UPDATED 12/23/20: Tech Community Pushes Forward Amid Crisis

Here’s the latest news from the tech sector:


Dec. 23, 2020
COVID-19 Continues to Fuel Surge in Cloud Services: Synergy
The surging COVID-19 pandemic in the third quarter continued to drive the expansion of the fast-growing global cloud service market, which hit $65 billion, a 28% year-over-year increase, according to analysts with Synergy Research Group. The public health crisis had led enterprises to more quickly adopt cloud services to adapt to the widely distributed workforce and the need to accelerate their digital infrastructure efforts. Every quarter, the top cloud providers – such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – have been helped by this increase in enterprise spending, with the market getting a $1.5 billion boost in the third quarter, the analysts said in a report this month. Spending was up in all the cloud services spending: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, hosted private clouds, and Software-as-a-Service. “At Synergy, we track cloud market numbers very closely and we knew there would be strong growth in Q3, but the actual growth was higher than we’d expected. There is no doubt that COVID-19 was the main reason for that boost,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy. “Workloads are being shifted to public clouds even more quickly than anticipated and hosted software apps are especially attractive for enterprises navigating their way through a worldwide pandemic. Rapid adoption is also being helped by a plethora of hybrid cloud services, which are helping to smooth the path towards greater usage of public clouds. Whatever a post-pandemic world may look like, we don’t expect those trends to reverse.”

Dec. 22, 2020
UCC Market Continues to Expand During Pandemic
Market research firm IDC is putting more numbers to the rapid growth in the global unified communications and collaboration (UCC) market during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the analysts, revenue in the space in the third quarter hit $12.2 billion, a 26.7% year-over-year increase and – highlighting the staying power of the trend – a 6.6% jump over Q2. In its report this week, IDC noted that the expectation that organizations of all sizes would continue to embrace the technology as some moved from the crisis to recovery phase in regard to the worldwide public health crisis, with interest focusing on cloud-based solutions for voice, video, messaging, and collaboration fueled by digital transformation efforts and the shift to more hybrid workplaces. The UC collaboration market – which includes videoconferencing software and cloud services – grew 46.7% year-over-year, to almost $5.8 billion in revenue, and seats growing 37.8%. The hosted voice and UC public cloud Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) grew 23.3% to almost $4.3 billion. While the enterprise videoconferencing system space declined 2.3%, smaller huddle room video endpoints and video infrastructure equipment jumped 72.5% and 39.6%, respectively. “In 2020, COVID-19 caused many businesses and organizations to re-think their plans for leveraging digital technologies and accelerated interest in and adoption of solutions such as collaboration, videoconferencing, messaging, and UCaaS, among others,” said Rich Costello, senior research analyst for UCC at IDC. “In 2021, we expect the positive growth numbers across these key UCC segments to continue, albeit at slightly more modest rates.”

Dec. 21, 2020
Enterprises Expecting COVID-Themed Attacks in 2021: Survey
Cybercriminals for months have been using the COVID-19 pandemic to launch a wide range of attacks on organizations. According to privileged access management (PAM) vendor Centrify, businesses expect bad actors to continue to use the public health crisis in the coming year to steal money and data. In survey results this month, 64% of 200 business decision-makers in large and midsize enterprises in the United Kingdom expect COVID-themed phishing attacks targeting their companies to increase in 2021. About 37% of respondents said there are no plans in place to train new employees on data management policies or cybersecurity risks related to COVID-19 and 37% also said they don’t have the necessary systems in place to verify employee identities and credentials when accessing company data. “COVID-themed e-mail, SMS, and web-based phishing attacks have not been uncommon over the last year, and so far we’ve seen cyberattack campaigns using the guise of charity, government financial aid initiatives, and business support schemes already lure thousands of victims into leaking sensitive information, such as log-in credentials and payment details,” Centrify Chief Revenue Officer Howard Greenfield said. “In fact, these phishing campaigns have been so sophisticated and widespread in 2020 that business leaders can only reasonably assume that a colleague or employee has already fallen victim to one, especially if they have been working remotely this year for the first time in their career.”

Dec. 18, 2020
Zoom Lifts Time Limits on Video Calls During Holidays
Public health officials are pleading with people not to gather in large numbers for the holidays, fearing a similar surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths that have followed in the wake of Thanksgiving. Throughout the year, businesses and consumers have been using cloud-based collaboration products like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to connect, and officials are urging people to do the same in lieu of in-person gatherings. Zoom this week said it’s lifting the 40-minute time limit for free subscribers for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the end of Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. The announcement from Zoom follows the announcement by Google Meet earlier in the month that video calls will not be limited to 60 minutes through March 31, 2021. Zoom and other video collaboration offerings from vendors like Microsoft and Cisco have seen business boom during the pandemic, with people working from home and students distance-learning. In the third quarter, Zoom’s revenue hit more than $777 million, a 367% year-over-year increase, and it had 433,700 customers with more than 10 employees, a 485% increase. Zoom officials said they expect fourth-quarter revenue to come in between $806 million and $811 million and revenue for its full fiscal year to hit more than $2.57 billion.

Dec. 17, 2020
COVID-19 Vaccines Put Focus Back on the Workplace
The trend continues to bend toward allowing employees to work at least part of the week at home after the COVID-19 vaccines are widely adopted. Gartner analysts this week said that a recent survey of 130 HR leaders found that 90% plan to enable workers to work remotely at least part of the time and 65% said their companies will continue to give employees flexibility on when they work. Most also said that they expect about half of the workforce will want to return to the office at least part of the time once the vaccines are made widely available. For the most part, the workplace will remain the same. About 62% of respondents said they’re planning to continue all safety measures currently in place once the vaccines are available, while almost a third said they would no longer require masks in the workplace or enforce social distancing in high-traffic areas. “With a COVID-19 vaccine rollout approaching, HR leaders are now faced with an onslaught of questions, including if they can or should require employees to be vaccinated, what the employer’s responsibility is in helping employees and their families get vaccinated, and how the release of vaccines impacts their return-to-the-workplace strategy,” said Elisabeth Joyce, vice president of advisory in Gartner’s HR practice.

Dec. 16, 2020
Synergy: Pandemic Fuels Expanding UCaaS Market
The cloud-based communication space has continued to see significant growth over the past few quarters as companies adopt technologies to support their remote workforces in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid growth in the Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) space also has given relative newcomers – in particular, Zoom and Microsoft Teams – room to grow their share of the market, according to analysts at Synergy Research Group. The market research firm this week said the UCaaS market grew 30% year-over-year, the fourth consecutive quarter for growth. RingCentral, Mitel, and 8×8 still are the top players, accounting for about half of all revenue. However, Microsoft in the past three quarters has seen its market share grow by almost five percentage points, while Zoom has about 2% of the market, having started from almost nothing a year ago. In particular, Zoom has almost 10% of the enterprise UCaaS space, which is growing faster than the midmarket and small-business segments. In all, the total number of UCaaS subscribers worldwide is nearing 14 million, double since early 2018. “We have seen a common theme among a variety of cloud markets over the last two quarters, with the pandemic helping to boost what were already strong growth rates. UCaaS has followed a similar trend,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy’s founder and chief analyst. “This has helped Zoom to make a sudden and strong entry into the UCaaS market, following its major success with its videoconferencing service. The stronger-than-expected market growth has also been an opportunity for other vendors, with Microsoft being the most notable example of a company gaining market share.”

Dec. 15, 2020
Mental Health Start-Ups Get Investment Boost Due to Pandemic
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the COVID-19 pandemic has unsurprisingly had a negative impact on people’s mental health. A CDC report in August found that adults in the United States – particularly younger adults, minorities, essential workers, and unpaid adult caregivers – are experiencing higher levels of adverse mental health conditions related to the coronavirus outbreak, including increased substance abuse and elevated suicide ideation. It’s an issue that tech investors also have noticed. According to a Reuters report, 2020 will be a record year for venture capital investments in start-ups in the mental health tech sector. The new organization said that research by data firm PitchBook found that as of Dec. 10, there were 146 deals that brought in almost $1.6 billion in such investments. That compares to 111 deals and $893 million during the same time last year, and three deals worth $6.6 million 10 years ago. Examples include Calm, the creator of a sleep and mediation app, which raised $75 million this month, and Modern Health, which offers a health and wellness platform and raised $51 million. Roger Lee, general partner at Battery Ventures, told Reuters that he expects the mental health tech sector will only grow, due not only to the pandemic but also to the use of social media. “When the book of social media is written, people will realize this was this generation’s tobacco,” Lee said.

Versa Sees COVID-19-Related Surge in SD-WAN, SASE Use
The work-from-home (WFH) trend that followed the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled a 100-times jump in usage of Versa Networks’ software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and secure access service edge (SASE) solutions, the company said Tuesday. Most companies sent at least a portion of employees to work from home starting in March and April when the coronavirus outbreak spilled out of China and spread around the world. The shift highlighted the need for technologies that could help organizations manage and secure their suddenly remote workforce and ensure business continuity. For some, SD-WAN and SASE technologies were part of the solution to challenges in a work model that had much fewer perimeters. Versa officials said they’ve seen a surge in the adoption of the company’s offerings through service providers, channel partners, and the cloud. “Though the longevity of work-from-home for employees continues, many organizations have not adapted to the new requirements of performance, visibility, and security for remote access,” said Michael Wood, Versa’s chief marketing officer. “WFH users need a cloud-based, scalable, hassle-free solution which will allow them to work securely from anywhere while reducing IT costs and complexity for the enterprise.”

Dec. 14, 2020
Oracle Joins HPE, Others in Moving From California to Texas
Oracle is the latest in a growing list of tech companies that are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and the related rapid shift to a remote workforce by moving their headquarters out of Silicon Valley to Texas and its less costly business environment. Officials with the enterprise software maker and cloud provider reportedly said this month that the company is moving its headquarters from Redwood City, California, to Austin, Texas, leaving a region that it has called home since its founding in 1977. “Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy,” a spokesperson told CNBC. “We believe these moves [of the headquarters and adoption of the new work policy] best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work. In addition, we will continue to support major hubs for Oracle around the world, including those in the United States such as Redwood City, Austin, Santa Monica, Seattle, Denver, Orlando, and Burlington, [Massachusetts], among others.” The company expects to add more locations. Oracle’s decision follows similar moves by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Palantir Technologies, which also are moving to Texas.

Google Puts Off Return to Work Until September 2021
Google has once again extended its pandemic-related remote policy. The company, which was among the first tech firms earlier this year to send employees home to work in hopes of slowing the spread of the coronavirus, is now continuing the policy until September 2021. The New York Times reported that Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, sent employees an e-mail Dec. 13 informing them that the policy has been extended and that Google is testing the idea of what he called a “flexible workweek” that could begin once the pandemic lifts. The plan would include letting employees work at least three days every week in the office and the other days at home. Pichair wrote that Google is “testing a hypothesis that a flexible work model will lead to greater productivity, collaboration, and well-being.” Google initially expected to end the work-from-home policy in January, but the anticipated surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths compelled company officials to extend that until July. Now the return to the office has been delayed another two months.

Dec. 11, 2020
Teradici Survey Address Lessons Learned from WFH Push
The sudden shift to a work-from-home model put a lot of pressure on organizations to adapt as the coronavirus outbreak made its way around the world. More than eight months later, executives can now look back to see the lessons learned from the transformation and what they might do different. According to a survey released this week by Teradici, whose cloud access software enables secure remote display solutions, more than two-thirds of the almost 700 IT professionals who responded said they would change the way they shift employees to work if faced with a similar crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic (including preparing hardware in advance, providing client devices, and training employees for remote work). In addition, 65% were comfortable with the level of security they’re operating with after sending employees home, leaving another 35% who were not comfortable. Many companies said they planned to increase IT spending by more than 100% to support remote teams and 75% said they were using remote desktops. The survey also found that for many industries, remote working is here to stay. About 56% of tech companies and 53% of media entertainment firms said more than half of their workers will continue working from home for the foreseeable future. Other sectors like education (43%), government and military (both 38%), and manufacturing and engineering (36%) said fewer than half of employees will work from home in an ongoing basis. More than half of the respondents said they needed to create or revise work-from-home policies.

Facebook: Employees Can Return to Work Without Vaccine
Facebook reportedly told its employees this week that they won’t be required to get vaccinated against the coronavirus before returning to work. According to a report in The Daily Beast, CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to tens of thousands of employees Dec. 10 and noted that in some countries with relatively low rates of COVID-19 infections, some workers already have returned to their buildings. Zuckerberg said the vaccines were a positive development in what has been a crushing pandemic and he encouraged employees to continue to practice safety measures, including social distancing, the report said, citing an anonymous source. A spokesperson later confirmed the report, saying that Zuckerberg said that “at this point, we don’t think it will be necessary to require a vaccine for employees to return to work.” Zuckerberg did say he planned on getting the vaccine, the spokesperson said. The CEO’s decision comes as vaccines are being approved by regulators and shots will start to be given in the United States as early as next week. Public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci also are urging citizens to get vaccinated when possible, noting that at least 75% of the population needed to get vaccinated by the end of next year to end the pandemic. Facebook moved aggressively earlier this year at the onset of the coronavirus outbreak, quickly shifting employees to remote work and saying they could continue working from home to at least July 2021.

Dec. 10, 2020
WFH, ‘BOPIS’ Driving Retail Sales During Pandemic: D&H
Executives with D&H said this week that since the first stay-at-home rules were put in place in April to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the distributor has seen retail sales grow at 15% to 25% a month, including an 87% increase in the PC gaming space in the six months since May 1, fueled in part by new gaming consoles hitting the market. There also was growth in product sales for the work-from-home and distance-learning trends, including mobile devices, Wi-Fi solutions, displays, and webcams, with that growth expected to continue. In addition, another key trend bolstering retail sales was “buy online, pick up in-store,” or BOPIS. Through this method, buyers were able to patronize big-box and local stores while staying safe and now that they’ve become accustomed to it, D&H expects it to continue even after the pandemic lifts. “Traditional e-commerce is surging, as would be expected in an atmosphere where consumers are intent on a safe shopping experience,” said Fred Eddy, D&H’s vice president of retail sales.

INAP Survey Shows COVID-19-Driven Turn to Hybrid Cloud
A new survey by hybrid infrastructure solution vendor INAP offers more data points that show the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing responses to it – including the shift to working from home – are ramping enterprises’ migration to the cloud and continuing to put pressure on companies to adapt to shifting business models. In the survey released Thursday, the company said that 54% of respondents said their companies are moving more workloads off premises to the cloud or co-location sites. The focus is on hybrid cloud environments. About 53% said their companies are migrating to hyperscale public cloud and co-location environments, while 50% said they’re turning to hosted private clouds. Given the shift to hybrid clouds, 35% said network, operating system, and data security are the top priorities when looking at infrastructure solutions. In addition, organizations are investigating how to address a remote workforce and a global business world that’s growing more reliant on digital services. About 51% of companies are considering virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and, given the threat of new lockdowns this winter as the pandemic surges, the key issues for IT teams are around troubleshooting new and changing environments, including modifying network strategies for a return to the office or remaining remote and setting up help-desk support.

Dec. 9, 2020
Project to Predict COVID-19 in a Person Wins $100,000 Prize
As the COVID-19 pandemic tightened its grip on the world, several companies and industry groups created challenges that offered money to finance projects that addressed various aspects of the coronavirus outbreak, from vaccines and therapeutics to gaining a deeper understanding of the virus itself. C3.ai, an artificial intelligence (AI) software maker, in September launched its own challenge to developers, data scientists, and others to create projects that would leverage data science techniques and strategies to accelerate research and fuel smart decision-making. This week, the start-up announced the winners of the prizes. The $100,000 grand prize went to a team of researchers that created a machine learning model designed to take in data around demographics, individual health characteristics, and behavior and geography to estimate the likelihood that a person is infected with the coronavirus can spread it. “Any return to normality relies on accurately determining who might have COVID-19. Demographics, individual health characteristics, and behavioral and geographical data considerably alter one’s risk of catching, suffering from, and spreading the virus,” said Freddy Bunbury, post-doctoral researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science and one of the winning team members. The company spread $25,000 and $12,500 prizes among other groups that focused on such issues as modeling the progression of the disease, predicting the effectiveness of vaccines and medications, the impact of COVID-19 policies on people and the economy, and the causal relationship between human mobility – like taking trips or staying at home – and the spread of COVID-19.

Dec. 8, 2020
Vermont Start-Up Develops AI-Based COVID-19 Test Software
A year-old start-up based in Vermont is claiming that artificial intelligence (AI)-based software it’s created can determine whether a patient can be ruled out as being infected with COVID-19 by analyzing routine bloodwork. In a paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, Biocogniv officials said the software could help healthcare facilities rule out some patients as being infected with the deadly disease, but also help them be more selective in their use of the PCR tests, which are considered the most accurate, though they can be costly and the lag time to get results can be a few days. Hospitals can save time, money, and PCR tests if there’s a simpler and faster way to rule out COVID-19 in patients. The company’s goal was to create and validate a machine learning model for ruling out adult patients in emergency departments. Biocogniv used clinical data from 66 hospital emergency rooms both from before the pandemic (December 2019) and during it (March through July) and included patients 20 or older. It included 192,779 patients in the training of the machine learning model. The software can say whether a patient is highly unlikely to have COVID-19 or the results can be inconclusive. According to a news report, the company is applying for emergency authorization use from the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) so the software can be used by healthcare facilities.

Dec. 7, 2020
AP: Few U.S. Residents Using Contact-Tracing Apps
Contact tracing is seen by public health experts as a key tool for getting the raging COVID-19 pandemic under control. Longtime rivals Apple and Google in April announced they were teaming up to develop a mobile app that would help with contact tracing by enabling devices using the app to register close contacts with each other and then alerting users if someone they had come in close contact with had tested positive for the coronavirus. The companies ensured that no private information would be exposed. However, according to an Associated Press report, relatively few Americans are using the technology. The news service found that only 18 U.S states and territories are making such technologies widely available and most Americans in these places haven’t activated the solution. A review of data found that as of late November, only 8.1 million people – from 110 million residents in the 16 states and the District of Columbia and Guam – have used the technology. “There’s a lot of things working against it,” Jessica Vitak, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, told the AP. “Unfortunately, in the U.S., COVID has been politicized far more than in any other country. I think that’s affecting people’s willingness to use tools to track it.”

Dec. 4, 2020
Facebook to Remove Disinformation About COVID-19 Vaccines
Given the massive numbers of people from around the world that they reach, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter, and similar sites have found themselves in the crosshairs of critics and lawmakers for allowing misinformation about a wide range of subjects, such as the presidential election, onto their sites. That criticism this year has extended to false information about the coronavirus, something most social networking sites have said they’re trying to limit to some degree. Now that there are vaccines on the horizon from multiple pharmaceutical companies, the pressure is on to stop the flow of misinformation about the drugs. YouTube – which is owned by Alphabet, which also is the parent company of Google – in October said it would remove content making false claims about the vaccines from the likes of Pfizer and Moderna, which could begin distribution as early as later this month. Now Facebook is following suit. In a blog post this week, Kang-Xing Jin, head of health at the company, wrote that Facebook “over the coming weeks … will start removing false claims about these vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts on Facebook and Instagram. This is another way that we are applying our policy to remove misinformation about the virus that could lead to imminent physical harm.” These include misinformation about the safety, efficacy, ingredients, or side effects of the medicines. “For example, we will remove false claims that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips, or anything else that isn’t on the official vaccine ingredient list,” Jin wrote.

Dec. 3, 2020
WFH Means Longer Work Weeks, Even During Holidays
The most visible change for businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the sudden shift to having employees work from home, a trend that’s expected to continue to some degree even after the public health crisis abates. Surveys have found a large number of workers want to continue teleworking and a growing number of businesses expect that more employees will work remotely in the coming years than had been before the coronavirus outbreak. NordVPN, a VPN service provider, found in a survey in March that employees were working more hours than before the pandemic – spending about three hours longer on business VPNs per day. Now the company has found that people also are working more on holidays, with the NordVPN Teams Analytics seeing a 42% and 70% increase in business VPN server load on Thanksgiving and Veteran’s Day, respectively, compared to what’s seen on average weekends. “We can also see employees working on weekends, but it’s considerably less, accounting for only 19%, compared to the business VPN server load on an average working day,” said Roberta Presaite, data analyst for NordVPN Teams. The company has found that the average work week in the United States has grown by about 40% since April – about another 15 hours on the job. “We still see no significant drop in the usage of business VPNs during lunch time, which might suggest that lunch breaks have become shorter,” Presaite said.

Verizon Sends Help to NYC Schools
The nationwide surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths is forcing many communities to rethink whether to keep their children in schools. The New York City public school system recently said it was temporarily switching back to all remote learning, a challenging situation for many students who don’t have access to the technology needed for distance learning. Verizon this week said it’s making a $43 million commitment to help the city provide students with remote learning tools. It’s donating 20,000 mobile hotspots – in partnership with the Fund for Public Schools – to students facing barriers to accessing the Internet and other technologies, and providing grant funding to several education nonprofits to enable STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education. The carrier already has been offering its Verizon Innovative Learning initiative, aimed at addressing the digital divide, in 15 NYC public schools.

Dec. 2, 2020
HPE Latest Tech Firm to Move HQ Out of California
The global coronavirus outbreak forced many employees to work from home and the expected trend even after the COVID-19 pandemic lifts is that a portion of the global workforce will not have to come into the office. No longer tied to a physical workplace and free to work from anywhere, some employees are contemplating moving out of high-cost areas like Silicon Valley and New York City. Apparently, some companies are doing the same. Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week became the latest tech firm opting to move its headquarters out of California and away from the state’s high cost of living. HPE officials announced that the company was shifting its headquarters to Houston, where it already has a significant presence. They noted that Houston is the company’s largest employment site and “an attractive market to recruit and retain future diverse talent.” HPE is building a new campus in the city, though the Bay Area in California – the company is currently based in San Jose – will continue to be a “strategic hub for HPE innovation.” No layoffs will come with the move. “As we look into the future, our business needs opportunities for cost savings [and] simplifying our footprint,” HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri said. “Also … we learned quite a bit about the team preferences about the future to work. Altogether, we made the decision to relocate the headquarters.” A CNBC report noted that HPE is only the latest company to make such a move. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics solution vendor, left Palo Alto, California, for Denver, and that company’s co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is moving the headquarters of his venture firm, 8VC, from San Francisco to Austin, Texas. San Francisco-based Dropbox, which has made remote work a standard practice, reportedly also is shifting its base of operations to Austin.

Dec. 1, 2020
Zoom Continues to Ride Momentum from Pandemic
Cloud-based video collaboration vendor Zoom was an early beneficiary of the lockdowns and work-from-home push that came with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that momentum doesn’t seem to be slowing. The company this week reported that in the third quarter, revenue reached more than $777 million – a 367% year-over-year increase. Zoom officials said that the company had 433,700 customers with more than 10 employees, a 485% increase, and 1,289 customers contributing more than $100,000 in trailing 12-month revenue, up 136%. Zoom expects fourth-quarter revenue to come in between $806 million and $811 million and revenue for its full fiscal year to hit more than $2.57 billion. “We remain focused on the communication needs of our customers and communities as they navigate the current environment and adapt to a new world of work from anywhere using Zoom,” founder and CEO Eric Yuan said. The company earlier this year reported more than 300 million active daily participants. Zoom overcame initial bumps around privacy and security, including enabling end-to-end encryption for both paid and free users.

COVID-19 Fuels Years of Change in Matter of Months: McKinsey
The coronavirus outbreak forced companies to react rapidly to seemingly overnight changes in their businesses, from adapting to a workforce where most employees suddenly were working from home to ramping up cloud service adoption to become more agile and cost-effective. A recent report by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company tried to quantify this rate of change. What it found was that companies made years of advancement and change over the course of only several months. According to the survey, “companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years. And the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by a shocking seven years.” The adoption of digital technologies has taken a significant step forward both at companies and within the industry – with the worldwide average share of customer interactions that are digital jumping from 36% in December 2019 to 58% in July, for example – and many of these changes will stick post-pandemic. That includes changing customer needs (62% of survey respondents said this will continue), remote working (54%), and more assets migrating to the cloud (54%). More survey results can be found here.

Nov. 30, 2020
Nutanix: Focus on Hybrid Cloud Grows During Pandemic
Organizations are taking a more strategic approach and focusing more of their efforts on hybrid clouds as they look to adapt to the rapidly changing business model brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sharp shift to working from home has helped accelerate the adoption of cloud services by companies that need greater agility in deploying infrastructure to support a more distributed workforce, according to a recent survey conducted by hybrid cloud solution provider Nutanix. The survey found that 76% of respondents said the pandemic made them think more strategically about IT and 46% said they’ve increased their investments in hybrid cloud due to the coronavirus outbreak. About 86% said hybrid cloud remains their preferred IT infrastructure model. In its annual Enterprise Cloud Index survey, the vendor also found that companies believe remote working will remain even after the public health crisis lifts. In last year’s survey, about 27% of respondents had no full-time at-home workers. That number dropped to 7% due to COVID-19, and by 2022, respondents believe that number will be at 13%. Half of respondents say improving IT infrastructure will be a priority over the next 12 to 18 months, while 47% say enhancing work-from-home capabilities will be on that list. “In January, for many companies, technology was considered a basic function of a business, enabling core organizational processes,” Nutanix CIO Wendy Pfeiffer said. “Today, technology has taken on an entirely new meaning. It is a complex strategy and it makes or breaks a company’s long-term viability.”

COVID-19 Drags Smartphone Sales, but Holidays Fuel Optimism
The lockdown orders that followed the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic put a squeeze on sales worldwide of smartphones, a trend that continued in the third quarter, according to Gartner analysts. Sales to end users came in at 366 million units, a 5.7% year-over-year drop. That was still an improvement over the first two quarters, which saw declines of more than 20% each. There was pent-up demand, but consumers are continuing to limit discretionary spending due to economic uncertainties and fear of a new wave of coronavirus cases. However, IDC analysts are optimistic about the market during the holiday season and beyond, forecasting that smartphone sales in the fourth quarter will jump 2.4% year-over-year and 4.4% in 2021. That will be fueled by a fast recovery in the supply chain and incentives from both device makers and channel players on new 5G products. IDC expects the global smartphone market will grow an average of 1.3% each year through 2024.

Nov. 25, 2020
Microsoft, Harvard Develop COVID-19 Tracking Tool
Microsoft, working with two Harvard research centers, has created a live tracker monitoring tool that monitors the real-time status of COVID-19 cases and deaths and the number of new cases in congressional districts around the United States. The information can be useful to elected officials and residents of those districts not only in monitoring the spread of the coronavirus but also in developing policies and planning strategies around testing and vaccine distribution. Microsoft launched its AI for Health program in January – before the coronavirus outbreak started its rapid growth around the world – with the goal of using artificial intelligence techniques and data to address global health issues. Much of the program’s work was soon consumed by the pandemic. In developing the tracker, the tech giant worked with researchers at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. The effort pulls together data related to public health and elections to create a range of metrics for each congressional district, including confirmed cases and deaths as a percentage of the population and historical and new cases and deaths.

Nov. 24, 2020
Pandemic Fuels Need for Banks to Improve Payment Systems
Social distancing efforts to help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus have driven a sharp shift in consumer payments away from cash and toward cards and digital payments. This trend also means that banks need to modernize their payment systems if they want to be in compliance with new regulations and compete with non-bank digital-payment providers, according to a report from Accenture released Nov. 24. The global systems integrator and consultancy is predicting that almost 420 billion transactions worth $7 trillion will shift from cash to cards and digital payments by 2023 and will increase to $48 trillion by 2030. The survey of 120 payment executives at banks around the world found that 75% of respondents said the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the urgency around plans to modernize their payment systems. In addition, 75% said the need to modernize these systems is being driven by changes to national payment infrastructure and regulations, including improving bank-to-bank payments systems, new industry standards, and open banking – or the use of APIs to enable third-party developers to build software and services around a financial institution. “COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to digital payments at a pace banks could not have predicted,” said Sulabh Agarwal, who leads Accenture’s Payments practice. “The pandemic will permanently change how consumers shop and pay for products as they prioritize convenience above all else.”

Simplus Builds Vaccine Distribution Solution with Salesforce
The news around COVID-19 vaccines is shining a light on what otherwise has been a dark fall as the pandemic continues to rage across the United States and other parts of the world. But while at least three vaccine trials have shown positive results in protecting people against the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, the challenge now becomes getting the vaccines distributed fairly and efficiently once they become available. Salesforce in late September unveiled a program as part of its Work.com solution suite that’s aimed at enabling organizations to more easily manage such distribution systems. Now Simplus, an Infosys company, said this month it worked with Salesforce to create a vaccine management cloud system built on the Salesforce Platform and supporting Salesforce’s Work.com for Vaccines effort. The solution is designed to help states comply with the federal government’s mandate to be prepared to distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. The Infosys vaccine management solution touches on a range of challenges, from campaign management and citizen registration to prioritization, supply chain visibility, forecasting, vaccine administration, and adverse event monitoring. The offering is integrated with Salesforce Health Cloud to ensure compliance with such laws as HIPAA, and within it are two communities – one for residents and the other for providers.

Nov. 23, 2020
Remote Work a Boon for Most Tech Workers: Indeed
The rapid expansion of remote work brought on this year by the coronavirus outbreak will not end when the pandemic recedes. Organizations have said they expect to continue to allow many employees to work at home for at least part of the time and some companies like Twitter have said their workers can telework forever. It’s also becoming increasingly clear that many workers are eyeing a future where they rarely if ever have to go into the office. In a report this month, job search site Indeed surveyed 616 U.S. tech workers who had worked in the office before the public health crisis and switched to full-time remote work. What the survey found was that 96% of respondents said that remote work wasn’t going away and 95% said they plan to work from home permanently, with 60% saying they would take a pay cut to do so. Of the 5% who want to return to the office, 63% said collaboration is more difficult from home and 62% said they missed socializing with coworkers. Workers see a range of personal positive impacts from the trend toward teleworking, including 86% citing improved flexibility and the lack of a commute. In addition, 83% suggested it improved their work-life balance. Also, two-thirds of respondents said expanded remote work will increase diversity in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, and geography.

Nov. 20, 2020
Public Cloud Spending to Jump 18.4% in 2021: Gartner
Spending on public cloud computing will continue to grow as the calendar – and the COVID-19 pandemic – turns to 2021. In a report this week, Gartner analysts said worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will jump 18.4% next year to $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion this year. As other market research firms have noted, enterprises and SMBs already were increasing the amount they were spending on cloud services over the past few years, but the onset of the global public health crisis this year accelerated the adoption of those services as organizations had to respond quickly to the rapid changes in the IT world, including the sudden shift to remote work. “The pandemic validated cloud’s value proposition,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “The ability to use on-demand, scalable cloud models to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity is providing the impetus for organizations to rapidly accelerate their digital business transformation plans.” The proportion of IT spending that is shifting to the cloud also will grow as the pandemic lifts, with cloud expected to account for 14.2% of global enterprise spending in 2024, up from 9.1% this year. Gartner’s report found that almost 70% of organizations using cloud services today expect to increase their cloud spending due to the disruption caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

Nonprofit Project Aims to Get Used PCs to Students in Need
An organization that resells used computers and other tech assets is launching a new program designed to get businesses and homes to donate unused PCs that can then be given to students who face another round of distance learning as the number of COVID-19 cases surges across the country. The goal of PlanITROI’s nonprofit Digital Dreams Project is to get 1 million computers into the hands of students who don’t have the means to get their own even as they are forced back into remote learning situations. Project members will reclaim, refurbish, and then distribute the used computers to disadvantaged students, who face not only financial hurdles but ongoing shortages of systems from manufacturers, the organization said. Paul Baum, PlanITROI CEO and founder of the project, estimated that there are one to five idle or unused computers in 100 million U.S. homes and millions more in American offices. Since 2011, PlanITROI has distributed computers to more than 7 million people around the United States. More information about the Digital Dreams Project can be found here. As the most recent wave of COVID-19 cases spreads across the country, eight states already have either partially or totally closed classrooms to protect the health of students, teachers, and staff.

Nov. 19, 2020
Organizations Satisfied with Cloud Providers During Pandemic
It’s well understood that the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled an acceleration in the adoption of cloud services by organizations that have needed to adapt to rapidly changing business models, such as a widely distributed workforce. Synergy Research Group in September noted that revenue in the first half of the year across four cloud service and infrastructure markets were up 20% year-over-year to $187 billion. According to a study released this week by digital consultancy SPR, 63% of organizations are satisfied with how their current cloud providers have supported them during the pandemic, though 69% said they were somewhat likely to switch to or add additional cloud providers in the next 12 months. Among providers, 72% of Microsoft Azure users and 71% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users said they were extremely satisfied with their performance. For Google Cloud, that number was 62%. The survey of 400 IT decision-makers and 400 line-of-business IT workers found that Azure users deploy hybrid cloud models more often than those of AWS or Google Cloud, though they also use multicloud models the least. The top reason enterprises were accelerating their cloud efforts now was to facilitate remote work. There also seems to be a disconnect between IT decision-makers and line-of-business workers. About 47% of decision-makers said COVID-19 accelerated their cloud maturity, compared with only 29% of workers. In addition, 39% of decision-makers said their cloud initiatives were very mature, though only a quarter of IT workers agreed.

Massachusetts Turns to Bluetooth Devices for Contact Tracing
Massachusetts officials are looking to Bluetooth-based mobile devices to help in the state’s contact tracing efforts as its coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and death numbers – similar to essentially every other state in the country – climb going into the holiday season. The state Department of Health is asking for bidders for three programs in a pilot project to test existing technology from Apple and Google, compare the technology to third-party applications, and investigate any security flaws, according to a report in the Boston Herald. Apple and Google in April announced a partnership to develop a Bluetooth-based contact-tracing technology that would enable mobile devices to communicate when in close proximity. If a person with one of those devices later tests positive for COVID-19, an alert could be sent out to the other devices. Other tech vendors also are leveraging Bluetooth technology in similar efforts. Massachusetts officials have been investigating technologies since soon after the pandemic began to aid with contact tracing. They hope to select two or three bids over the next month.

Nov. 18, 2020
Red Hat Joins With DarwinAI, WHO in Fight Against COVID-19
Open-source hybrid cloud player Red Hat is working on two tracks to help battle the COVID-19 disease. The IBM-owned company this week said it’s partnering with artificial intelligence (AI) technology company DarwinAI to make it easier for healthcare clinicians to use the COVID-Net neural networks through a web-based GUI that uses Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes platform for hybrid cloud and multicloud infrastructures. The GUI sits atop Boston Children’s Hospital’s ChRIS open-source medical analytics framework. DarwinAI and the University of Waterloo in May launched COVID-Net, a suite of deep neural networks for detecting COVID-19 through chest radiography. Red Hat and DarwinAI also were working with the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center, a computation research group at Boston Children’s, to tune the software for real-world clinical and research use. Red Hat also is working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to build an open-source development infrastructure to support WHO’s Learning Experience Platform. The goal is to more quickly disseminate accurate COVID-19 information to healthcare practitioners, policy makers, and WHO staff. The project is using development practices from Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs and Open Practice Library and technologies from Red Hat community projects.

Fraud Calls to Call Centers Jump During Pandemic: Report
Call centers for companies like financial services and insurance firms have seen sharp increases in calls since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to research by fraud detection solutions vendor Pindrop and market research firm Forrester, the number of suspicious or fraudulent calls also is growing. With the drop in face-to-face interactions, contact centers are experiencing a surge in calls, according to the report released this month. About 42% have seen a year-over-year increase in call volume, while almost a third have seen the number grow more than 50%. At the same time, 57% of firms surveyed said fraud attacks on call centers have increased since the coronavirus outbreak, with 53% saying it’s impacting their bottom line. About two-thirds said maintaining security without impacting the customer experience is a challenge. “Account reconnaissance, the most common type of fraud firms are seeing in the IVR, is on the rise. Most respondents said they’ve seen fraudsters use the IVR [interactive voice response] for account mining or reconnaissance since the pandemic began,” the authors said in the report. “Bad actors know contact centers are stretched thin, and they are using that to their advantage — starting with IVR.”

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