From a growing category of enterprise spend to a symbol of pandemic survival and now a hybrid work enabler, the collaboration tool market has been on quite the ride in recent times.

Consider the meteoric rise of providers such as Zoom, whose video collaboration tool designed with the enterprise user in mind ended up being adopted widely by consumers. Or the speedy growth of Microsoft Teams, backed by its inclusion in the popular Microsoft 365 bundle.

Now, business leaders are looking at their tool selection with a turbulent economic environment as backdrop. Enterprise consolidation over preferred services is ongoing. Providers, in response, have swiftly developed integrations and new product features to keep users happy — and to sustain the adoption momentum. 

What’s to come in 2023 for this subset of technology? Projections suggest leaders won’t likely cut back technology spend, but the outlook for the collaboration market will remain in flux as the world gets a better grasp on what the economy has in store.   

Here are seven stories from the past year showing how the collaboration market has shifted: