Dive Brief:

• Cisco sits above Microsoft in the total enterprise collaboration market, according to a Synergy report of Q4 2017. IBM fell to third, far behind the close margin between Cisco and Microsoft.

• The nearly $10 billion in revenue from Q4 2017 came from enterprise voice, UC applications, telepresence, email software, enterprise content management, enterprise social networks and cloud-based communications and apps, according to the report. Revenue for cloud-based solutions grew 26% from the same time last year while on-premise revenues declined 4%.

• Microsoft sits comfortably ahead of Cisco in the cloud sector, but Synergy researchers are mindful that the cloud collaboration "side of the market is more fragmented with no single supplier achieving a double-digit market share, in contrast to the on-premise market."

  

   

Dive Insight:

Despite so much of enterprise collaboration turning to the cloud, traditional, on-site solutions remain the ones to beat. Cisco is facing the reality of an expanding digital market while the vitality of the hardware market is slowly shrinking.

In the last year Cisco has made a concerted effort to expand its portfolio. In October, the hardware company added BroadSoft to its growing list of acquisitions. Cisco turned to BroadSoft to deploy its cloud-based calling and communication solutions through its existing hardware services.

But alongside a redesign of its current product strategies, Cisco is trying to keep pace with the evolution in collaboration solutions. The company turned to AI and ML services to help manage risk, cut expenses and bring its customers new training models.

Not long after these developments Cisco announced the expansion of services on its IoT platform to focus on software and analytics for its customers. Its "intuitive networking" system is meant to give businesses encrypted traffic analytics for increased view on their customers.