Below is a list of 2020 predictions from AdRoll, Commvault, McAfee, Adobe and more on MarTech, FinTech, Cybesecurity, AI, and data management solutions.
FinTech Predictions
Spokesperson: Kelly Rodriques, CEO of Forge Global
Forge Global, Inc. (Forge) is a premier trading and settlement partner for a wide range of investors in the private markets. Established in 2014 as Equidate Inc, the company empowers investors and shareholders by enabling liquidity in the private markets. Forge was founded by Y Combinator alumni and backed by top investors including Tim Draper, FT Partners and Munich Re. Forge’s platform allows shareholders and investors in privately held innovation firms to liquidate a portion of their shares and provides private and institutional investors access to top companies like Spotify, Lyft and 23 and Me before their IPO.
Private companies will stay private longer
“The number of global unicorns (companies valued at $1B or more) will continue to rise as more companies delay public offerings. Companies will continue to explore new models of capital raising and new methods to improve employee retention so they can invest in innovation and build a stronger brand, demonstrate stronger growth, and show a clear path to profitability prior to filing.”
More DPOs
“We’re seeing more interest in direct public offerings given the success of Slack and Spotify’s listings that cut out underwriters. Companies that don’t need to necessarily raise money in an offering are choosing the direct listing for a number of reasons – they want to reduce the hype cycle – and ease the volatility that often follows a public listing, and they want to avoid the high costs of engaging underwriters, plus they can avoid the lockups as a benefit to employees and shareholders.”
Increased private financial disclosures
“Companies will take advantage of new “testing the waters rules” that allow them to gauge interest in their stock prior to a public offering. We’ll continue to see increased financial disclosures from private, high-growth companies that will aid them in timing their public market entrances.”
Increased capital innovation
“2020 will usher in more capital innovation – new ways for investors to participate in the high growth periods innovation companies experience in the lead-up to major exits, as well as new ways for private companies to get value from their existing equity so they can stay private longer, retain employees and invest in innovation. We expect to see new financial products coming to market that take advantage of the growing value of private high-growth companies.”
What companies and stocks are hot heading into the New Year
“The private innovation companies that have received the most investor interest in recent months are those that typically have business models that allow for a path to profitability, strong revenue growth, and are viewed as category “creators”. We have also seen increased focus on businesses that operate non-capital intensive marketplace models, as well as enterprise software companies with recurring revenue models. These include the likes of Databricks, Digital Ocean, and Snowflake. Investors also seem more interested than ever in exploring earlier stage companies in the private secondary market, with a sub $5B in valuation.”
MarTech Predictions
Spokesperson: Jason Davis, CEO and co-founder, Simon Data
Simon Data is a fast-growth startup that works with enterprise marketers at retail giants to provide live, personalized data, and to monitor purchasing trends and predict customer behavior. www.simondata.com
Nobody puts baby data scientists in the corner
“It’s a given that brands will continue to make deeper investments in data science. However, not all of those investments will pay off. Success will come from changing organizational structures to break up functional silos. The brands that realize the most value from their data investment will be the ones that open up these structures and embed data science resources on the front lines where they’re able to collaborate on a wide range of business challenges with their non-technical counterparts.”
Big bets on CDPs reveal a gap in the existing tech stack
“The recent acquisition of Custora by Amperity and the investments we’ve seen from marketing clouds like Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle in CDPs all point to a gradual realization by marketers that there’s a gap in today’s tech stack. I know it sounds shocking given the seemingly infinite proliferation of vendors that there’s still a hole in what’s being offered. However, there’s some ambiguity about the shape of that gap and what it would take to fill it. Amperity’s acquisition of Custora is a signal that they have a vision of what that gap is, but from our perspective, it’s a little unclear what that vision is.”
Data science on the front lines
“Over the last year, we’ve heard a lot about the triumph of data science within business organizations with the rise of dedicated data executives to c-suite positions as the primary proof point. However, 2020 will prove that the importance of data is best measured not through executive team appointments, but rather the enablement of data and data science within non-technical functions at all levels of an organization. Particularly within small organizations, I think we’ll see the role of the data executive moved toward supporting role. The proliferation of data science in an organization will be reflected in its implications for roles that are not technology-centric. We’ll see fewer investments in data assets and more in the tools to leverage those assets for business value at every level.”
Product mediocracy becomes acceptable as CX becomes paramount
“Customer-centric business models have given rise to Generation ME. It doesn’t matter if you’re 7 or 70, everyone’s familiarity with technology and exposure to information across a growing set of channels has changed what’s expected from brands. Increasingly, consumers have come to expect marketing that caters to them personally providing rich relevance and holistic cross-channel communication. If my mom texts Delta, she expects a personalized response just as I would. And if I walk into a Glossier, I know the experience will be worthwhile even if their product is not empirically the best on the market. As CX becomes a consumer’s north star, expect that impact of product and traditional gender or generational demographic marketing to wane.”
In 2020, it takes less time to start a business and even less time to fail
“The common wisdom is that it’s never been easier to start a company, but that’s not universally true. There’s certainly been plenty of capital in the markets for founders to launch businesses, and there is a wealth of enterprise-level technology solutions available to provide infrastructure for new startups, but that doesn’t mean success is guaranteed. Furthermore, while access to capital has lowered some barriers to entry in some categories, the hurdles to success are ten times higher for competitive sectors like finservices, retail, and airlines. The differentiator, especially in these competitive fields, will be data. Companies that harness and adapt to data insights the fastest will survive and thrive, whereas we can expect more brands to merge or fold.”
Spokesperson: Scott Gifis, president of AdRoll
AdRoll is a growth marketing platform that levels the playing field for ambitious brands and marketers by giving them sophisticated marketing technology, tools, and expertise usually reserved for the big guys. https://www.adroll.com/
Email marketing players like Mailchimp will be massively disrupted in 2020
“Email is a 20-year-old space that is ripe for disruption, and we’ll see new players start to gain significant share next year as more companies add this feature to their businesses. Marketers inherently understand how to organize their customer data and how to organize campaigns and strategy – AI helps by informing segmentation with data-driven, predictive analytics that are virtually impossible for marketers to keep up with. New entrants are going to disrupt long-dominating players like Mailchimp, who are making investments in AI but are at a disadvantage compared to the companies that are born out of AI”
D2C marketing will have an identity crisis
“A lot of the D2C space has been bolstered by VC investment, those VCs expect continuous and exponential growth. D2Cs will feel a tremendous amount of pressure, especially as the market starts to soften. As customer acquisition costs become untenable, out of desperation, companies will find ways to come together to reduce their over-dependency on Facebook, Google, Instagram, Amazon, etc. D2C and digitally native brands across are going to partner and find new ways to directly create relationships with customers by leveraging each other’s audiences. We’ll see more in-store popup tents and stores-within-stores. This will happen because D2C brands are over being commoditized on Amazon – they don’t want to be in a competitive situation where they lose their customers and costs to Facebook and Instagram. Eventually, we’ll see more tech being built to facilitate these relationships between brands.”
Data Management Predictions
Spokesperson: Nigel Tozer, Solutions Director EMEA, Commvault
Commvault is the recognized leader in data backup and recovery. Commvault’s converged data management solution redefines what backup means for the progressive enterprise through solutions that protect, manage and use their most critical asset — their data. Commvault software, solutions and services are available from the company and through a global ecosystem of trusted partners. Commvault employs more than 2,300 individuals worldwide, is publicly traded on NASDAQ (CVLT), and is headquartered in Tinton Falls, New Jersey.
CCPA Will Prompt Lawsuits in the US
“Unlike with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, which involves regulators getting involved and taking action, the legal system in the US will precipitate some high-profile cases involving the new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2020. Even though class-action isn’t allowed under CCPA, a successful case will have a knock-on effect and open the door to high numbers of plaintiffs.”
Expect CCPA to Fuel a Data Collection and Processing Backlash
“The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will highlight data collection and monetization in the US, just as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) did in Europe. This will fuel a backlash on data collection and processing in the US, especially around political ad targeting during the 2020 election year. Companies such as Facebook and Google will come under greater pressure to distance themselves from this area, and data analysis companies that are now largely unheard of will be in the news for the wrong reasons.”
Increasing Focus on Eliminating AI Bias
“With AI creeping into more areas of our lives than ever, companies in this space will have to double-down on eradicating, or at least minimizing, any bias embedded in their AI. This will mean pre-processing and profiling of data prior to using in AI systems – so once again, data quality will take center stage, but for different reasons than previous years.”
AI Technology and Privacy Concerns Drive Consideration of Health Care Data Anonymization
“We know AI works better with more data, and we all want its benefits when it comes to healthcare. IT companies moving into health data (such as Google buying Fitbit), combined with heightened awareness of privacy, will force governments around the world to enact anonymization laws that encourage the collection and use of health data for the greater good, without compromising patients’ privacy.”
Public Cloud Price War
“There will be a backlash against the cost of public cloud services, resulting in a slight but impactful slowdown in public cloud growth. It will result in cloud companies cutting their prices, bringing more services to market, and more acquisitions by the big cloud players as they attempt to be more competitive. This price war is happening already, but it will intensify over the coming year and make more headlines.”
Spokesperson: Matt Tyrer, Technology Evangelist
Commvault is the recognized leader in data backup and recovery. Commvault’s converged data management solution redefines what backup means for the progressive enterprise through solutions that protect, manage and use their most critical asset — their data. Commvault software, solutions and services are available from the company and through a global ecosystem of trusted partners. Commvault employs more than 2,300 individuals worldwide, is publicly traded on NASDAQ (CVLT), and is headquartered in Tinton Falls, New Jersey.
IT is Leaving on a Data Plane
“We will see an increased level of abstraction within IT, with businesses focusing more on data and less on this data’s underlying infrastructure. Hypervisors, clouds, containers, and platforms in general will form a data plane that enables more fluid movement of data between each tier as businesses focus on moving data to where they need it to be. Data security, privacy and protection will be layered on top of this plane to provide businesses with the data management functionality they need to keep their data safe and available.”
Data Analytics Moves to the Top of the Companies’ Priority List
“Data volumes continue to grow, but we’re knowing less and less about that data – which is a huge risk. In 2020, the focus on analytics will be driven by increased regulatory and compliance pressures, risks from data breaches and ransomware, and the need to properly classify data for AI and ML projects. Without “clean” data of value, these AI and ML projects will stumble. Data analytics will support intelligent decision making, feed AI and ML initiatives, and strengthen compliance stances within organizations. Expect more businesses to be hitting this point in their data maturity, where analytics projects take priority.”
AI and ML Enable More “Self-Driving” IT Operations
“With more complexity in IT, it is becoming more of a challenge to maintain the various interdependent systems in this age of hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Data and infrastructure management solutions will likely continue to expand their use of AI and ML technologies to deliver companies more self-driving IT operations. These self-driving IT systems will not only manage more day-to-day tasks, but proactively augment policies and send alerts that anticipate and respond to potential security threats and other changes to companies’ IT environments.”
Spokesperson: Penny Gralewski, Solutions Lead
Commvault is the recognized leader in data backup and recovery. Commvault’s converged data management solution redefines what backup means for the progressive enterprise through solutions that protect, manage and use their most critical asset — their data. Commvault software, solutions and services are available from the company and through a global ecosystem of trusted partners. Commvault employs more than 2,300 individuals worldwide, is publicly traded on NASDAQ (CVLT), and is headquartered in Tinton Falls, New Jersey.
Title: Multi-cloud Adoption Will Increase Demand For More Diverse Data Protection Capabilities
“As organizations adopt more clouds for different organizational requirements, the need for fast, flexible data protection – able to protect a diverse set of data workloads – will increase. Organizations are choosing different clouds for different use cases, so today’s data protection platforms need to accommodate a wide variety of cloud use cases, including Platform as a Service (PaaS), containers, and massive databases like Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Splunk, SAP HANA and Oracle.”
The IT Hiring Gap Will Drive Greater Adopt of Automation, AI and other Emerging Technologies
“Highly skilled, qualified IT leaders are difficult to find in the current job market. That means IT professionals looking for a new career will take a hard look at an organization’s technology before accepting a job. Today’s job seekers do not want to do remedial work like touching thousands of servers with each upgrade – they want modern data protection, analytics, security, and other solutions with cutting-edge technologies such as automation and AI. New hires will likely bring in new technologies like these to speed the work of data protection, security and other operations across their organizations.”
The Cloud Data Center Race Will Drive Greater Data Migration To, From, and Across Clouds
“Cloud vendors are quickly expanding their regional data center availability. There are currently 54 Microsoft Azure regions, 22 Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions and 20 Google Cloud Platform regions. Oracle Cloud just announced a goal of 36 regions available by the end of 2020. For Oracle customers, that means a new availability region every 23 days. This will provide organizations have more choice as they determine how to support worldwide offices, call centers and manufacturing organizations with cloud regions located close to these facilities. However, this will also require them to find data protection solutions that give their global IT teams visibility into where all their data is located and how it’s managed, especially as country and region specific data governance requirements change.”
Weather-Related Natural Disasters Will Drive Greater Demand for Recovery Readiness
“Increasingly warm weather around the globe is leading to more intense natural disasters, such as wildfires in California, historic flooding in Venice, and drought in Africa. If we can learn one thing from these headlines, it’s that weather is becoming more unpredictable and damaging – for communities and enterprises alike. That means enterprises need to be ready – ready to recover from a flood, ready to transfer backups of mission critical applications over to another cloud region, ready for unexpected power outages that require them to put their disaster recovery plans in motion.”
Cybersecurity/IOT Predictions
Spokesperson: David Thomas, CEO, Evident
Evident is revolutionizing the way personal data is shared. Evident’s simple, secure Identity Assurance Platform lets businesses confidently know who they are dealing with without handling sensitive personal data. With connections to thousands of authoritative sources through a single API, Evident is the only platform that enables comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date identity and credential verifications without the risk and liability of holding personal information.
The Need for Comprehensive Identity Verification Will Rapidly Increase in Lieu of Adversarial AI and Deepfakes
“The vulnerabilities of knowledge-based verification and multi-factor authentication with SMS and email will lead to account recovery processes adopting remote identity verification processes. Businesses will begin to embrace technology-driven authentication methods like authenticator apps, passwordless logins, and biometrics to ensure accounts – and the businesses and individuals behind them – are protected. This change supports the zero-trust world in which we live in, where the presentation of credentials like a password or token is not sufficient to grant access with any level of assurance.
The need for comprehensive identity verification will explode across the globe as businesses look to combat adversarial AI, deepfakes, and even seemingly innocent data subject requests (DSRs) congruent with CCPA and GDPR regulations that are being submitted by cybercriminals hoping to obtain personal data that doesn’t belong to them. Budget and time will continue to be spent on identity verification technology and processes to support compliance with privacy legislation, as governments put increasing emphasis on data security and privacy.
When it comes to cybersecurity and data privacy, data minimization is the name of the game. No longer will businesses boast that they collect sensitive data in order to garner the best consumer insights and make the world a smarter place. Increasingly, businesses will adopt practices that ensure they’re responsibly collecting and protecting only the data that is key to their business. To avoid harmful, reputation-ruining data breaches, the data that’s not critical to business success won’t be collected in the first place.”
Spokesperson: Larry LeBlanc, Chief Engineer, Security, Sierra Wireless
Sierra Wireless is the leading IoT solutions provider that combines devices, network and software to unlock value in the connected economy. Whether it is a solution to help a business securely connect edge devices to the cloud, a software/API solution to help manage processes associated with billions of connected assets, or a platform to extract real-time data to make the best business decisions, Sierra Wireless creates the right industry-specific solution for IoT endeavors. www.sierrawireless.com.
Security Orchestration will Simplify Protection of IoT Applications for SMBs
“To protect their IoT applications from attack, in 2020, organizations will increasingly implement IoT Defense in Depth solutions with new security orchestration technologies. These technologies orchestrate the deployment and management of protection layers around all elements of the IoT application – edge device, network connectivity and cloud. By simplifying IoT security, security orchestration enables companies to implement a robust IoT security strategy without the need for a large, dedicated IoT security team. As these security orchestration-enabled solutions become more well-known and adopted, expect small and medium-sized businesses to increase their investments in IoT initiatives now that they know they can achieve strong IoT security without breaking the bank.”
Spokesperson: Andrew Filev, CEO, Wrike
Wrike is the most versatile work management platform for the enterprise. It can be easily configured for any team and any use case to transform how work gets done. Wrike’s feature-rich platform puts teams in control of their digital workflows, enabling them to focus on the most important work, maximize potential, and accelerate business growth. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, more than 18,000 customers, including Hootsuite, Tiffany & Co., and Ogilvy, and 2M+ users across 140 countries depend on Wrike to help teams plan, manage, and complete work at scale. For more information, visit: https://www.wrike.com/.
The workplace will rely more on remote workers, more AI/ML in the enterprise, agile and automation
“Flexible and Remote work: By 2025, remote and telework work will be viewed as a remedy to urban congestion, and be encouraged or incentivized in up to 30% of cities with populations above 5 million people. (see Tokyo Olympic Telework rules)
Driven by the saturation of the workforce by millennial and Generation-Z workers, more offices will adopt college-campus-like flexibility, where seating isn’t assigned, teams can self-organize, and you’re just as likely to find a worker sprawled across a couch as you are at a desk. Employers will embrace this flexibility, which combined with an increase in telework – will save enterprises up to 25% on commercial real estate and energy costs.
Businesses will experience a digital-fueled productivity bump as the digital-native generation grows in the workforce. Generation Z will make 20% of the workforce in 2020 and this number will increase steadily throughout the decade. This generation is natively comfortable with virtual collaboration and are masters of the social marketing tactics they’ve used their whole lives. The digital transformation was accelerated by millennials – but Generation Z will own the post-digital era with eye-popping results for brands.
AI/ML: By 2021, business systems will have generated and processed enough data to enable AI to truly make an impact in the enterprise, and all business functions will begin to use this technology. By 2025, AI will be used for workforce planning by 35% of Fortune 1000 companies to align headcount with profitable activities.
Agile in Enterprise: By 2022, Agile will no longer be limited to software organizations, and 80% of both enterprise and strategic PMO will seek significant adoption of Agile methodologies.
Over 70% of Fortune 1,000 companies will have multi-departmental work management implementations that will connect their digital initiatives, and CIOs will actively seek technology that can support agile work across enterprises.
Job Skills: Automation will continue to eat away at routine tasks and may take as many as 7% of US jobs by 2025. As the nature of work transforms, jobs will become more cognitively challenging, boosting the need for creative, empathetic, and strategic career skills will grow. Humanities and arts degrees will see 10% growth as storytelling, content, and design become increasingly important to brands. STEM will also continue its growth trajectory.
E-learning will become mainstream and even mandatory in some rapidly evolving fields. By 2025, 45% of white-collar employees will have used an e-learning platform to improve their job skills or explore new careers.
Enterprise software platforms will become a factor in the decision-making process for job candidates when accepting positions at new companies. Candidates, especially those of Gen-Z are most likely to seek positions that add to their long-term career growth through the mastery of market standard CRM, CWM, analysis, and automation platforms.”
Spokesperson: Gary Davis, Chief Consumer Security Evangelist, McAfee
McAfee is the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company. Inspired by the power of working together, McAfee creates business and consumer solutions that make our world a safer place. www.mcafee.com
More Awareness, More Regulations
“Davis predicts that new privacy laws will be implemented to empower consumers to better protect and control their data. Consumers will likely see more “consent” requests attached to any online data collection. Therefore, it’s important to pay close attention to what consumers are agreeing to when they click “consent.”
New Tricks for the New Year
“Davis anticipates that cybercriminals will begin to use advanced technology- such as social engineering and artificial intelligence, to better lure consumers into their tricks and cons”
Dark Web Draws in More Data
“With the number of breached records growing every day, consumers need to be aware of how crooks are leveraging this information in the cybercriminal underground and on the Dark Web. Davis forecasts that we will continue to see a growing trend of personal online accounts being brokered on the Dark Web”
AI Predictions
Spokesperson: Matt Matsui, Chief Product Officer at Calabrio
Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organizations to enrich human interactions. Through AI-driven analytics, Calabrio uncovers customer behavior and sentiment, and derives compelling insights from the contact center. Organizations choose Calabrio for its ability to understand customer needs and the overall experience it provides, from implementation to ongoing support.
Companies must balance the use of Artificial Intelligence with Artificial Humanity
“In 2020, companies will realize that they are limiting their understanding of customer behaviors by only considering rational decision making enabled by AI-driven fact-based technology. The missing piece is that as humans, the core of our decision making is emotional. Looking forward, companies must learn to balance the use of Artificial Intelligence with Artificial Humanity, which accounts for the emotional – and sometimes irrational — drivers behind human decision making. Companies will look to uncover the valid and valuable use of AI in fact-based rationale, and the need to balance this with creating emotional bonds through human interactions.”
Spokesperson: Craig Peasley, Director of Marketing, Adobe
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. With its Document Cloud Services, Adobe is helping businesses embrace the digital workplace to ensure seamless work is being done in the tools that workers prefer to use.
Data Insights and analytics will be a top sought after skill
“Don’t look at the future of work as machines taking jobs away. It’s a chance for businesses to reskill their workforce and adopt advances in technology to help them be more creative and productive. We expect that data insights and analytics to predict future outcomes and trends will be a top, sought after skill across industries from education to retail. Machine learning and AI will not only assist employees with predictive analytics, but also automate the mundane, clerical tasks that might slow them down.”
