Tune into: Disruptive Change
One day, when – with the benefit of hindsight – we look back at 2020, we will likely remember it as a period of unprecedented, tumultuous and continuous change. The type of change that makes you a bit nauseous and scared at the same time. Like a rollercoaster ride, but a lot less predictable and with widely different outcomes and impacts per person, per industry and per country, even though we were essentially on the same ride.
In our industry forecast we referred to this as “the end of averages” (or at least the end of meaningful averages). Within the same country, one industry was experiencing record growth, while another would be fully locked down with no revenue left. The IT industry as a whole did relatively well, while cloud came out with flying colors. As we mentioned in our cloud predicts, try to imagine lockdowns and mandatory work from home without the benefit of collaboration platforms like Zoom ,Teams, Webex or without sharing platforms like Dropbox, Sharepoint.
Telecom providers tweaked th e dials of their networks and reaped the benefits of their fairly recent software defined and virtual networking investments. Keeping everyone connected in realtime, despite massively different traffic patterns and volumes. And as always they got little recognition or reward. Communication pipes are very much like the pipes of sewer systems, nobody gives them much thought, until they overflow of cog up. All the attention, and most of the money, went to what ran Over The Top. Some things never seem to change, not even in 2020.
Looking further ahead, let’s say towards 2025, we do expect some significant change in how the competitive landscape will look. The cloud disrupters of just a few years ago have now become – at record speed – the incumbents of the cloud market. But that market is about to change significantly with the entry of Edge computing. And all market players feel they have a historic right to play there. Cloud provider see Edge computing as a way to distribute their cloud offerings to be nearer to their customers (distributed cloud). Traditional on-premises infrastructure players feel that near premisses (Edge) is a lot closer to their on-premises offering. And telecom players are all eager to finally combine their old (metropolitan real-estate locations, once occupied by massive rotary switches) and new (5G spectrum and close nit antenna coverage) investments into a monetizable offering.
The next 5 years promise to be an interesting chess game, where who blinks first will loose and where unexpected turns and twists will cause plenty of nausea and fear. Although hopefully only off the professional and commercial kind.
Stay Safe and all the best for 2021.
Rollercoaster is a song by Dutch artist Danny Vera, who during the traditional end of year Top 2000 competition, managed to displace incumbent powerhouses that occupied the lead spot for decades, such as Queen, The Eagles and Led Zeppelin. Already considered as a timeless classic when it was introduced in 2019, the song helped numerous people to cope with the rollercoaster life we got to know during 2020.
To play the song, please click the link in the show notes.
Tune Into The Cloud 