New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that hosted/cloud collaboration market leader Cisco widened the gap with its chief challenger Microsoft, thanks primarily to achieving considerably stronger growth in premise-based solutions where it has a 27% market share. Cisco’s overall collaboration market share is now at a two-year high. For the fourth 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 hold a strong lead in hosted/cloud collaboration followed by Cisco, Verizon, AT&T, Google and Citrix. The total collaboration market grew 4% year on year with Cisco increasing its share to 16% in the final quarter. Other major players in the market include Avaya, IBM, Polycom, 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 — passed the $9 billion milestone in the quarter and reached an all-time high. Revenues from hosted/cloud solutions continue to grow strongly — up 10% year on year - while revenue from premise-based systems declined 3%. During the quarter particularly strong growth was seen in teamwork applications, hosted contact center, cloud file sharing, hosted video, hosted voice & UCaaS, and a range of other hosted solutions. Teamwork applications is an emerging and super-high growth area that features Cisco's Spark and vendors like Slack, Cotap and Redbooth.
“Collaboration continues to be a market that is characterized by a long list of disruptive and high-growth companies, with no less than twelve companies achieving year-on-year growth rates in excess of 25%,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst. “We have seen lots of new cloud-based applications which have gained traction in the small office environment and I now expect to see many of these start to penetrate mid- to high-end enterprises.”
This article was originally posted “Cisco Extends Hosted/Cloud Collaboration Leadership” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
