Cisco Collaboration's Place in the Market
With a company of Cisco's size and scope, it can be challenging to nail down market position; much depends on how you segment the market. However, it's worth mentioning that Cisco is among the Leaders in three collaboration-related Gartner Magic Quadrants for 2018: Unified Communications (its 10th year running), Contact Center (its sixth year running), and Meetings Solutions (its second year running).
Synergy Research Group's latest collaboration market numbers -- for Q4 2017 -- show Cisco maintaining a narrow lead over its top competitor Microsoft, evaluated based on revenues from enterprise voice, UC applications, telepresence, email software, enterprise content management, enterprise social networks, and a range of hosted/cloud communications and applications. As evidenced in the below chart, Cisco's leadership position in the collaboration business is due to its dominance in premises-based solutions, along with gains it's made in cloud/hosted solutions, SRG said.
"Cisco and Microsoft clearly set themselves apart as large-scale vendors whose portfolios span multiple major segments of the market and whose activities span the globe," said Jeremy Duke, founder and chief analyst for SRG. "Cisco is a clear market leader in North America and APAC regions, while Microsoft has a lead in EMEA and Latin America."
Teamwork, or team collaboration, applications are an emerging and "super-high" growth area, SRG also said in its report.
Repositioning in Team Collaboration
In its market analysis, MZA looks more closely at the team collaboration segment. In terms of the volume of weekly active paid user licenses at the end of 2017, MZA found Microsoft to be the clear market leader in team collaboration, with Slack in second, and Cisco in third, as shown to the right.
Market positioning such as this could point to one reason Cisco pivoted its team collaboration strategy in April, rebranding Spark as Webex Teams and overhauling the Webex user interface and backend (not to mention why Trollope, who drove the Spark messaging, took his leave, as some have suggested). "This is not just a rebrand," said Gartner research director Mike Fasciani. When Cisco rebranded to Webex, "it re-prioritized around its strengths in meetings and calling services, leaving messaging as an add-on," he said. "The original vision for Spark got lost in translation."
Nolle, too, said he sees the rebrand as clear evidence of a misstep on Cisco's part. With its approach to team collaboration, Cisco is operating on a model that is no longer relevant, he said. It's hurt by the fact that it separates the act of collaborating from the object that's being collaborated over, and lacking the productivity tools that its competitors have, he added.
"The real question for Cisco is can it come up with a collaborative model that suits the notion of what you're collaborating on instead of the process," Nolle said. "Cisco can't transform ... without having something to do with the underlying object. Collaboration is the process of collective work on something. Microsoft and Google have both seen the light on that."
Cisco Collaboration CTO Jonathan Rosenberg dismisses such concerns. While not having a productivity suite has been a challenge, it's one the company has been fighting for years while still retaining a leadership position, he asserted. "It's possible to integrate with those technologies on the productivity side," he said. Further, the Spark/Webex rebrand is having the desired effect, that being to simplify Cisco's messaging around Webex relative to its team collaboration strategy, he said.
