Business concerns as a vaccine for COVID-19 appears promising!

As of the writing of this article on 15 November 2020 there has been well over 54 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide and over one million two hundred thousand deaths related to the pandemic.

The US and Europe are witnessing a second wave of the pandemic. In fact, all the 50 states in the US experienced significant increases in the infection rate two days ago, and the necessity of a total lockdown of the country has been seriously floated. Although there is high hope in the US because of the election of a new, perhaps more capable, president, we are certainly not out of the woods yet; especially given that winter, which is known to worsen pandemic infection, is here already.

Besides the sickness and deaths directly attributable to COVID-19, there are the biting undesirable effects of the pandemic on business health and people’s financial wherewithal; not to mention the psychological effects. The aviation, hospitality, and cruise industries have been badly hit by the pandemic, and a shot in the arm is badly needed in these industries. However, the only real solution to these COVID-19-facilitatetd problems is the availability of effective vaccines against the disease.

So, as expected, when Pfizer pharmaceutical company in the US announced on Monday, 9 November 2020, that a “vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis,” hopes were raised around the world. Pfizer enrolled 43,538 participants for the study to assess the effectiveness of their vaccine. Forty two percent of sample space have diverse backgrounds, and no serious safety concerns have been observed. In Pfizer’s words, “submission for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) planned for soon after the required safety milestone is achieved, which is currently expected to occur in the third week of November.” An effective vaccine is certainly the key to returning to life as we once knew it, or as a better new-normal. Pfizer’s news boosted stock performance for the industries disproportionally affected by the pandemic – airlines, aircraft airframe and engine manufacturers, cruise, and cruise.

But if you think that everyone is happy that a vaccine for COVID-19 is coming, please think again. To be sure, quite a few industries have benefited from the pandemic. The least of course is not Zoom. As reported in this column on 4 November 2020, Zoom’s share price climbed from $68.80 on 2 January 2020 to approximately $528.10 at the end of last month, amounting to a 668% rise for the period. COVID-19 pandemic, which has significantly inhibited in-person meetings, is responsible for the rise of Zoom.

Will Zoom want to fall off the cliff after the pandemic has been fully controlled by the promised vaccine? Probably not, depending of course on the moral responsibility of the enterprise. At the best, the company would want a new normal, after the pandemic, that would still be favorable, and depend significantly on video communications, even if the pandemic has all but disappeared. And Zoom is not the only video communication company: Cisco WebEx Meetings, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts Meet, MS Teams, Skype, and Join.me, plus perhaps a score of others, are going to lament the expected business downturn following a successful COVID-19 vaccine deployment.

Another sector of the market that is not amused by the news of a vaccine for COVID-19 is SaaS, the cloud computing lingo for Software as a Service, which is one of the utilization modes for cloud computing. The “cloud” in cloud computing means the Internet, so that cloud computing is “computing on the internet.” Cloud computing is used in one of several ways. In “Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),” you basically upload your application to a cloud site and run the application in that site for a fee, using the hardware (servers, storage capacity, network bandwidth, etc.) in the site. In “Platform as a Service (PaaS),” you log into the cloud site and use software tools in the site to build your own applications. In SaaS, you access the cloud site in order to use available software (developed by others) on the site. In this case, the cloud supplier, not you, are responsible for the hardware that delivers the service, as well as for the creation, updating, and maintenance of the software. In all cases, you pay only for what you use.

The SaaS community is not at all cheering at the news of a COVID-19 vaccine. In fact, their stocks took a nosedive at the news and selling off was significant, especially for companies that are wholly cloud computing. Microsoft Cloud – Azure – has seen significant boost during the pandemic, as has Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud industry leader. An imminent vaccine for the current pandemic may call for an adjustment in these companies’ projections for the future; unless, of course, the businesses are able to perpetuate the demands that COVID-19 help to create. As you can see, perspectives do matter.