Analyst company Synergy Research Group conducted a study of the global market for IT solutions for collaboration. Cisco continues to strengthen the position of the largest manufacturer of these technologies.
According to Synergy Research, in the fourth quarter of 2016, the volume of implementation of unified communications, corporate voice and telepresence systems, e-mail software, corporate social networks and business information management, as well as various cloud applications for collaboration, 9 billion dollars and approached the absolute record.
From the beginning of 2015, sales of cloud products for collaboration are more than the size of the implementation of local hardware and software for the same purposes. The volume of the first segment in October-December 2016 grew by 9%, and the second showed a 4% decline.
Strong recovery was observed in the CCaaS segments (contact center as a service) and VaaS (video as a service). Collaboration applications are a growing and fast-growing area in which products such as Cisco Spark and Slack are present, the report says..
The increase in demand for CCaS-solutions was felt by such vendors as Genesys / Interactive Intelligence, inContact and Five9, while the active introduction of VaaS led to a confident growth and increased attention to Zoom, BlueJeans and some other manufacturers.
"The market for collaborative solutions is still rather fragmented and characterized by a long list of breakthrough and fast-growing companies, at least 15 of which have achieved annual growth of more than 20%," said founder and senior analyst at Synergy Research Group Jeremy Duke,. - Such a rise, of course, does not suit the leaders. The 10 largest companies on the market recorded a decline in total revenues in 2016 ".
The first place in revenue from sales of IT solutions for collaboration is held by Cisco, which became the leader in the first quarter of 2014, ahead of Microsoft.
The share of Cisco has steadily grown over three quarters in a row, and in October-December 2016 it exceeded 15%.
Microsoft also grew in the market, but the company remained behind Cisco with a market share gap of 2.5 percentage points. IBM entered the top three in the fourth quarter, but following the results of the whole 2016 the company took the fourth place, letting forward Avaya. In addition, the list of the largest sellers of collaborative solutions includes brands such as AT & T, Verizon, Citrix, Polycom, Mitel, UNIFY and ALE.