Consumers plan on buying fewer gifts and spending less this holiday season, with an 18 percent reduction in their average budget from last year, a KPMG LLP survey found. Forty-one percent of consumers also said that they are not planning on going to Black Friday sales in person.

Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Digital Hospitals: Creating Growth Opportunities in Patient Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond, finds that digital hospitals that deploy smart technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), remote health monitoring, and robotics, deliver higher standards of patient care and hassle-free experiences for health professionals

The market for professional loudspeakers posted global revenues of nearly $3 billion in 2019, an increase of almost 7%, according to the latest professional loudspeaker industry report from Futuresource Consulting. One of the key themes of the report this year was the impact of COVID-19 and its significant effects on forecasts moving forwards. The segment most affected by these restrictions is Live and Touring.

Supply chains are in the middle of an evolution that will change completely how chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) organize and operate their organizations. “CSCOs are tasked to design a supply chain organization that fits into this new era,” said Mike Burkett, vice president analyst with Gartner. “While in the past, a good supply chain was efficient and powerful, it must now be agile and fast.”

It’s clear that 2020 will go on record as the year that the digital revolution made tremendous strides through the consumer psyche. Online retailers are expected to see record highs as consumers are unable to frequent physical retail locations, with traditional retailers forced to embrace online and multi-channel methodologies in a bid to protect their position within the market.

Due to COVID-19, one thing that became apparent to many businesses and organizations during this period was the acute requirement to provision secure, scalable communications and collaboration solutions, tools, and applications to support a sudden, significant rise in the number of work-from-home (WFH) employees.

Single connections between customer and supplier are often not resilient enough in crisis situations, so supply chain leaders must counter by adding more partners and building an ecosystem. Every ecosystem looks different, as some organizations turn to academia and start-ups to fill capability gaps, others involving end users and consumers in new forms of value exchange.

New Bain & Company research highlights eight themes for brands to consider as they define strategies for a world changed by COVID-19, which has forced potentially dramatic new directions in consumption, altering behaviors in ways that few would have imagined. Some of these trends are clearly here to stay, for others the jury is still out.

If history is any indication, dealmakers have reason to be cautiously optimistic about a near-term revival of the M&A market. A study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in collaboration with Professor Sönke Sievers of Paderborn University finds that, after a sharp decline, monthly M&A deal volume has already returned to the low end of the historically normal level.

Companies spent the equivalent of around $15 billion extra a week on technology to enable safe and secure home working during COVID-19. This was one of the biggest surges in technology investment in history – with the world’s IT leaders spending more than their annual budget rise in just three months, as the global crisis hit, and lockdowns began to be enforced.

Globally the Consumer Electronics (CE) market increased in value during 2019, adding just over $3 billion to present a worldwide total of $683 billion in trade value. Shipments across CE product categories totalled almost 4.4 billion units worldwide, representing a growth of 2.7% year-on-year.

Policymakers should focus on five critical success factors in order to ensure the US continues to build its emerging 5G economy, according to a new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG). BCG’s study draws on an in-depth analysis of the factors that secured America’s leadership of the 4G economy.

The Global Sourcing industry is suffering from the negative business impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The worldwide setup of Global Business Services (GBS) centers, also known as Global In-house Centers (GICs), fell more than 48% as offshore/nearshore activity dropped 46%, and onshore setups dropped 52% for the quarter.

Over the next five years, an exponential rise in digital interactions between buyers and suppliers will break traditional sales models, according to Gartner, Inc. In fact, Gartner’s research shows that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.

By 2023, 65% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations, up from 10% in 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. While some organizations focused on cost optimization during the global COVID-19 pandemic, it is paramount that they incorporate the demands of a rapidly evolving privacy landscape into their business’s data strategy.

The evolving threat landscape was ranked as the top driver impacting the information security organization during the next three to five years, according to a recent survey by Gartner. “External risk is top of mind for security and risk management leaders in 2020, yet COVID-19 has proved how rapidly and how drastically such risks can change,” said Jonathan Care, senior research director at Gartner.

The EMEA purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) market rose in value 11.1% year on year to $320.9 million in the second quarter of 2020, according to International Data Corporation's (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.

Customer service and support leaders must scrutinize all technology investments for their ability to deliver on customer experience (CX) goals, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner identified 33 must-watch technologies on the Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2020.

According to Forrester, consumers no longer need to trade off price, convenience, and emotional experience when making buying decisions. They expect new products, services, and delivery models to cater to all attributes at once. As a result, the future of B2C buying is not a shift from traditional to digital or an abandonment of self-service in favor of delivery; it is all the above.

According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker, the total security appliance market delivered solid unit shipment and revenue growth in the second quarter of 2020. Worldwide revenue increased 7.5% year over year in 2Q20 to $4.2 billion. Unit shipments experienced similar growth, increasing 8.0% year over year.