Technology Business Research announces 2021 Predictions webinar schedule

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Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR) announces the schedule for its 2021 Predictions webinar series. 2021 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include telecom, cloud, devices & commercial IoT, data center, and services & digital.

Jan. 6            COVID-19 changes everything: What’s next for devices and IoT?

Jan. 13         2021 will bring more demand, more partnerships and more industry innovation to cloud

Jan. 20         Hybrid, ecosystems and industry clouds shape the future for consulting, IT services and digital transformation

Jan. 27         CSPs face brave new world in 2021

Feb. 3           COVID-19 necessitates data center investments, becoming a catalyst for digital transformation

TBR webinars are held typically each Wednesday at 1 p.m. EDT and include a 15-minute Q&A following the main presentation. Previous webinars can be viewed anytime on TBR’s Webinar Portal.

For additional information or to arrange a briefing with our analysts, please contact TBR at [email protected].

Microsoft Teams in crosshairs as Salesforce announces acquisition of Slack to bolster its Customer 360 vision

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Slack fits within Salesforce’s historical growth strategy

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) has increasingly relied on inorganic growth to accelerate top-line revenue performance, such as its acquisitions of MuleSoft in 2018 for $6.5 billion and Tableau in 2019 for $15.7 billion. The addition of Slack (NYSE: WORK) would allow Salesforce to augment its robust, customer-focused products, including Sales and Service clouds, with Slack’s internal collaboration and communication platform, which contains a robust ecosystem of third-party integrations. Speaking about the acquisition during Salesforce’s 3Q20 earnings call, CEO Marc Benioff stated, “More than 90% of Slack’s enterprise customers are also Salesforce customers, but we also see how much further they can go.”

How much further Slack’s clients can go on their deployments will be contingent on Salesforce’s ability to articulate the value of the Customer 360 vision to the acquired clients. Execution of this portfolio strategy will be critical to complementing Salesforce’s inorganic growth by driving demand of existing front-office suites like Sales and Service clouds, in addition to broadening the company’s presence beyond the front-office with recent product launches like middle- and back-office-focused suite Revenue Cloud.

Integrating Slack’s value proposition with existing go-to-market efforts

The acquisition of Slack would bolster Salesforce’s Customer 360 portfolio strategy by adding a robust collaboration product at the center of the platform. This tactic mirrors recent investments by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) around Teams, such as tighter integrations with products like Dynamics 365, which, combined with enterprise needs as a result of the pandemic, accelerated Teams’ daily active user growth by a reported 53% from April to October. Further, the acquisition will increase the competitiveness of Slack in larger-scale multiproduct engagements, a dynamic the company struggled with in the past, given its lack of portfolio breadth compared to Microsoft. This is evidenced by Slack’s July filing of an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in the European Union, citing unfair market competition as the company frequently included Teams as a free trial within multiproduct bundles, such as Microsoft 365.

With this in mind, TBR believes the planned acquisition’s success will be contingent on Salesforce’s ability to integrate Slack’s value proposition as an internal collaboration into its customer-focused suites, thus allowing Salesforce to generate cross-sale opportunities within the acquired install base. For instance, Salesforce used investments around Work.com, a platform the company released in May in response to the pandemic, to create revenue opportunities from support for remote workforces. Specifically, Salesforce launched updates in September around employee engagement and productivity, including Employee Workspace, which provides users with a central hub to access and manage resources like learning platforms, payroll systems and collaboration applications, providing a clear path for integration with the capabilities that will be acquired from Slack. Aligning Slack capabilities with products like Work.com could help Salesforce differentiate Slack and use it to strengthen the Customer 360 portfolio strategy with clients.

After a week of market speculation, Salesforce confirmed ahead of its 3Q20 earnings call the company’s intent to acquire Slack for $27.7 billion, which would be the largest acquisition in the company’s history. The deal, which is expected to close in 2Q21, will be funded by a combination of new debt and cash on hand. The planned acquisition would inject an estimated $600 million in revenue in 2021, supporting Salesforce’s 2021 revenue guidance of approximately $25.45 billion to $25.55 billion, representing a yearly growth of about 21%.

2021 will bring more demand, more partnerships and more industry innovation to cloud

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Join TBR’s Cloud & Software team, Allan Krans, Nicki Catchpole, Evan Woollacott and Catie Merrill, for an exclusive review of our predictions for cloud in 2021, including the lingering impact of COVID-19 on vendors and customers and how they will handle challenges in the coming year. The team will also discuss how cloud demand will not only remain elevated but also take different forms as vendors offer more industry customization and hybrid capabilities.

Don’t miss:

  • How uncertainty will accelerate cloud adoption in 2021
  • How industry clouds will become the norm
  • How partnership models will support accelerated cloud demand
  • How containers will challenge the traditional virtualization model

Mark your calendars for Jan. 13, 2021 at 1 p.m. EST,
and REGISTER to reserve your space.

TBR webinars are held typically on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. ET and include a 15-minute Q&A session following the main presentation. Previous webinars can be viewed anytime on TBR’s Webinar Portal.

For additional information or to arrange a briefing with our analysts, please contact TBR at [email protected].

COVID-19 pandemic forces telecom industry to go all in on digital transformation

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CSPs face brave new world; government stimulate market

The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to persist through at least 2021 as vaccines and other virus mitigation efforts take time to make their way through societies globally. In the meantime, the global economy remains in a state of suspended animation following unprecedented injections of fiscal and monetary stimulus by governments across numerous countries, which total over $20 trillion (or 23% of global GDP in 2019). The amount of stimulus is expected to continue growing steadily through 2021 and potentially beyond as governments aim to fully offset the impact of the pandemic on their economies as well as build a foundation for sustainable economic growth.

After weathering the first phase of the pandemic in 2020 relatively well, communication service providers (CSPs) will enter 2021 facing a brave new world and many tough decisions. The unrelenting virus is forcing economies and societies to fully embrace digital transformation as they adjust to the new normal, and it is forcing CSPs worldwide to take a hard, holistic look at their operational, business and growth models, and to adjust and accelerate their digital transformation road maps accordingly.

Fortunately for the telecom industry, a significant and growing portion of government stimulus is being earmarked to enable the ICT sector to accelerate infrastructure and ecosystem development. CSPs and their suppliers will be key beneficiaries of the trillions of dollars and other support mechanisms (e.g., tax breaks, low or no interest rate financing) governments will directly and indirectly inject into the ICT sector and broader economy for these purposes. This stimulus will help CSPs ease their capex and opex burdens as they migrate to the new network architecture and will ensure they have the capital necessary to keep their businesses going and their debt obligations satisfied.

2021 telecom predictions

  • Government stimulus powers ICT investment
  • Governments will increasingly democratize spectrum to ensure a vibrant 5G ecosystem
  • CSPs accelerate 5G SA road maps

Technology Business Research 2021 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include cloud & software, telecom, devices & commercial IoT, data center, and services & digital.

COVID-19 necessitates data center investments, becoming a catalyst for digital transformation

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COVID-19 shifts data center market demands as customers leverage the cloud to meet swift transformation needs

In 2020 IT decision makers around the world moved into highly reactive and tactical modes to mitigate COVID-19’s impact on their businesses, and data centers had to be provisioned rapidly for remote activities across all elements of the business stack, including IT. Although businesses’ initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic boosted certain on-premises provisioning, it also delayed large, services-laden transformation engagements. Economic uncertainty and uneven industry sector impact also saw some IT instances pivot to cash conservation. IT infrastructure vendors held strong against the murky IT backdrop, although some business shifted to ODMs more aligned to serving exascale cloud companies at the expense of more traditional or legacy technologies.

TBR believes this trend will continue through 2021. COVID-19 accelerated existing macro trends toward cloud-delivered technologies leveraging automation to strip away person-to-person contact from commerce. AI and machine learning (ML) will pull infrastructure along and push infrastructure deployments further to the edge.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is the multifunctional building block for a lot of IT instances. HCI can sit at the ever-growing edge or in departmental or branch office data centers, and it can be used for modular scaling of private cloud deployments whether on premises or in colocation facilities. HCI growth, coupled with further cloud migration, pressures legacy and more traditional IT infrastructure. 

AI growth persists. Definition increases as emerging technologies become applicable to general use. Vendors and customers alike seek AI automation to strip labor’s hollow calories from all elements of business commerce and IT support. All these aspirations hinge on tight data governance rules and human compliance with those rules when putting data into the automation engine. That tight wrapper for consistent, shared information flows can be achieved through blockchain, described by EY Blockchain Head Paul Brody as the ERP equivalent for multienterprise business networks. 

This vision of the digital world also acknowledges the need for a new data engine to analyze the data and derive new insights to advance all elements of human existence. Quantum computing will be that new engine, and its performance will be to classical computing what the jet plane was to propeller airplanes. TBR expects 2021 to be a year with significant discoveries that push quantum computing further down the path to economic advantage. If deep scientific thought and “what if” analysis happen only when the world’s greatest minds can pursue their natural inquisitiveness, then it could be that COVID-19 generates the requisite science necessary for quantum computing to shift from discovery to emerging commercial application.

2021 data center predictions

  • Investments in 1H20 to modernize IT to meet COVID-19 requirements will lead to reduced data center hardware spend in 2021
  • Quantum computing advancements will persist, leading to an increase in M&A activity to consolidate capabilities
  • COVID-19 increases the presence of HCI in modern data centers

Technology Business Research 2021 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include cloud & software, telecom, devices & commercial IoT, data center, and services & digital.

Webinar – COVID-19 changes everything: What’s next for devices and IoT?

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The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated some trends and slowed others. In IoT, the emphasis has shifted to a more strategic approach to achieve greater resilience and transparency, while projects largely aimed at increasing operational efficiency have be put on the backburner. At the same time, the crisis has accelerated a maturation in customer organizations that makes it easier to build IoT into digital transformation strategies. In devices, especially in PCs, the 2020 surge in consumer demand will be followed, TBR believes, by market saturation, reducing revenue and driving down margins.

Don’t miss:

  • The new division of labor in IoT customer organizations     
  • Specialized packages and bundles simplify vendors’ go-to-market strategies
  • How the increased PC total addressable market will affect the near-term PC market

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, Jan. 6, at 1 p.m. EST,
and REGISTER to reserve your space.

TBR webinars are held typically on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. ET and include a 15-minute Q&A session following the main presentation. Previous webinars can be viewed anytime on TBR’s Webinar Portal.

For additional information or to arrange a briefing with our analysts, please contact TBR at [email protected].

Hybrid, ecosystems and industry clouds shape the future for consulting, IT services and digital transformation

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Join Patrick M. Heffernan and members of TBR’s Professional Services and Digital Transformation teams as they explore three developing trends: the evolution of hybrid consulting, new ways of partnering across a changing IT services ecosystem and the return of industry clouds. Additionally, the teams will review 2020 performance and strategies of key players in the market and predict the impact of these trends in 2021.

Don’t miss:

  • How the consulting business model has finally begun shifting to accommodate a post-pandemic world, with face-to-face selling and delivery replaced by a hybrid engagement experience
  • Why maturing emerging technologies necessitate more complex ecosystems, pressuring all the players in the IT services space to partner differently
  • After the death of digital in 2020 and as cloud providers begin reintroducing industry clouds, how professional services vendors will partner to accelerate previously lethargic cloud adoption, even as they ward off encroachment by those same cloud vendors into services opportunities

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, Jan. 20, at 1 p.m. EST,
and REGISTER to reserve your space.

TBR webinars are held typically on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. ET and include a 15-minute Q&A session following the main presentation. Previous webinars can be viewed anytime on TBR’s Webinar Portal.

For additional information or to arrange a briefing with our analysts, please contact TBR at [email protected].

CSPs face brave new world in 2021

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The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to persist through at least 2021 as vaccines and other virus mitigation efforts take time to make their way through societies globally. In the meantime, the global economy remains in a state of suspended animation following unprecedented injections of fiscal and monetary stimulus by governments across numerous countries, which when aggregated to date, amount to over $20 trillion (or 23% of global GDP in 2019). The amount of stimulus is expected to continue, growing steadily through 2021 and potentially beyond, as governments aim to fully offset the impact of the pandemic on their economies as well as build a foundation for sustainable economic growth.

After weathering the first phase of the pandemic in 2020 relatively well, communication service providers (CSPs) will enter 2021 facing a brave new world and many tough decisions to make. The unrelenting pandemic is forcing economies and societies to fully embrace digital transformation as they adjust to the new normal and forcing CSPs worldwide to take a hard, holistic look at their operational model, business model and growth model and to adjust and accelerate their digital transformation road maps accordingly.

Join Principal Analyst Chris Antlitz for an in-depth, exclusive review of TBR’s 2021 Telecom Predictions, in which he discusses how the telecom industry is adapting to the post-pandemic world.

Don’t miss:

  • How government stimulus will fuel growth in the ICT sector and support the telecom industry
  • Why spectrum democratization is happening
  • Why CSPs are accelerating their 5G SA road maps

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021, at 1 p.m. EST,
and REGISTER to reserve your space.

TBR webinars are held typically on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. ET and include a 15-minute Q&A session following the main presentation. Previous webinars can be viewed anytime on TBR’s Webinar Portal.

For additional information or to arrange a briefing with our analysts, please contact TBR at [email protected].

Webinar: COVID-19 necessitates data center investments, becoming a catalyst for digital transformation

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Like the rest of the world, IT decision makers have been moving into a highly reactive and tactical mode in 2020 to mitigate COVID-19’s impact on the businesses they underpin. TBR believes the ripple effect of these decisions will continue through 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated macro trends toward cloud technologies that leverage automation to reduce person-to-person contact in economic commerce. AI and machine learning will pull infrastructure along and similarly push the infrastructure deployments further to the edge, while reinforcing the need for investment in emerging technologies to solve pain points that existing technologies cannot address.​

Join Stephanie Long and Geoff Woollacott as they dive into the impacts of COVID-19 on the data center market thus far and how they predict the impacts will evolve during 2021.

Don’t miss:

  • How 1H20 investments in modernizing the data center to meet COVID-19 mandates will reduce data center hardware spend in 2021
  • COVID-19 increases the need for edge deployments
  • Quantum computing advancements persist, leading to an increase in M&A activity to consolidate capabilities

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021, at 1 p.m. EST,
and REGISTER to reserve your space.

TBR webinars are held typically on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. ET and include a 15-minute Q&A session following the main presentation. Previous webinars can be viewed anytime on TBR’s Webinar Portal.

For additional information or to arrange a briefing with our analysts, please contact TBR at [email protected].

EY 2021: Hybrid and omnipresent

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TBR perspective

A few years ago in a wide-ranging discussion, TBR analysts and EY executives considered the future consulting business model, noting how most industries had been fundamentally disrupted by technology while consulting had seemingly remained unchanged. Fast forward to the current pandemic, and EY clearly anticipated where consulting was headed: hybrid engagements, delivered in-person and virtually, substantially aided by technologies, including big bets EY made on AI, blockchain and cybersecurity. In addition, EY has understood a significant shift in the IT services and consulting ecosystem, in which technology vendors’ needs have been supplanted by clients’ needs, making partnerships less about sales and marketing and more about delivery.

During the opening session of the Technology Analyst Summit, Dan Higgins, the firm’s Global Technology Consulting Leader, said clearly and definitively EY intends to become “the transformation consulting leader,” an ambition that requires best-in-class and scaled capabilities around technology, data, platforms, products and ecosystems. In Higgins’ view, one of EY’s strengths in tackling that ambition came from being able to bring the entire firm to bear at a client, from all aspects of consulting, as well as tax and strategy & transactions. The September Technology Analyst Summit and the one-on-one discussions with EY executives in the following weeks confirmed TBR’s assessment that EY’s evolution continues, undeterred by COVID-19.

In an expansive and informal discussion with TBR after the event, EY’s Global Vice Chair for Consulting Errol Gardner said the firm’s performance in the Asia Pacific region has returned to close to 2019 levels, adjusting more rapidly to the COVID-19 era than other regions. He predicted massive opportunities to consult with the government sector in Europe in the coming year as well as sustained uncertainty in North America (specifically the United States), all while noting that the current market does not favor new entrants or substantial account turnover, with most clients unwilling to take on additional risks associated with onboarding new consultants.

Gardner’s comments extended his Technology Analyst Summit opening remarks and provided some assurance that the radically changed business model for consulting would not lead to a radically changed EY, except in certain areas, such as remote working, diversity and inclusion, and resilience. Gardner also reinforced one of the overarching themes TBR took away from the entire event: The future is hybrid, which includes not just delivery but also how EY structures itself and continues to build its business. Beyond recruiting talent, building solutions and acquiring assets, Gardner reiterated the firm would be relying on ecosystem partners and expanding beyond traditional alliance structures to meet clients’ evolving demands. In TBR’s view, this approach to ecosystems has developed over the last few years as the firm has shifted from selective and limited alliances to a more expansive partnering model.

In a follow-up discussion after the Technology Analyst Summit, EY’s Global Business Consulting Leader Amy Brachio described an evolution of clients’ consulting needs and how EY tackles those changes. According to Brachio, clients previously brought EY problems that required a specific skill set or clearly defined capabilities to solve. As emerging technologies have forced changes to clients’ business models, EY has responded to more complex and transformational problems by bringing to bear the entire firm.

Frictions within the global firm that previously prevented more holistic responses have been minimized through resetting how EY looks at clients’ problems and how EY measures its own success. Rather than focusing on global total engagement revenue by competency (such as supply chain), EY has shifted to evaluating performance based on the buyer’s agenda and understanding which skills and capabilities the entire firm needs to bring to solve more complex problems. In TBR’s view, shifting from a traditional mindset around revenue metrics based on competencies to a client-centric, holistic understanding of EY’s role within a client’s ecosystem reflects the firm’s overall culture around purpose.  

Sticking to strategies and building alliances around security, AI and blockchain

Ever-expanding alliances with key technology partners have underpinned EY’s technology evolution over the past few years. Building on comments made during the Technology Analyst Summit, Global Alliance and Ecosystem Leader Greg Sarafin explained to TBR that the firm’s alliance remained grounded in joint solutions, integrated platforms and shared clients, not joint ventures or business groups. In contrast to other leading consultancies and global SIs, EY’s approach to partnering with technology vendors, particularly companies such as SAP (NYSE: SAP), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), revolves around definitive opportunities centered on EY-built platforms and solutions. For example, the firm has partnered with IBM Watson to create Diligence Edge, a due diligence platform that, according to Sarafin, substantially reduces the hours needed to “find the worms and the pearls … [to] accelerate the time to find issues and accelerate the time to value” for clients examining acquisition targets. Sarafin added that EY will “lean in on solutions” and “solve big problems” with EY-built solutions and platforms.

While EY may deliver some of these products as managed services, the firm’s primary business model will continue to revolve around the consulting, process re-engineering, integration and change management work necessary for clients to continue with their digital transformations. On that last element, Sarafin noted that COVID-19 brought religion to boards about the importance of digital transformation, ending the indecisive start-and-stop nature of many engagements and convincing EY’s clients they need to move to the cloud. As part of EY’s story on digital transformation, Sarafin shared with TBR that EY’s wavespaces would continue to evolve, becoming more tightly aligned with technology partners, such as Microsoft, or more industry-centric, such as around manufacturing in a to-be-opened wavespace in Ohio. (Note: TBR has written extensively on wavespaces and on innovation and transformation centers generally.)

EY Virtual Technology Analyst Summit: On Sept. 28 and 29, EY hosted analysts for a global EY Virtual Technology Analyst Summit, which showcased the firm’s technology-centric offerings and capabilities and included breakout sessions on functional areas, such as blockchain, security and analytics, as well as client success stories. The following includes information gathered during the event and in subsequent one-on-one discussions with EY executives.