Cloud Communications Continue to Drive and Disrupt the $45 billion Collaboration Market

RENO, NV, January 23, 2019

The latest research from Synergy Research Group shows that the total collaboration market will grow by 9% in 2019 to reach over $45 billion, driven by a group of high-growth hosted & cloud collaboration market segments. TeamWork Apps will be the highest growth market, up by almost 60% in 2019, while CPaaS and VaaS will each grow by around 30%, with UCaaS and CCaaS being the next highest growth markets. In aggregate, total hosted & cloud collaboration markets will grow by 19% in 2019 while revenue from on-premise products will decline by 3%. Quarterly vendor revenues from collaboration are now running at an all-time high and are projected to continue growing steadily over the next five years. Cisco maintained its lead in the total collaboration market and in the last quarter it pulled further ahead of second-ranked Microsoft. Beyond these leaders, the vendors who are growing the most rapidly include Slack, twilio, BroadCloud (Cisco), Zoom, Fuze, Dropbox, RingCentral and LogMeIn (Jive) – companies 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. Total worldwide Q3 revenues from collaboration – which include a range of both on-premise products and hosted/cloud communications and applications – were just shy of $11 billion and Q4 revenues will be substantially higher. Revenues from hosted/cloud solutions now account for 64% of the total and on-premise products 36%, a marked change from twelve quarters ago when the market was split evenly between the two. North America continues to account for just over half of the total market and the EMEA region just under a third.

“Collaboration continues to be a somewhat fragmented market with many disruptive and high-growth companies targeting specific technology areas,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “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.”