The Decade’s Megatrends in Numbers – Part 3:

Spending on Hosted & Cloud Collaboration Tools Grows More than Fourfold while On-Premise Declines

RENO, NV, January 08, 2020

Synergy Research Group’s detailed review of enterprise IT spending over the last ten years shows that while annual spending on UC collaboration tools has more than doubled to over $45 billion, the hosted & cloud segment’s share of the total has grown from less than a third to over two thirds. Over the decade the market for hosted & cloud collaboration has grown over fourfold, while the market for on-premise is now declining by an average 4% per year. 2016 marked the first time that on-premise products accounted for less than half of the market. The 2019 market data is based on actual spending in Q1-Q3 and Synergy’s forecast for Q4. Within on-premise products the largest segments are IP telephony, videoconferencing, email and content management. While total on-premise spending is in decline, there is at least some growth being seen at the individual product level, most notably in IP telephony call control & end points. Hosted & cloud solutions have grown by an average 16% per year over the decade, with especially strong growth coming from areas such as CPaaS, TeamWork apps, UCaaS, CCaaS and cloud file sharing.

“Enterprise collaboration tools and solutions have become ever-more sophisticated over the last decade as technological advances have enabled new ways of improving communications and enterprise productivity. We are now seeing strong growth in segments that didn’t exist a few years ago,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “While Cisco and Microsoft remain as the two overall market leaders, the evolving and somewhat fragmented collaboration market has seen a plethora of new market entrants that have helped to shake things up, including Twilio, Slack, RingCentral, Zoom, Fuze, Dropbox, LogMeIn (Jive), 8x8 and Bandwidth, to name just a few.”