March 2020
The Software Industry Response to COVID-19
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Welcome to The Cirrostratus Group March newsletter.

So much has changed in the last month and I hope you and your families are safe and healthy. For those of you dealing with the challenges of loss of business, sick employees or family members I'm sorry you're having to deal with this.

Remote work and remote teams is of course the daily routine for many, if not most software companies. Since the software business has been doing a lot of remote work and has had geographically dispersed teams for many years I believe they are much better poised to deal with the associated challenges of the increased levels of remote work. In many cases the software and business tools they provide are seeing substantially increased use.

It's good to see companies including Google, Microsoft, Atlassian, Logmein, Slack and many others, providing some or all of their collaboration software for free as a result of the COVID-19 virus crisis. Many edtech companies are providing services for free to colleges and universities. Other software companies such as Toast, a major provider of software to restaurants, are helping their clients with resources and guidance of how to navigate the crisis. This is by no means an exhaustive list of what software companies are doing but gives some good examples.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seen as a major tool in helping to manage and mitigate the pandemic and to find ways to treat and protect against the COVID-19. Stanford has a free virtual conference on April 1st, on the topic of AI and COVID-19. This article gives a good overview on the topic, Can AI find a cure for COVID-19? Government and industry are working together and have made a database available for machine learning applications that has thousands of research papers and data related to COVID-19.

Stay safe and healthy.

Paul Ressler
The Cirrostratus Group  







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