Entries by Allan Krans, Practice Manager and Principal Analyst

Wave of growth that will outpace prior estimates expected for cloud professional services market

Cloud professional services market overview Market overview Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the increasing complexity of enterprise hybrid and multicloud environments had already established a growing need for managed services and system integration vendors. Traditional deployment schedules and delivery timelines have been accelerated as the pandemic has created a short-term need to fulfill the demands […]

SAP and IBM were prepared, responding rapidly, but are still waiting for COVID-19’s peak impact

The 1Q20 earnings releases of IBM and SAP offered the first glimpse into how COVID-19 is impacting IT vendors financially and into the strategies being used to respond. The two vendors are a positive litmus test for the rest of the IT industry, given their breadth of businesses and customer bases across geographies and vertical […]

Zoom videoconferencing booms amid COVID-19, but Microsoft and Google will win with broader SaaS

Zoom’s rapid adoption highlights security concerns; Microsoft and Google are better positioned Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL) were relatively well prepared for the unexpected demand for videoconferencing, with global data centers and strong security measures in place, while Zoom’s security was not ready for the same scaling. There have been numerous reports of […]

IaaS and PaaS leaders maintain their current positions in the public cloud market but face mounting competition

Coopetition is growing among vendors to outcompete leaders in the public cloud market, and customers have responded positively by integrating multivendor environments. TBR expects this coopetition will enable multiline vendors to attain notable growth, but likely not until roughly 3Q20, after the COVID-19 pandemic abates, as enterprises manage remote workforces rather than undergo vast integrations. […]

Security measures taken to combat impacts of COVID-19 on businesses will have long-term implications

The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed an array of cyberattacks that threaten the health of our virtual systems, including but not exclusive to those in healthcare, banking and government agencies. Cyber criminals are capitalizing on widespread weaknesses with attack vectors in the form of spam, phishing scams, ransomware and malicious URLs. As the number of infected […]

COVID-19 preparedness: Looking back to achieve perfect vision for tomorrow

Finger-pointing from the vantage of hindsight Last year, nearly 18 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, three former Department of Homeland Security secretaries urged the U.S. government to place cybersecurity at the top of the national threat list. The call to action was issued prior to any knowledge of a looming pandemic, and adherence to […]

Enterprises thinking above and beyond the bottom line

Not all news related to the pandemic is bad news Just a couple of months ago, the term “going viral” lightly referred to the match-to-kerosene-like spread of images, videos or other content across borders and populations. Today’s news has literally gone viral, carrying coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak in an unfortunate and devastating new realization […]

COVID-19 catches manufacturing and retail verticals flat-footed, limiting IT and service investment

While manufacturing and retail companies are capitalizing on some opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic, they are also experiencing significant negative short-term impacts. Making matters worse, most companies in these verticals lack the agility and IT infrastructure necessary to adjust in the current environment. The result will be a severe slowdown in these sectors, which will […]

COVID-19 pushes automation to the forefront of business strategies

Automation shifts from a discussion to an imperative across all industries The decision to embrace automation typically requires an organization to engage in careful strategic planning and analysis over a period of time. On one hand, automation enables a level of efficiency, consistency and quality that manual deployment alone cannot achieve. On the other hand, […]

COVID-19 outbreak pushes virtual technology events to sink or swim

Events in general and global annual events in particular have been slow to adapt to a changed world So many things have changed in the business and technology environments over the past two decades, but in-person events have maintained their importance. Even as digital marketing has replaced most traditional mediums and activities like cold calling […]