An analyst survey suggests Microsoft could weather the coronavirus outbreak with 3 businesses - Azure, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams
- RBC Capital Markets surveyed more than 1,100 people including chief information officers, human resources professionals, and venture capital and public equity investors about how the coronavirus outbreak may affect business.
- The results show respondents are expecting hiring slowdowns and freezes, deals to be canceled or delayed by one to three months, projects to be put on hold, and some spending cuts.
- Microsoft, however, emerged as a potential beneficiary of the outbreak because of three businesses: Azure, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams.
- Many respondents said they expect to use those products more, and spend more on them.
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Three Microsoft businesses - Azure, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams - could help the company weather the novel coronavirus outbreak while many companies are expected to cut spending and delay deals, according an RBC Capital Markets survey.
RBC surveyed more than 1,100 people including chief information officers, human resources professionals, and venture capital and public equity investors about how COVID-19 may affect sales, remote work, commercial travel, and corporate budgets. The results show respondents are expecting hiring slowdowns and freezes, deals to be canceled or delayed by one to three months, projects to be put on hold, and some spending cuts.
Microsoft, however, emerged as a potential beneficiary of the outbreak because of its cloud and collaboration software businesses.
While many deals that have yet to closed will likely be postponed, one Fortune 500 chief information officer told RBC the company is likely to accelerate its move from on-premises computing resources into the public and private cloud, benefiting Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Budgets for Microsoft's collaboration products, according to the survey, will likely increase as more companies start using Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams.
Here are highlights from the report:
- As companies are increasingly adopt remote work policies and less business travel, Microsoft stands to benefit because of its Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams chat app. Of the 435 respondents who said they work from home more often because of COVID-19, 39% said they will use Skype for Business and 34% said they'll use Teams.
- Additionally, 42% of those respondents said their company made video conferencing software available for the first time, plus 37% for workplace chat, 31% for cloud storage, and 17% for project management software.
- A majority - 69% - of the 552 respondents who said they regularly travel for business will travel less as a result of COVID-19. Of those respondents, 37% said they will use Skype for Business more often and 28% said they'll use Microsoft Teams more often.
- Budgets for Microsoft products will increase, according to 349 respondents who said they have insight or control of their company's spending decisions. While 56 percent said their company has cut or delayed spending as a result of COVID-19, 24 percent said their budgets for Teams and for Skype for Business will increase.
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