There are few parts of business that the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t impacted, in some cases creating pervasive and long-lasting change. While no one knows exactly how our lives will emerge from this upheaval, for businesses it’s clear that long term survival depends on agility. Entire workforces have been mobilised in a matter of weeks. Employees – even the Luddites among us – have had to adopt new ways of working and many are in no rush to return to the traditional office!

IDC forecast that 2019 would be the year when enterprise IT spending by departmental managers overtook spending by the IT department itself. Cloud-based on-demand services have become the norm by lowering barriers to technology purchases and enabling cost centre managers to quickly and easily deploy the software of their choice. Flexible subscription contracts gave access to an almost unlimited bank of resource to accommodate seasonal and periodic spikes in demand.

With increasingly draconian measures worldwide aimed at keeping people at home to quell the spread of COVID-19, companies of all shapes and sizes and across the majority of industries are finding themselves in the same situation – how to equip and empower their workforce for mobile working. More than 5 million companies around the world will experience an impact at a cost to the global economy exceeding US$1 trillion.

It has been a week since several of our mVISE and elastic.io developers attended the Vodafone TOBi Hackathon at the Vodafone Sky Lounge in Düsseldorf. Some of them were in the 3rd place team and all contributed greatly to the future success of the TOBi Chatbot. Teams formed, ideas flowed, problems were overcome, and the air was filled with the sounds of developer’s keystrokes!

Let me start by introducing myself properly: I’m Renat Zubairov, CEO and Co-Founder of a Germany-based company elastic.io, part-time techie, part-time sales, full-time father of three. And I will be hosting a topic at the SaaStr Annual Braindates 2020. While working at our previous companies, Igor, Rico (the other elastic.io co-founders) and I realized how much of a challenge the traditional software business model posed for enterprises.

With $billions invested in digital transformation over recent years, it is little surprise that IDC’s 2020 forecast predicts a continued commitment to the digital enterprise. Moreover, it’s even had a fresh new look for 2020 as the ‘digital-first’ enterprise. What is interesting is the estimation that over the next five years over 90 percent of new apps will be cloud-native, many developed by enterprises themselves to address specific business goals and challenges.