COVID-19 impacts and assumptions

COVID-19 has undoubtedly created financial pain for businesses across all verticals. Business operations have been disrupted and revenue streams have declined in many industries across the globe. At the same time, the pandemic has required additional investment to support remote work and adjust business processes to align with public health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including social distancing. However, even amid these financial challenges, businesses have spent and plan to continue spending more of their IT resources on cloud-delivered services. Cloud’s benefits of agility, innovation and a high degree of automation have been reinforced during the pandemic and have prepared adopters for the next unknown disruption to their business.

Given these circumstances, TBR’s market forecasts for cloud professional services and hosted private cloud have been adjusted to reflect the impact of COVID-19 over the five-year forecast period. In the next two years, we anticipate growth will slow slightly due to the impacts social restrictions are having on supply and demand. Particularly given the uncertain environment, business spending will likely take longer to rebound than in previous economic downturns. This holds true across IT departments, as many businesses that have on-premises IT infrastructures will postpone cloud deployments until after the pandemic abates.

As such, workload activity including legacy SAP, VMware and Oracle migrations to bare metal IaaS and the associated services opportunity will be affected. While these impacts will reduce market growth by a few percentage points through the remainder of 2020 and into early 2021, the flexible nature of cloud-based transactions make the cloud professional services and hosted private cloud markets less susceptible to the virus’s near-term effects than other markets within the IT industry. COVID-19 is testing many companies’ IT preparedness, and as a result, a notable increase in cloud usage will occur once the virus subsidies and IT spending returns to normal, driving accelerated growth from 2022 to 2024.

TBR’s Cloud Professional Services Market Forecast and Hosted Private Cloud Market Forecast provide insights into how market sizes, growth and vendor positions will change over the next five years. Each forecast is broken down into four subsegments and both forecasts cover the Americas, EMEA and APAC.

What makes Egypt attractive

Egypt’s growing IT services and technology sector has been built on important natural advantages and few forward-looking investments in recent years. The country’s proximity to Europe, considerably large and educated talent pool, and relatively low costs compared to nearshore locations such as Poland, Romania and Bulgaria make Egypt a natural hub for IT services, just as it has been a hub for commerce for millenniums. In addition, multinational companies have long-established histories of doing business in Egypt, building up the trust and goodwill needed for large investments and sustained operations. IBM has had a presence in the country for 66 years, and in addition to its six regional delivery centers in Cairo, in 2019 it opened two new centers — an Innovation and Industry Client Center and a Marketing Services Center — to accelerate digital transformation for public and private sector clients through next-generation solutions such as AI, cybersecurity, digital technology, blockchain and hybrid cloud. Sharing a time zone with much of Europe provides Egypt with a natural advantage, particularly relative to India and the Philippines, two outsourcing megacenters. 

Atop these advantages and potentially separating Egypt from other growing outsourcing locations has been active investment by the Egyptian government in developing a business ecosystem, creating jobs and exports, fostering entrepreneurship, encouraging foreign direct investment, and assisting Egyptians in innovation efforts. While this mandate may sound ambitious, Egypt, a country known for large projects, has kept a tight focus on successful development of IT services and technology exports.

Sustained investment in talent

Egypt’s critical advantage could be its talent base, particularly due to the group’s size, technology skills and fluency in multiple languages. According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics in Egypt, approximately 500,000 students graduate from universities in Egypt every year, of which around 90,000 speak English. To assist graduates in finding employment with multinational companies — and to help those companies develop their employees’ skills — the Egyptian government, through ITIDA, partners with companies to provide mentoring, tools and competitions for startups as well as sponsor various hackathons and other initiatives.

The Egyptian IT sector exported around $4.2 billion in services in 2019, according to the Egyptian Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA). The country’s IT sector has become a substantial part of the overall economy growth, contributing both jobs and export revenues, primarily from BPO, software, application development and maintenance, and technical support services. TBR sees advantages for Egypt in the post-coronavirus world.

COVID-19 will accelerate a range of secular trends in federal IT

Despite the inevitable short-term impact of COVID-19 on federal technology outlays, IT infrastructure modernization will eventually return to the top of the list of federal IT spending priorities, as will investments in cybersecurity, analytics, AI, big data, cloud and machine learning. The epidemic will disrupt contract delivery, create resource deployment challenges at federal IT vendors and their agency clients, and may cause nonhealth-related discretionary spending to be redirected to healthcare areas, benefiting vendors such as Leidos, Accenture Federal Services, Maximus and ManTech (Nasdaq: MANT).

As federal agencies transition large portions of their workforces to remote environments IT infrastructure improvements and migrations to cloud and everything “as a Service” will follow, along with projects to improve private networks and broadband connections and engagements to enhance security requirements as the “threat surface” exposed to new security breaches expands. Federal IT decision makers are increasingly seeking methods of combating COVID-19 that have been proved in the commercial sector.

Federal spending levels are expected to increase on preparedness and response activities and other disaster recovery or mitigation work in the fiscal 2021 budget, with a growing volume of IT modernization opportunities around disease surveillance improvement, including the implementation of new IT systems and advanced analytics. Still, the overall landscape for products and services to counter biothreats remains unclear and federal IT vendors will be tapped to provide the vision and road map for the adoption of biothreat surveillance solutions. Spending on electronic warfare, countering drones and unmanned systems and other areas of the National Defense Strategy will remain strong for the next two years and in fact may expand to include bio-monitoring and bio-surveillance technologies.

Most of the results from the 1Q20 earnings season are in, and federal technology contractors have provided initial reactions to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on their fiscal performance and their outlook for federal fiscal 2020 and beyond. By and large, the fiscal effects of COVID-19 were limited to the final few weeks of the quarter, according to a plurality of federal IT vendors, minimizing the top- and bottom-line impacts for most federal technology contractors. Negative impacts were most concentrated in the global aerospace sector, and as such, companies with a footprint in commercial or government aeronautics encountered severe growth and margin headwinds. However, all federal contractors had to scramble to acclimate resource management, operations, service delivery, business development and supply chain management strategies to the new COVID-19 environment.

Near-term market implications: What is next, rather than beyond

TBR believes the intersection of public policy and commerce is the next area where technologists will apply their energies within the blockchain realm. The core platform elements are in place with clearly articulated road maps for ongoing development work. At issue will be the policy regulations and compliance methods needed to ensure blockchain-enabled business activity can be seamlessly imported into legacy systems of record for financial reporting purposes.

Similarly, nation states and native-cloud platforms such as Facebook will vie to become the de facto economic exchange mechanism for blockchain transactions. Notably, Libra Association, the Facebook-created digital currency, recently named former U.S. Department of the Treasury Under Secretary Stuart Levey as its first CEO, indicating Facebook’s strategy for bridging the nation state-commercial entity divide. Taking a conservative posture to minimize security threat vectors to protect the value of the currency in question appears, on its face, to be the most prudent course of action. On the other hand, taking a more aggressive position that allows for deeper embedding into commerce chains and exposes the currency to more programmability — and consequently creates a greater surface area for malicious attacks — is a risk nation states and businesses will undertake to gain greater participation in the digital economy.

In the short term, then, the conservative posture is prudent. In the long term, however, such conservative viewpoints could result in shifting geopolitical power. The U.S. dollar, for example, has been the de facto foreign exchange clearing mechanism for decades. A conservative posture on the part of the U.S. Federal Reserve on digital currency opens the door for other entrants to displace the U.S. dollar as the international clearing mechanism and, in so doing, removes a valuable foreign policy tool from the U.S. diplomatic toolbox at a time when U.S. diplomacy is already severely challenged.

The fourth annual EY Global Blockchain Summit had a vastly different look and feel as the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the engagement to a virtual forum and turned the spotlight on the rapidly coalescing use cases that blockchain technology underpins. The core coterie of blockchain builders does not have to prove technical value through “use case show and tell” of how the technology works, but rather needs to discuss what the technology delivers in terms of business process improvement. However, technology companies do need to outline product road maps to ameliorate persistent concerns. More important, though, is the need for automated interaction, adjustment and compliance with business rules and the ever-evolving public policies designed to mitigate risk. It appears clear that as revolutionary as blockchain can be to business commerce by shifting the tracking of such activity from general ledgers to distributed ledgers, it can be equally transformative to nation states, depending on what form of currency exchange settles out as the de facto clearing mechanism for multi-enterprise blockchain business networks.

With a foundation in open source, Red Hat is poised to deliver to the hybrid-ready enterprise

The open source proposition has been embedded in Red Hat’s roots since the company’s founding in 1993 and has since remained at the core of its guiding principles, with Linux operating system (OS) at the heart of all its innovations. Vendor loyalty and clearly charted paths were the mantras many companies operated on for years, while “digital transformation” was barely on an enterprise’s short-term road map. Then a decade ago, cloud adoption surged, creating the impetus to embrace more agile and flexible development models, and open source technologies emerged. While business models centered on open source software have proved challenging for many, Red Hat’s pre-established culture and leadership around open source communities solidifies the Red Hat brand, paving the way for rapid scale, as the company has captured over 90% of the Fortune 500 as clients and in 2019 became the first open source-defined company to reach $3 billion in annual revenue.

During opening keynotes, Products and Technologies EVP Matt Hicks discussed how Red Hat is leveraging its foundational strengths in an open hybrid cloud approach, which, by virtue of being open, goes beyond technology and extends to processes, cultures and transformation, to further differentiate. Red Hat is releasing new offerings to capture opportunities around hybrid infrastructures, application development and management while rapidly scaling up the integration of technologies such as AI and edge, bolstered by collaborative engines like its Innovation Labs.

Originally scheduled to be hosted in San Francisco, Red Hat Summit 2020 offered participants numerous opportunities to virtually engage in hands-on labs, converse with industry leads and hear from Red Hat customers, and it did so while maintaining the spirit of openness and collaboration for which Red Hat is known. While the topic of COVID-19 did not overtly dominate the discussions or significantly color the overarching Red Hat messaging, it became clear that the ability to pivot rapidly, embrace change and remain flexible will underscore Red Hat’s efforts to successfully promote transformation amid the pandemic. Red Hat’s reputation has historically been predicated on its open and agile approach to development and deployment, long before such attributes were considered valuable, let alone essential.