16 Winners and Losers After COVID-19 "” Including Some That Will Surprise You "” Part One

The COVID-19 pandemic delivered a mixed bag of blessings and curses to the technology world. Some companies, such as those specializing in video conferencing, turned out to be lifesavers, making it possible for society to function — and sometimes thrive — while working remotely. Others, however, such as development shops that build stage lighting control systems, faced a world in which demand for their services dropped sharply, sometimes to zero.

While it is too early to know which shifts in IT usage and approaches will become permanent, we can identify companies that are thriving now and are likely to continue doing so even after the pandemic fades.

One of the biggest shifts will be for those who work in offices, who already represent a large portion of the technology economy. Many companies have already announced they will not go back to requiring employees to report to the office every working day. They are embracing remote work, signaling it will be the new normal. The savings in time and real estate are too significant to ignore. Hybrid schedules — where people meet in person a few times a week, month, or quarter — will also be part of an experimental workplace mix.

Below is a look at the technology categories and strategies that have benefited from the shifts caused by the COVID-19 crisis, and which are likely to be reconsidered after the pandemic.

Winner: Video Conferencing — and Its Ecosystem

The clear big winner remains easy to identify: demand for video conferencing tools surged dramatically as meetings and classroom sessions moved online. But it's not only the few major platforms that are benefiting — the virtual meetings boom has attracted satellite projects tuned for smaller niches. Zoom, for example, has an app marketplace with specialized extensions for industries such as finance, education and customer service and more than a dozen other categories. Similar software projects have been built around Microsoft Teams and Google Meet as well.

The prominent systems are not the only ones. Open-source tools like Jitsi allow anyone to host their own video conferencing system, either to save money or to increase security. There are also options for offloading hosting work to others using Jitsi as a Service (JaaS).

Furthermore, the need to see all your colleagues in small grids on your laptop has been a boon for cloud service providers as well. Video conferencing creates more and more cloud machines to meet demands that rise and fall with school and office schedules. Machines equipped with high-powered GPUs are particularly useful and are ideal for generating thumbnail-sized versions of video streams on the fly.

Loser: Office Management Tools

Dozens of software and hardware packages designed to streamline the day in physical offices have taken a significant hit. As long as large portions of the workforce are working from home, there will be far less demand for enterprise software for tasks like scheduling conference rooms. The same applies to hardware products like those small tablets mounted outside meeting room doors that display who has the room booked. A very large number of products use physical proximity sensors to detect RFID chips in badges for access control or to track the use of office equipment such as photocopiers. Tools built on detecting and caring for people using physical presence will not be a priority at least for a workforce that does not return to the office en masse.

16 Winners and Losers After COVID (Some of Whom Will Surprise You) — Part One:

Winner: Collaboration Software

Office tools that enable people to work collaboratively on documents or presentations have become more valuable than ever. In-person meetings where someone stops by a cubicle or calls employees into a conference room to spread some papers on a table are almost entirely gone. All of that back-and-forth has moved online, so demand for — and tolerance of — whiteboards and collaboration tools that facilitate remote work has risen significantly. And now that the genie is out of the bottle, and many companies have reconsidered their remote work strategies even after returning to the office, expect demand to continue for some time.

Here, as with video conferencing, there are additional tool marketplaces that may also benefit from the surge. Zoho, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and virtually every other online collaboration tool support a marketplace where third parties can offer extensions that add functionality to the platforms.

Loser: Face-to-Face Software

Not every part of the video software business is booming. Companies specializing in creating fancy meeting rooms that support video conferencing won't find much demand, although smart companies will pivot to the home market where they can help people add soft lighting and high-quality microphones to their home offices.

There are hundreds of other projects that support people meeting face to face. Conferences often ship their own apps so attendees know which talk is in which room. Large-format printers produce large sprawling physical copies that work well pinned to walls or spread across a table where people gather around them. Development and design shops built around these ecosystems will take a hit for some time.

Winner: BYOD

When the lockdowns began, IT departments didn't have much time to support everyone who was going to be sent home to work remotely. The companies that made the smoothest transitions were those that had adopted lightweight corporate structures that encouraged workers — or even required them — to bring their own devices.

The philosophy was originally embraced by newer and smaller, more agile startups,

which didn't want to invest the time or staff in maintaining a large fleet of company-owned machines.

They built their enterprise data services to be open on the internet,

generally so that anyone could log in from any browser. Yes,

this increased some risks and made some attacks easier,

but it also forced developers to face these threats rather than relying on firewalls and physical access to stop the bad guys.

Loser: Company Hardware

Company-owned hardware won't disappear,

and many companies still need to keep shipping laptops to workers' homes.

But heavy desktop computers and large monitors will be less common when workers need to leave the office

— and may well be reconsidered even when they return.

Some believe companies will still want to maintain ownership of the hardware employees use,

for simplicity alone. Would the developers of an internal application want to support every old browser,

installed on a dusty old laptop an employee digs out from under their child's bed?

Does the accounting department want to manage company spending through devices that children also use,

whether in online classes or late-night gaming sessions?

VPNs, firewalls, and spending a little more on dedicated hardware,

can be cheaper than supporting some virus-ridden computers that haven't been updated since the Bush administration. To make matters worse,

fewer homes now have a personal desktop computer.

Many people stopped buying home computers because their phones and tablets are more than sufficient for basic tasks.

16 Winners and Losers After COVID (Some of Whom Will Surprise You) — Part One:

Winner: Zero Trust

When computer security teams began examining the new decentralized environment,

they saw danger everywhere. This level of paranoia crystallized into the buzzword “zero trust,”

meaning security teams gave up on building a perimeter or establishing any zone where they could relax.

A zero-trust world means rethinking many internal applications,

so that they work properly when run from a cafe or someone's kitchen.

Any packets going out to the network will be encrypted and authenticated.