Cisco Systems grew its collaboration market share, passing 15 percent in Q4 2016, according to Synergy Research Group.
US based software major Microsoft has achieved sequential growth in its collaboration market share. Microsoft remained more than two and a half percentage points behind Cisco, its big rival.
Avaya battled with IBM for third place in the collaboration market. IBM is the third largest vendor in collaboration market in the fourth quarter. But Avaya has the third position in collaboration market in 2016.
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.
Microsoft continues to hold a strong lead in hosted/cloud collaboration, but this side of the market is more fragmented with no single supplier achieving a double-digit market share, in contrast to the on-premise market. Beyond the top four vendors, other major players in the market include AT&T, Verizon, Citrix, Polycom, Mitel, UNIFY and ALE.
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 –topped the $9 billion mark.
Revenues from hosted/cloud solutions grew 9 percent in 2016, while revenue from premise-based systems declined 4 percent.
During the fourth quarter particularly strong growth was seen in teamwork applications, contact center as a service (CCaaS), and video as a service (VaaS). Teamwork applications is an emerging and super-high growth area that features Cisco’s Spark and vendors like Slack.
Market demand for CCaaS drove strong growth for such vendors as Genesys/Interactive Intelligence, inContact and Five9; while increased market adoption for VaaS drove strong growth and continued attention to vendors such as Zoom and BlueJeans.
“Collaboration continues to be a 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,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst.
