Published: March 25, 2020

451 Research just completed a flash survey focused on the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) on enterprises and what enterprises are doing to address those impacts. The complete survey results are being published in our Voice of the Enterprise, Digital Pulse product. One of the interesting findings of this research was the variance in responses within different regions of the US. While we can debate endlessly about the causes for these regional variances, they do present opportunities for vendors in the market. By tailoring and targeting messages based on these shifts and gaps, vendors and service providers can help address the emerging needs of these enterprises.

Here are some highlights of the survey:
  • The West Coast (53% of those survey respondents) is currently experiencing a reduction in employee productivity due to coronavirus at rates noticeably higher than the Central Atlantic (43%), Lower Atlantic (34%), Midwest (38%), and Gulf Coast (22%).
  • At a rate of 2-to-1, West Coast businesses (32%) are more likely to be spending less on labor (e.g., overtime, contractors) due to coronavirus vs. Central Atlantic (15%) and Lower Atlantic (16%), as well as the Gulf Coast (15%).
  • Due to coronavirus, enterprises expect to spend more on information security software and tools in the Central Atlantic (32%) and the Midwest (34%), but on the West Coast (19%), that expectation of greater spending is lower. The North American average is 26%.
  • The Central Atlantic (16%) also sees the highest expectation to spend more for third-party services (e.g., installation, managed services) driven by the coronavirus outbreak vs. a North American average of 7%.
  • While across North America, 91% of enterprises believe that their IT systems are well equipped to handle new coronavirus-related policies, that confidence is lower on the West Coast (85%).
  • New England (53%) and the Midwest (48%) are currently experiencing increased strain on internal IT resources at double the rate of their peers in the Gulf Coast (24%).
Improved collaboration tools, outsourcing services, security tools and services, and broader managed services are all areas in which technology vendors and service providers can help enterprises through these difficult times.


US Regional Breakdown
Brett Azuma
Executive Vice President, Chief Research Officer

Brett Azuma is Executive Vice President, Chief Research Officer for 451 Research. He provides leadership, direction and operational management for the company's analyst team. This includes overseeing the research agenda and analyst process ensuring that 451 Research continues to be insightful, with a focus on innovation; to be objective, reliably thorough and accurate; and, most importantly, to deliver value to its clients.

Craig Matsumoto
Senior Analyst, Datacenter Networking

Craig focuses on the confluence of CDNs, interconnect fabrics and cloud access. Craig has covered service-provider and enterprise networking since the dot-com bubble of 1999, including more than 10 years at Light Reading, where he covered broad topics including optical networking, routing and the then-new beat of software-defined networking. He also spent four years at SDxCentral, delving further into SDN, NFV and container technologies.

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