“After the most challenging year in recent memory for most people, and significant economic regressions worldwide in 2020, I believe that 2021 is going to see an enormous shift to a bull market. We are preparing for a huge year based on current demand and recent trends, and most business owners I have spoken to this quarter are seeing similar spikes in demand with no sign of letting up.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been discussed with great fanfare over the last few years, and 2021 will see more applications reaching most households in developed countries through smart meters, smart TVs, smart fridges and similar appliances and devices.
5G is now a proven technology that is running very successfully in countries such as South Korea, China, Japan, the USA and Australia, and the coming year will see huge growth in Europe and Asia in particular.
With the noticeable increase in demand for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, I expect this to be a key growth area for SaaS applications for the next year and beyond, as more businesses realise the critical importance of knowing your customers and capturing data about their interactions and preferences.
Microsoft continues to rapidly grow their revenues from subscriptions to Microsoft 365, Office 365 and Dynamics 365, and are set to continue this trend, and while the field of competitors continues to increase, the market growth outstrips this to the point where this is plenty of opportunity for new players as well as the dominant incumbents. I do expect there to be some consolidation towards the end of 2021, where a smaller number of successful challengers absorb many of those less successful ones, to quickly gain market share and functionality.
The move away from housing IT appliances such as servers, firewalls, routers etc. onsite and migrating to the cloud will climb steeply in 2021, now that the requirement for flexible working arrangements has become so apparent in the past 12 months, so expect Amazon, Google and Microsoft to all profit from this trend in a big way. Data centres are going from strength to strength for similar reasons, especially for those businesses that remain wary of security concerns with the public cloud.
In the past 12 months we saw one or two examples of legal action being taken against senior executives and business owners from companies that were found to have exposed customer data to being captured illegally due to taking inadequate precautions to protect that data, and there is every reason to expect this trend to increase. Inevitably, as the risks become too great to tolerate, the cyber security industry is poised to boom throughout 2021 and will continue to do so for the next 3-5 years in particular.”
