Dive Brief:
- In 2019, the hosted and cloud solution unified communication collaboration market is expected to exceed $45 billion, growing from just over $6 billion in 2009, according to findings from Synergy Research's The Decade's Megatrends in Numbers.
- On-premise collaboration products have steadily declined since 2013, dropping about 4% year-over-year. By 2016, on-premise solutions captured less than half of the market spend.
- Hosted and cloud solutions have seen a 16% year-over-year growth since 2009, supported by adoption of communications platform as a service, teamwork apps, unified communications as a service, contact center as a service and cloud file sharing, according to Synergy.
Dive Insight:
In the last decade collaboration has broken the confines of email and phones. Now there are cloud-based solutions for every kind of company and employee. But deciding what vendor and what tool is right is a difficult task.
"Everyone has this problem," Jean-Marc Chanoine, global head of Strategic Accounts at Templafy, told CIO Dive, last month. "You have 1,000 vendors doing 1,000 things 1,000 different ways,"
Microsoft, Slack, Google, Facebook, Zoom, and Cisco are holding tight to their respective place in the market.
"There's only so much market to capture … What you're going to start noticing is people are going to look at the big winners," said Chanoine. The shift will force smaller vendors to offer cross-platform integrations.
Slack advertises itself as a platform inclusive of other vendors and applications, serving as a centralized communication hub, something Chanoine expects to see more of in the market.
Vendors that don't extend their services beyond their capabilities run the risk of creating "frenemies," he said, especially when they know there are already market winners.
Integrations eliminate the need for companies to overhaul existing collaboration systems in favor of a single provider or service.
Companies still using older technologies, such as on-premise products or fragmented collaboration solutions, are likely because "someone a long time ago decided to buy something and people got used to it," he said.
Internet protocol telephony, video conferencing, email and content management are the largest pillars of the UC collaboration market, according to Synergy. IP telephony call control and end points are more or less carrying the growth in the individual product sphere of on-premise solutions.
The cost of change or nuances in management could stonewall an organization in what tools it continues to use or discard.
"It becomes a process question more than a technology question because every tool out on the market, to be frank, says they can do everything right," said Chanoine. "The truth is, it's tough for an organization to determine what's true, what's not true until you're in a tool for a long time."
Figuring out why a company is still using disparate tools is the first step in deciding where future collaboration funds could and should go.