The Coronavirus pandemic has driven leaders to rethink the way that we do things, and although the threat to our health has placed many obstacles in our path, the world has pulled together with determination to address and eventually eliminate the virus. In the same manner, businesses around the world are finding the current unprecedented climate a challenge but they are finding new ways to handle the crisis while tackling the slow down to business.

The current situation more than anything has caused restrictions to people’s movement and during such an unforeseen event such as COVID-19 when people’s safety is paramount, it is the technology that comes to the rescue by ways of innovation and opportunity.

The NetEvents [email protected] virtual international media event “What’s Hot in Networking & Analyst Views,” held last week brought together a panel of several senior specialists for an informed discussion about the technology sector’s business outlook during this difficult time. The panel was chaired by Jeremiah Caron, Global Head of Research & Analysis, Technology Group, GlobalData.

As a world-leading data and analysis company, GlobalData provides for 4,000 of the world’s largest companies to help them to make better and more timely decisions through their unique data, expert analysis, and innovative solutions delivered through a single platform.

“A unique data-driven, human-led, and technology-powered approach creates the trusted, actionable, and forward-looking intelligence you need to predict the future and avoid blind-spots,” GlobalData’s website says.

An experienced senior executive with a strong history of leading research and analysis teams, and driving client value through real-time, actionable insights and advice, Jeremiah Caron on shared advanced data from current research on IT buying trends from 4,200 Enterprises at this event, Caron also discussed the trends that they are seeing due to the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.

“Obviously, healthcare workers, and the, the emergency services teams, and people working in supermarkets and people who are doing things that make the world run, like garbage collection and all these things - they're the real superstars of this COVID-19 situation that we're all in, but I would add to that, IT and networking, alongside them,” Caron said. “What has happened in terms of the rapid and instant shift to the way businesses operate and also the shift or acceleration of the way we work, we deal with our personal lives and interact with our friends and family, all have never depended upon technology more than they did the past couple months, and the performance was outstanding. I think we all should be really proud to be a part of an industry that was so integral to us getting along as human beings, not just from a business perspective, during this crisis.”

GlobalData’s mission is to help clients decode the future to be more successful and innovative. Over the years, they have become one of the largest data and insights solution providers in the world.

 “One of the things I'll point out is a shift in priorities,” Caron continued. “During the past couple of months, before COVID-19 when we asked, ‘what are your key priorities?’ Unsurprisingly, that far leader was sales, ‘let's bring in the money’, you know, and contract delivery and the things and looking at new markets and all that these were the priorities before COVID-19 but then there was a sudden shift in all of that, the most important thing that businesses, business leaders were thinking about was first and foremost, employee safety. And secondly, survival - business continuity, just getting things done. Further down and this will, this will kick into gear, as we move forward next quarter and the quarter after that, things like sales growth and whatnot were not priorities, there were bigger fish to fry as the saying goes, and it'll be very interesting to watch to see how that evolves as some of the environments and societies, open up a bit. Over time, there's still some way to really tell what the true impact of COVID-19 will be.”

 “In the critical months of March and April, there was a spike in spending in some areas for sure, as they move their employees to working from home or also building out their security, support and moving applications to the cloud, etc.,” Caron added. “But generally, if you think about most businesses, now they're looking forward and going ‘we don't know what the economic situation is going to be’. So, it's not surprising to see that they're expecting to spend less overall.”

“In terms of priorities over the next two years and again, this is information taken very recently. So, it is COVID-19 impacted, if you will, you know, not surprising that this sort of, there's interest in all these areas, obviously. And, and again, trying to project two years, what they're gonna have money to spend on is difficult, but clearly collaboration, the need to really make that robust, make it business class, make it somewhat permanent. You know, one of the things that we've observed is a lot of what we're what we're seeing now, that represented a sudden shift for some business will become permanent, or at least partially, and businesses are thinking about that and also thinking about Automation may be accelerating their efforts to automate processes.”

“Interestingly, while we saw the expectation that IT budgets were going to be less throughout the rest of this year,” Caron concluded. “Actually, the vast majority said that on networking they expect it to be at least flat or increase. And I think that's for pretty obvious reasons to the extent to which they're going to recover and support their employee base they're going to have to invest in networking, at the very minimum they may not invest in a lot of other things other than collaboration, for example, but networking is one area that they do expect to see increased investment in.”

The panel, which included, John Apostolopoulos, VP & CTO for Enterprise Networking Business, Cisco; Mansour Karam, President & Founder, Apstra; Bob Friday, CTO, Juniper Networks (and co-founder of Mist, a Juniper Company); and Kevin Deierling, SVP Marketing, Networking, NVIDIA exchanged views and explored the hottest technologies and trends which included the new developments in wireless technology for Enterprise and Edge; the advances being made in Cloud by optimizing the application experience; the latest developments on Intelligent Network Automation through Intent-Based Networking (IBN) enabling increased automation and analysis across all elements of the network, and more.