Channel partners can hold an essential place in the work to combat COVID-19. In one of the latest examples, find out more about SADA and its new National Response Portal. After that, check out what prominent investment banking firm Capstone has to say about recent – and upcoming – cloud and SaaS mergers and acquisitions.

SADA Takes Google Cloud-Based National Response Portal Live

MSP SADA on Thursday launched its National Response Portal, a data and analytics repository to help with COVID-19 recovery.

The effort highlights the vital role the channel can play to help the U.S., and the world, address the pandemic.

SADA built the platform with Google Cloud Platform at the behest of HCA Healthcare.

The portal lets health care providers and policy makers share data about the pandemic. So far, HCA, Community Health Systems, Bon Secours Mercy Health and other providers SADA didn’t name have joined the data-sharing effort.

SADA Systems’ Michael Ames

“Even as some locations are already passing through the initial case surge, the path forward – moving from coping with the crisis to ending it and restarting the economy – remains largely uncharted,” Michael Ames, senior director of health care and life sciences at SADA, said. “Our first goal is to arm health care administrators and government officials with data-driven insights to navigate the road ahead. The NRP will provide decision-makers with rich and timely data to understand how policy changes and social behaviors impact efforts to end the crisis.”

COVID-19 Metrics

The National Response Portal gives health care organizations COVID-19 situational awareness metrics at county and state levels. Data arrives each day from hospitals across the U.S., which ultimately will provide insights into ventilator supply and use; ICU bed supply and use; COVID-19 test results; and healthy patients who have been discharged.

The platform also makes use of data sets including social distancing policy scores, and traffic and social mobility patterns. SADA said this will shed light on how public policy and social behavior intersect and affect the spread of COVID-19.

SADA built the National Response Portal on Google Cloud. The software features interactive mapping and other data visualization dashboards. It also relies on Google Cloud tools including Looker, BigQuery, Cloud Storage and Kubernetes.

“The National Response Portal represents an important resource to help U.S. health care organizations, governments and the public understand and respond to the impact of COVID-19,” Philip Moyer, vice president, industry sales at Google Cloud, said. “We are proud to support this initiative.”

Capstone: Don’t Expect Q1’s M&A Activity to Continue in Q2

Cloud and SaaS mergers and acquisitions hit record levels in the first quarter of the year. That was just as COVID-19 was encroaching on the U.S. economy.

Investment banking firm Capstone Headwaters notes in a new report that 657 deals took place in the first quarter, many in the cloud and SaaS sector. Some of the more channel-centric examples include:

Don’t expect the high activity to continue for the second quarter, though. Capstone analysts David Michaels and Teak Murphy expect transactions to be “down sharply.” Private equity firms and other investors will stay focused on taking care of their current portfolios while they wait for the debt markets to stabilize, Michaels and Murphy wrote.

That may not happen soon.

“Headwaters expects [the third quarter] to remain depressed as debt markets will be slow to come back and deals that hit pause during the shutdown will be more likely to get closed in [the fourth quarter],” the analysts said. “Our discussions with buyers indicate a mixed bag for strategic appetite while private equity is open for business, albeit with tightened criteria and lack of debt-impacting valuations.”

Overall, Capstone forecasts growth to keep slowing over the next 12 months; analysts project 14% growth. M&A ventures will stay depressed over the second and third quarters, analysts said. That will last “until the economy has stabilized and [it] is not likely to return to pre-COVID levels until late 2021 or early 2022.” And, the investment bank said, analysts predict the risk of another significant market correction next quarter “when Q2 earnings reports come in and the true impact of COVID-19 on business performance becomes more evident.”

However, there may be some good news for some parts of the cloud and SaaS industries: Capstone said it expects the need for private equity firms to put money to work will fuel a recovery in software M&A beginning in the fourth quarter of this year and accelerating in 2021.