Dive Brief:
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Cisco remained the leader in the collaboration market for the third consecutive quarter, growing its market share by 15% in Q4 2016, according to data from Synergy Research Group.
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Total revenues from collaboration surpassed $9 billion in 2016. Microsoft came in just behind Cisco, with Avaya and IBM in a virtual tie for third. Other major players in the market include AT&T, Verizon, Citrix, Polycom, Mitel, UNIFY and ALE.
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Revenues from hosted/cloud solutions grew 9% in 2016 compared with 2015, while revenue from premise-based systems declined 4%.
Dive Insight:
The collaboration market includes a variety of business tools, including enterprise voice, UC applications, telepresence, email software, enterprise content management, enterprise social networks and hosted/cloud communications and applications, according to SRG.
Cisco is the long-team leader in on-prem collaboration solutions. But as in many areas, companies are gradually shifting to cloud-based solutions instead. And when it comes to cloud based collaboration solutions, Microsoft has the upper hand.
As cloud-based collaboration solutions grow while on-prem solutions slow, Microsoft could soon give Cisco a run for its money in this space.
