Although Cisco may have lead the market for collaboration in the fourth quarter of 2016, Microsoft is continuing to hold strong to their lead in terms of collaboration through the cloud, according to information revealed from the Synergy Research Group. The report found that the cloud/hosted collaboration segment of the market is now more fragmented than ever, with no single supplier achieving its own double-digit share.
Collaborations include UC applications, enterprise voice, email software, telepresence, enterprise social networks, enterprise content management, and a range of hosted and cloud communication applications. The report believes that there’s likely to be a significant amount of growth in the area of teamwork applications with players such as Slack and other high-end brands investing in their capabilities with options like Cisco’s Spark.
Opportunities in Collaboration
Though there’s some controversy that collaboration overload could be killing our productivity, it’s safe to say that there’s a lot of opportunities in the current space for vendors. Overall revenues from collaboration are exceeding $9 billion, and came near their all-time highest level during the fourth quarter of 2016, according to Synergy, with cloud and hosted solutions experiencing the highest growth. Cloud and hosted solutions were up by around 9% in 2016, year-over-year, while on-premise collaboration declined by about 4%.
Collaboration today remains to be a highly-fragmented market that’s characterised by a range of high-growth and disruptive companies. In fact, there’s no fewer than fifteen different companies in the sector that are achieving growth rates for the full year that are higher than 20%. According to information provided by Jeremy Duke, the research group founder and chief analyst for Synergy, that level of growth isn’t matched by market leaders, with the top 10 companies seeing revenues decline more in 2016.
As we look ahead, we can see that new cloud-based applications are likely to disrupt traditional systems for business communication, creating brand new solutions for cloud-based opportunities in the market.
Cisco Is Still Growing
One thing that remains certain is that Cisco are staying strong. Within the collaboration market as a whole, Cisco developed its existing market share over the third quarter, moving beyond the 15% mark during the fourth quarter. According to Synergy, the growth that Cisco experienced during the fourth quarter can be attributed partially to the fact that they have achieved a five-year high in market shares in premise-level solutions, while still holding their own in the cloud and hosted market segments.
