2020 Events and What They Mean for 2021
At first, 2020 looked to be a normal year: bickering over presidential politics, trade disputes, and the ever-present Brexit. We went to work, visited our clients, attended our trade shows, and kept the airlines busy. The economy was headed for a boom year, and all was well in our world.
Until it wasn’t.
COVID-19 struck like lightning, and the world changed overnight. Anyone thinking about the term “back to normal” required a new vocabulary. On the leading edge, we saw dramatic change across our industry, providing strong indicators of what’s ahead.
We’ve selected our most important announcements for the year and what they mean for 2021.
DeepMind
DeepMind solved the protein folding problem. Resolving a scientific analytical issue that has been outstanding for 50 years opens up a vast new range of possibilities for machine-driven problem-solving.
Open Science and Vaccines
COVID-19 vaccines have opened up the need for speed, with open science here to stay. Science was already moving toward extreme collaboration across domains, but a pandemic forced our hand. Producing a group of viable vaccines within a year of the outbreak and using several different intervention techniques demonstrate that the research tools, data availability, and knowledge transfer techniques were in place to support the global bio pharma industry shortening the “previously normal” five-year cycle of vaccine development to less than one year.
Open Access
We saw 39 publishers drop their paywalls in response to the call to action by the Wellcome Trust, supported by the rest of the publishing world. The move solidified the future of open access for scholarly publishing and provided a push toward viable business models to support it. Eventually, the acceleration of open access during and after the pandemic will be a cause for lasting change in the industry.
Virtual Reality and Virtual Events
Little NasX performed a concert in-game to millions of fans. The Thunderbird School of Global Management at ASU celebrated its December 2020 graduates in virtual reality with avatar robots, holographic commencement speakers, and awards delivered by a drone. Who knew!? These portend the events of the future and the expectations of next-generation attendees.
We saw the emergence of a new industry surrounding the support of virtual events, from software-based event platforms to production houses/studios to marketing, registration, and scheduling services. Some players, such as Hopin and Zoom, are seeing astronomical valuations — a function of being at the right place at the right time. Or, in the case of the pandemic, perhaps it’s better said that they were at the wrong place at the right time! But still, they prosper.
Companies like Informa clawed their way out of a huge trough, innovating as they reinvented their business models. Questex launched Fierce, proving that innovation must happen in the darkness of a downturn, our teams can rally, and the muscle we built for agility and creativity must remain built for the long haul.
Continuous Education
COVID-19 taught us that continuous learning and life-long learning are for real. Pearson announced the creation of a direct-to-consumer division and a partnership with International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) “to co-create educational programs that will reskill workers in a rapidly developing global economy.” As unemployment rises, so does the number of individuals looking to reskill — this strategy was evident pre-pandemic but is another example of COVID-19 acting as an accelerant.
Data Marketplaces
The pandemic also taught us that there are some trends so persistent that nothing will get in their way, so plan for them in 2021 as well.
Data marketplaces continue to advance and diversify. We see the big horizontal ones taking root first, and soon we’ll see the emergence of vertical ones. In September, S&P Global Market Intelligence announced the seamless delivery of S&P Global’s financial, textual, ESG, and alternative data in collaboration with cloud data platform Snowflake. This comes on the heels of the launch of the S&P Global Marketplace, which offers ready-to-consume, highly curated datasets and next-generation analytics, AI, machine learning, and data visualization capabilities to clients. At the close of the year, Moody’s launched the Moody’s DataHub to provide integrated data access, management, and delivery of Moody’s data on a single, cloud-based platform designed for data science practitioners and advanced desktop users.
In addition to amassing highly curated proprietary and third-party data, marketplace platforms also seek to enable practitioners with software capabilities, tools, and third-party solutions to simplify client workflow. In September, Clarivate launched the Innovation Exchange, its suite of applications and data to support life sciences, healthcare, and professional researcher workflows. In November, Thomson Reuters introduced its Marketplace and the launch of Legal Home. It also took a big leap forward with its legal platform strategy, which could potentially result in it bringing its competitors into its own platform from the end of February 2021. The move marks a major culture shift within Thomson Reuters, but if executed properly, it will be a win-win for Thomson Reuters and the third parties.
M&A’s Persistent Presence
In July, Clarivate announced that it was acquiring CPA Global, its biggest acquisition to date, in an all-stock transaction. Clarivate’s share price has more than doubled since it listed on the NYSE in 2019 through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), highlighting the potential disruption SPACs could cause in reshaping market segments within our industry if others choose to replicate Clarivate’s model. We predict more SPACS in 2021.
Salesforce snatched up massively popular, white-hot Slack, benefitting from the huge pivot this year to work-from-anywhere. It will use Slack as the interface to its enterprise platform, which now becomes a combination of enterprise workflow, productivity, communications, and collaboration. It’s a shot across the bow of Microsoft in what is really a two-horse race in the enterprise.
D&B Bought Orb Intelligence and Bisnode. The Orb Intelligence deal helps D&B fill out its identity resolution strategy with both online and offline data validation. The Bisnode deal helps it expand geographically by acquiring a close and trusted partner. Both acquisitions align to three of the five tenets of D&Bs growth strategy: developing innovative solutions (Orb), expanding presence in international markets (Bisnode), and winning new clients in targeted markets (both).
Of course, the mega-deal of the year was the merger between S&P Global and IHS Markit, with competitive implications for the data and analytics business.
All this activity proves that data valuations will continue to soar with the advent of analytics and machine learning, given the ability of data analytics to create new categories of insight. Look for data suppliers to continue to sell to analytics providers — with soaring valuations going with them.
Regulatory Action
The regulators eventually caught up. The California Privacy Protection Act kicked in. The FTC and 46 states filed lawsuits against Facebook, and Google finally did the right thing by joining Apple to stop X-Mode from collecting location data from users’ phones, proving that while privacy is a thing of the past, it will continue as a hot button issue as the unfettered power of the big platforms finally gets attention. Look for more regulation and lawsuits in 2021.
More innovation, more M&A, and more emphasis on learning and new modalities of delivery. The move to open, the importance of data — it’s all the fuel that powers the next generation of industry developments.
Out with the old, in with the new. 2021 — we’re so happy you’re here!