Cisco Extends Collaboration Leadership as Market Reaches All-Time High

RENO, NV, March 7, 2016

New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that 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.”