitched together based on assumptions, tradition, conversations, meetings and siloed tools giving very imperfect information, as well as...

The Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse, Coronavirus Flash survey wave was conducted in March 2020. The survey represents approximately 820 completed interviews and 15 hour-long interviews from pre-qualified IT decision-makers. This survey focuses on the impacts to businesses of the global COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.