Cisco pulls ahead of Microsoft in $45B collaboration market

Cisco continues to maintain a leadership position within a collaboration market forecast to reach over US$45 billion in 2019, while pulling ahead from closest rival Microsoft.

Backed by nine per cent annual growth, quarterly vendor revenues are running at an “all-time high”, with Synergy Research findings projecting steady growth over the next five years.

Behind Cisco and Microsoft, the best performers are Slack, Twilio, BroadCloud (Cisco), Zoom, Fuze, Dropbox, RingCentral and LogMeIn (Jive), billed as vendors that are “leading the charge” in the high-growth segments.

“The growth of Slack is particularly noteworthy as it has more than doubled in size year over year,” observed Jeremy Duke, founder and chief analyst of Synergy Research.

Driven by a group of “high-growth” hosted and cloud collaboration segments, Duke said TeamWork Apps will be the highest growth market, up by almost 60 per cent in 2019.

Maintaining the upward curve, communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) and video-as-a-service (VaaS) are expected to increase by approximately 30 per cent each, followed by unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) and contact-centre-as-a-service (CCaaS).

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Collectively, total hosted and cloud collaboration markets will grow by 19 per cent in 2019, while revenue from on-premise products will decline by two per cent.

“Collaboration continues to be a somewhat fragmented market with many disruptive and high-growth companies targeting specific technology areas,” Duke added.

“That being said, the overall trend is quite clear in that traditional on-premise sales are shrinking and being replaced by cloud-based communication services.

“There is now wide adoption of these new emerging cloud services and our forecasts show that they will continue to grow strongly over the next five years.”

Generally speaking, Duke said total worldwide third quarter revenues from collaboration – which include a range of both on-premise products and hosted/cloud communications and applications – were just shy of US$11 billion, with fourth quarters revenues set to be “substantially higher”.

Meanwhile, revenues from hosted and cloud solutions now account for 64 per cent of the total and on-premise products 36 per cent, a marked change from twelve quarters ago when the market was split evenly between the two.