Tag: COVID-19

Demand for digital building product marketplace rises by 125 percent

Posted on September 22, 2020 by - News

Specification-led marketing and product data specialist, SpecifiedBy, has reported substantial quarterly growth in its online marketplace as COVID-19 building product manufacturers embrace digital transformation.

The Newcastle-headquartered company, whose clients include Dyson, VELUX, Tarmac and SIG, has seen a 125 percent increase in manufacturers signing up to its platform between April and June 2020, compared to the same period last year. During this time, traffic to the platform has also increased by 60 percent as architects and specifiers are among the professions that have moved more of their work online during the pandemic.

Tech changes that COVID-19 enabled

Posted on September 8, 2020 by - News

Vincentas Grinius, CEO at Heficed, said some of the changes to the industry bought in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic are here to stay.

Grinius said that unable to resume business as usual, workers continued to carry out their daily tasks from the comfort of their homes. Companies pivoted their IT budgets to VoIP services, secure VPNs, remote desktop protocols, and other solutions aimed at streamlining collaboration among employees.

Blockchain gets a boost from COVID-19

Posted on August 25, 2020 by - News

Rusty chain - Wikimedia CommonsForrester  analysts have been adding up some numbers and reached the conclusion that COVID-19 has given Blockchain initiatives a kick in the pants.

A new report with the catchy title, ‘COVID-19 Is Accelerating Critical Enterprise Blockchain Initiatives’ shows that blockchain initiatives, particularly related to supply chain and logistics, have accelerated during the pandemic, despite many budgets being cut.

InfinityQS’ Global Client Survey shows positive upturn in manufacturing

Posted on August 11, 2020 by - News

Green shoots of recovery are emerging within the manufacturing sector, according to InfinityQS’ 2020 Global Client Survey.

The results show a positive upturn in the industry, with nearly 74 percent of respondents reporting that they are optimistic toward the future. These manufacturers are adapting and rebounding in the wake of the pandemic, adopting new technologies and processes for managing production and controlling quality, including 75 percent  who noted more of their workers are now working remotely. 

Corvid home working shift triggers eacs support extension

Posted on August 5, 2020 by - News

MSP eacs has decided that it needs to launch a 24/7 service model to take advantage of the CORVID-19 move to remote networking.

The firm has seen its customer base react to the coronavirus by demanding more levels of support and, given a recent refinancing deal, eacs is in a position to meet those changing market conditions.

Last month, the business scored a multimillion-pound refinance deal working with broker Knight Capital Funding and corporate lender Shawbrook Bank. The money is not only being used to refinance an existing facility, but also to upsize the debt on more favourably to help the firm invest in initiatives such as the extension of support.

Kevin Timms, chairman and chief executive of eacs said: “The driver here has been COVID and many of our clients are now beginning to investigate new ways of working, as exemplified by the rise in working from home. However, with greater flexibility in operations and working hours come additional challenges to many businesses as they seek to support their staff, both operationally and personally.”

Frost & Sullivan predicts rise of remote workers shock

Posted on July 23, 2020 by - News

Frost & Sullivan predicts that the number of remote workers in the wake COVID-19 will be 500 percent greater compared to the pre-pandemic number, creating a massive demand for video meetings.

This can’t be much of a surprise.

It its report with the catchy title “Post-pandemic Growth Opportunity Analysis of the Meetings Market”  Frost & Sullivan predicted that the number of video meeting licenses is projected to increase at a CAGR of 24.6 percent between 2019 and 2025, compared to a pre-pandemic forecast of 17.2 percent.

COVID-19 will permanently alter business and technology. No kidding

Posted on July 17, 2020 by - News

Augurs working for the analyst outfit Forrester say that COVID-19 will usher in five macro shifts that will permanently alter business and technology.

In a  new report with the catchy title, “The New, Unstable Normal: How COVID-19 Will Change Business And Technology Forever,” Forrester describes how, despite modern healthcare and the implementation of extensive pandemic management protocols (PMPs), the effects of COVID-19 will continue to surface over the next decade and will cause profound near-, medium-, and long-term impacts.

Imperial launches COVID-19 information platform with Cloudwick and MirrorWeb

Posted on July 7, 2020 by - News

A consortium of technology companies comprising Cloudwick, MirrorWeb, and Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL (AWS), is working with PanSurg, an Imperial College London COVID-19 surgical network made up of healthcare professionals and academics from the Department of Surgery and Cancer and the Institute of Global Health Innovation.

The idea is to build a global knowledge platform to help provide the healthcare community with guidance on delivering high quality care to COVID-19 patients.

UK government departments still go Zoom

Posted on June 29, 2020 by - News

Major government departments have bought more than 700 Zoom video conferencing licences during the COVID-19 outbreak and 41,300 new laptops, tablet computers and mobile phones to help staff operate remotely.

Government and parliament were told by the intelligence agencies two months ago not to use the videoconferencing service Zoom for confidential business, due to fears it could be vulnerable to Chinese surveillance.

The quiet warnings to limit the technology came after the cabinet had used Zoom to hold a well-publicised meeting at the end of March, a decision that was defended at the time as necessary in “unprecedented circumstances”.

Cloud migrations to increase

Posted on June 24, 2020 by - News

A LogicMonitor study of 500 global IT decision makers examines the future of cloud workloads and the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on IT organisations in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Though the full picture is still evolving, the survey suggests that COVID-19 has become a powerful catalyst for rapid cloud migration.

LogicMonitor’s Cloud 2025 study  found that 87 percent of global IT decision makers agree that the COVID-19 pandemic will cause organisations to accelerate their migration to the cloud. Specifically, nearly three quarters (74 percent) of respondents believe that, within the next five years, 95 percent of all workloads will be in the cloud. Many IT decisions makers around the world are even more optimistic than that, with 37 percent of respondents in the APAC region saying 95 percent of workloads will reach the cloud by 2022, compared with 35 percent of US/Canada respondents and 30 per cent of UK respondents.

Cisco says its channel strategy has accelerated “like hell’

Posted on June 23, 2020 by - News

Cisco claims that its channel strategy has “accelerated like hell” during the COVID-19 crisis.

Cisco’s Oliver Tuszik said that Cisco has not changed its messaging to the channel to transform their business even during a time of huge economic uncertainty for channel partners and their customers.

He added that Cisco’s has seen a huge acceleration among its partner community towards software and services selling over the last six months as a direct result of the COVID-19 crisis.

No end in sight to IT vendor layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs

Posted on June 22, 2020 by - News

There has been widespread evidence of layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs at IT vendors, and there is more economic pain on the horizon, according to bean counters at GlobalData.

GlobalData reports that, as of the end of May, the number of active jobs in the technology and telecommunications field was down 36.2 percent as compared with the same time last year.

Steven Schuchart, Principal Analyst at GlobalData, said: “Times are tough for enterprise IT vendors. The economic downturn as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has hit them hard. Some IT vendors, particularly the ones involved in cloud or collaboration, have seen great increases in business, but the traditional vendors and startups are taking a beating.”

Is your channel business equipped to survive COVID-19?

Posted on June 18, 2020 by - News

Peter Olive, CEO of Vortex 6, a company which automates vendor partner programme compliance has been explaining the key approaches for channel businesses to undertake to make sure they stay in good shape during the pandemic, not only ensuring business continuity but thriving as a result.

Olive said that the current pandemic is forcing firms all over the world to rethink how they do business in 2020 and beyond – the IT channel is no exception.

Channel partners are playing a crucial role during the crisis, ensuring customers’ businesses are fully enabled – in many cases standing up remote workforces almost overnight. Partners have been forced to adapt quickly and some may feel vulnerable during this period of uncertainty.

Olive says as a partner, you will have many questions and concerns. Is the budget your customers spend with you likely to be cut? How are we going to be affected by the economic recession? Where should you put your resources? Are there processes that are manual and inefficient that you can automate?  

Datacentre market slows

Posted on June 16, 2020 by - News

Big snail in Old TaipeiThe datacentre market began to lose momentum in Q1 as the COVID-19 crisis halted hardware spending in the enterprise space according to a report from Synergy Research Group.

In a freshly baked report  Synergy said that software spending declined by two percent globally in the first quarter to $35.8 billion.

The Q1 decline was driven by a sharp drop in enterprise and service provider spending, which fell by four per cent during the quarter to $22.5 billion, Synergy wrote.

Public cloud spending, however, helped abate the decline, growing by three per cent. The company said that COVID-19 pandemic has had “little impact” on the public cloud datacentre infrastructure market.

It follows several consecutive quarters of growth in datacentre spending. Synergy claims that datacentre hardware and software spending grew by two percent in 2019, with public cloud up by seven per cent and traditional datacentre spending down by seven percent.

UK smart cities need to advance in response to COVID-19 

Posted on June 4, 2020 by - News

illustration: elenabsl/adobe stock

Analysts GlobalData said any of the short-term fixes and even long-term cures envisaged for the illness of urban and wider society so vividly and exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic lie, at least in part and sometimes almost completely with ICT.

With half of the world’s population living in cities and 70 percent projected by 2050, it is now more important than ever to tackle these challenges, the analysts said.

GlobalData forecasts the market for smart cities to grow from $458 billion in 2019 to $624 billion by 2024, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.4 percent, with the biggest growth coming from transportation, infrastructure, and grids.

Tony Cripps, Principal Analyst at GlobalData, said: “Creativity of thinking by UK cities and companies will be a necessity for managing the business impacts post-COVID-19, a fact that necessarily places the use of advanced ICT very high on what looks set to be a reinvigorated smart cities agenda.”