The company has widened the gap with Microsoft despite many disruptive competitors.
New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that collaboration market leader Cisco widened the gap with its chief challenger Microsoft, thanks to achieving considerably stronger growth in premise-based solutions where it has a 25% market share. For the second consecutive quarter total revenues from hosted/cloud solutions exceeded those of premise-based collaboration, but the competitive landscape is very different in this segment with no single vendor able to achieve a 10% market share. Microsoft continues to lead in hosted/cloud collaboration followed by Cisco, Google, Verizon and AT&T — with the latter three having almost identical market shares. The total collaboration market grew 5% year on year with Cisco increasing its share to 15%. Other major players in the market include Avaya, IBM, Polycom, Citrix, Mitel, UNIFY and ALE.
Total revenues from collaboration — which includes enterprise voice, UC applications, telepresence, email software, enterprise content management, enterprise social networks and a range of hosted/cloud communications and applications - were approaching $9 billion in the quarter. Revenues from hosted/cloud solutions continue to grow strongly — up 10% year on year - while revenue from premise-based systems were flat. During the quarter particularly strong growth was seen in hosted contact center, hosted video, hosted voice and UCaaS, and a range of other hosted solutions. Hosted teamwork applications is a new emerging area that will see aggressive growth, featuring Cisco's Spark and vendors like Slack, Cotap, and Redbooth.