Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Five Tech Industry Trends to Watch in 2021
By Mark Sherman, Managing Partner at Telstra Ventures
If this year served as a crash course in what works well (and what doesn’t) when everything is required to go online and in the cloud – then 2021 will be the year businesses redefine and scale how they operate in a newly transformed digital world.
Gaming is “eating the world”
Online gaming and esports is becoming a hotbed of tech innovation and 2021 will be the year it goes mainstream. Alongside this we will see plenty of game tech be replicated across many different sectors, including retail and financial services – driving a ‘gamification’ of the tech industry and beyond. In particular, expect gaming innovations in areas such as AI-powered customer acquisition and user engagement to be adopted by many other sectors.
Meanwhile strong uptake of cloud, video and gaming services will test underlying network infrastructures – and platform performance will increasingly become a competitive differentiator for online services. Another trend to watch, therefore, will be the rise of companies that can deliver an optimised fast-lane for high-bandwidth companies such as gaming platforms. An example in our portfolio is Subspace, which has developed tech to dramatically improve latency times and local network performance.
Enterprises demanding actionable insights
There is growing demand across multiple sectors for data analytics that deliver real-time, actionable insights across organizations. Retailers, for example, can no longer wait a quarter to see which of their products are doing well or which stores are underperforming. Their survival and future success depend on how quickly they can get the business intelligence that enables them to make decisions.
As such, we predict that 2021 will see rapid adoption of analytics platforms that are able to draw data from a range of digital sources to measure, for example, how people are using apps and engaging with marketing campaigns. One such company in our portfolio is Singular, which provides a platform that aggregates all of a marketer’s data into a single dashboard, allowing them to easily visualise and manage their data.
Kubernetes to set the standard in app management
Kubernetes will rise to dominate management of cloud-native computing in 2021. The Google-developed open-source technology that helps with the deployment and management of containerised applications has only seen modest adoption in enterprises to date – but we expect that to change. As every company strives to become a data company, a cloud-native architecture driven by Kubernetes will become the standard thanks to its ability to scale app environments quickly and cost-effectively.
Evidence of Kubernetes momentum can be seen in the recent acquisition of Rancher Labs by open-source enterprise software giant SUSE. Rancher Labs – an early adopter of Kubernetes – has created a platform that makes it easier for companies to set up and manage large Kubernetes environments and is used by more than 30,000 engineering teams worldwide
Tech brings disruption and innovation to insurance sector
Another sector to watch is InsurTech. The insurance market will continue to be disrupted, and we believe that will continue to accelerate in 2021 as InsurTech start-ups scale and big insurance firms move into the space. Expect to see new models such as ‘insurance on-demand’ – currently only accounting for a low single digit of share of the global insurance market – achieve significant consumer adoption in 2021. Companies to watch in our portfolio in this space include Corvus in cyber insurance and reThought in flood insurance.
AI deployed to protect against heightened cybersecurity threats
People will be wanting to get back to the office in 2021, but the working-from-home phenomenon will not be going away. With every business adopting cloud strategies to enable flexible working, the focus of online criminal activity could shift and individuals and SMEs could see a surge in cyberattacks as a result. Larger enterprises, meanwhile, will need to protect a larger vulnerability surface. As a result, we expect to see a big push by enterprises to adopt multi-layer cybersecurity defence strategies that protect business users both inside and outside the firewall. AI-powered cybersecurity solutions from companies such as Crowdstrike will therefore continue to see strong adoption in 2021.
In conclusion, it’s clear that the upheavals experienced in 2020 is accelerating adoption of online tools and digital solutions across multiple sectors, as well as creating new market opportunities in areas such as online gaming, education tech and digital health. Our aim for 2021 must be to harness the power of digitalization to drive a global economic recovery.
##
About the author
Mark Sherman, Managing Partner at Telstra Ventures
Mark is Managing Partner of Telstra Ventures since 2012. Previously, he was a General Partner at Battery Ventures, where he led the firm’s enterprise IT and India investment practices with investments in Coupa, Neoteris, and Tejas and Managing Director at Robertson Stephens & Company, where he ran its software investment banking practice working with companies such as BEA, HNC, Informatica, Intuit, JD Edwards, Quest, and Siebel. Mark received his MBA from Harvard Business School and BS in Economics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
