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Hosted and Cloud-Based Collaboration Ahead of On-Premises Offerings

By Laura Stotler TMCnet Contributing Editor

As companies seek to upgrade their communications and collaboration technology, they are increasingly turning to hosted and cloud-based solutions thanks to a number of advantages. The hosted collaboration market is experiencing strong growth and outpaced revenues from premise-based solutions for the second quarter of the year.

While Microsoft has traditionally led the pack for hosted collaboration solutions, new research shows Cisco (News - Alert) coming in next, and increasing its share to 15 percent of the total market for hosted and premise-based collaboration solutions for Q2. Synergy Research Group found that Cisco is the leader when it comes to premise-based offerings, with 25 percent market share, but the hosted and cloud-based space is a different beast.

"Microsoft (News - Alert) has been a significant disruptor in collaboration but it is now joined by a range of other disruptive companies, including inContact, BlueJeans, RingCentral, and 8x8 (News - Alert),” said Jeremy Duke, founder and chief analyst of Synergy Research Group. “A dozen companies achieved annual growth rates in excess of 25 percent with some achieving over 50 percent. However, thanks to a strong position across a wide range of segments, Cisco continues to fend them off and its market share in Q2 was actually marginally ahead of what it achieved throughout 2014."

Synergy puts the total collaboration market at close to $9 billion—just in the second quarter. The research firm counts enterprise voice and social networks in those revenues, along with UC applications, telepresence, email software, content management and a large range of hosted and cloud-based collaboration apps.

MarketsandMarkets forecasts the entire enterprise collaboration market will reach $70.61 billion by 2019, driven by evolving communication standards and a massive increase in data and connectivity. Hosted and cloud-based offerings are also a major disruptor within the market, and in addition to Microsoft and Cisco, Google (News - Alert), Verizon and AT&T bring in the lion’s share of revenues.

Synergy found that additional players in the hosted and cloud-based collaboration space include Avaya, IBM (News - Alert), Polycom, Citrix, Mitel, UNIFY and ALE. And while premise-based systems revenues were flat during Q2, revenues from hosted and cloud offerings were up 10 percent over the previous year.

Hosted teamwork applications are gaining traction and are expected to see aggressive growth, according to Synergy. Cisco’s Spark app as well as Slack, Cotap and Redbooth are noteworthy solutions in the space, and Synergy also observed strong growth in the hosted contact center space as well as hosted video, voice and UCaaS.

Edited by Dominick Sorrentino