Report: Cisco, Microsoft Lead Collaboration Market in Q4 2016
Cisco may have led the collaboration market in Q4 2016, but Microsoft continues to hold a strong lead in cloud-based collaboration, according to data from Synergy Research Group.
As the report notes, the hosted/cloud collaboration side of the market is more fragmented with no single supplier achieving a double-digit market share.
Collaboration includes enterprise voice, UC applications, telepresence, email software, enterprise content management, enterprise social networks and a range of hosted and cloud communications and applications, according to Synergy. The report expects to see a lot of growth in the teamwork applications area with players like Slack and others investing in their capabilities, such as Cisco’s Spark.
While it remains to be seen how much collaboration is killing our productivity, there is certainly a lot of opportunity in the space for vendors. Total revenues from collaboration exceeded $9 billion and were close to their all-time high in Q4 2016, according to Synergy, with hosted and cloud solutions seeing the strongest growth. Hosted and cloud solutions were up 9 percent in 2016 year-over-year, while on-premises collaboration systems declined four percent.
“Collaboration continues to be a somewhat fragmented market that is characterized by a long list of disruptive and high-growth companies, with no less than 15 companies achieving full-year growth rates in excess of 20 percent,” Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst said in a statement. “That level of growth is certainly not matched by the market leaders, with the top 10 companies in aggregate seeing their revenues actually decline somewhat in 2016. Looking ahead we see that new cloud-based applications will continue to disrupt traditional business communication systems, creating strong opportunity for new cloud based solutions.”
In the collaboration market as a whole, Cisco grew its market share for the third consecutive quarter, passing the 15 percent mark in Q4.
“Cisco’s market share growth in Q4 was thanks in large part to achieving a five-year market share high in premise-based solutions while holding its own in the much higher growth hosted/cloud market segments,” Synergy said.