Telecom Lead America: According to the latest Strategy
Analytics Extended Enterprise Software Strategies (EESS) report, global
business collaboration applications market is estimated to reach $12 billion by
2017.
With the demand for faster, interactive, collaborative
meetings and information sharing increases across enterprises, collaboration
providers need to focus more on providing business users with the best possible
text, voice and video communications experience – with a little help from cloud
services.
The new trend in global business collaboration is
creating a major shift from email to instant messaging, conferencing and social
collaboration applications.
Through 2017, business email and calendaring
application revenues and users will grow at a snail’s pace compared to
double-digit growth for other collaboration applications according to the
latest Strategy Analytics report, Global Business Collaboration Applications
Revenues and Users, 2011-2017.”
Today’s workers need to work smarter and faster in
gathering information, soliciting input from a wider and more diverse team,
analyzing results, making decisions, and communicating and coordinating action
plans,” said Mark Levitt, director of Enterprise Software and Communications.
Although email and calendaring software applications
will remain important because of their near universal reach and support for
non-real-time communications, businesses users will behave increasingly like
consumers, favoring instant and social collaboration tools,” Levitt added.
The latest trend is that organizations respond to greater
demand for new business collaboration applications by spending more on Software
as a Service (SaaS) than on-premises software. This will prove to be a win for
vendors that have invested heavily in business collaboration SaaS, such as
Cisco, Citrix, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce, according to Levitt.
This trend could also bring new opportunities to cloud
solutions providers that include mobile operators AT&T, BT, Deutsche
Telecom, Orange, Sprint, Telefonica and Verizon to win based on their ability
to deliver the one-two punch of enterprise mobility combined with cloud
services.
