Page 5 - Cisco Tribune Q2 2015

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Telecom Reseller: Cisco Tribune NEWS PRODUCTS PEOPLE EVENTS
2nd Quarter 2015 5
Cisco surges ahead

of Microsoft in UC

collaboration market

As a trusted Cisco Preferred
Solution Partner, 911
EASTWOOD
its telephony revenues which helped it
to distance itself from Microsoft,” said Emergency Telecom Company
Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s is a leading national provider
By Gary Eastwood on March 25, founder and chief analyst, adding: “The
2015 on www.ucinsight.com
real bright spot for Microsoft is that it has with hundreds of customers
The on-going battle for supremacy in
clear leadership in hosted/cloud solutions across the United States and
the UC collaboration market continues which are also the highest growth part of the
to oscillate as revealed by the latest market. Cisco dominates in premise-based Canada.
quarterly data from Synergy Research solutions but the general trend is for hosted/
Group, which shows Cisco once again cloud revenues to catch up with and surpass www.911etc.com
surging ahead of Microsoft as market leader. premise-based revenues.” ■
Furthermore, total revenues from the UC
collaboration market reached an all-time
high in the fourth quarter of 2014 (4Q14),
according to the igures.
According to Synergy, revenues from UC
collaboration – which includes enterprise
voice, UC applications, telepresence, email
software, enterprise content management,
enterprise social networks and a range
of hosted/cloud communications and
applications – were $8.5 billion in the
quarter, up 2 per cent on the year-ago
quarter.
Although speciic igures are not provided,
Synergy states that overall revenues
continued to decline for enterprise voice and
telepresence, while hosted voice and UC-as-
a-Service (UCaaS), hosted contact center,
enterprise social networking, and enterprise
presence/IM showed steady growth.
Across all applications, revenues from
premise-based solutions fell 1 per cent year-
on-year, while revenue from hosted cloud
solutions grew by 6 per cent. Hosted cloud
solutions accounted for almost half of the
total UC collaboration market in the quarter,
according to Synergy.
In terms of vendors, Cisco’s overall market share stood at 16 per cent, compared to just
over 13 per cent for second-placed Microsoft.
It marks a strong surge for Cisco, which
beneitted from a 9 per cent sequential
increase in revenues (compared to Microsoft’s
sequential quarterly growth of just 2 per
cent). Avaya, IBM and Polycom still fall some
way behind the two runaway leaders with
market shares of approximately 6 per cent, 4
per cent and 3 per cent, respectively.
Just one year ago, Microsoft and Cisco
were neck and neck, so the latest surge
from Cisco throws up more questions than
answers. With strong interest in UC-as-
a-Service (UCaaS) and cloud-based UC
solutions, and an apparent decline in sales
of on-premise solutions, it seems surprising
that Cisco has enjoyed such strong growth
during the quarter, given its predominance in the on-premise market. Microsoft,
meanwhile, continues to chart a wholly
cloud-based journey, including solutions such
as Skype for Business.
“Cisco dominates in premise-based
solutions but the general trend is for hosted/
cloud revenues to catch up with and surpass
premise-based revenues.”
According to the data, Cisco was boosted
by a surge in telephony sales in 4Q14, and
is still the leader in on-premise solutions.
However, Microsoft was the clear leader in
hosted/cloud solutions during the quarter,
and so it is surely a matter of time before the
two incumbents lock horns once again for the
UC leadership title, as cloud-based solutions
outgrow on-premise deployments.
“While revenues from enterprise IP
telephony are clearly continuing to decline, Cisco saw a very nice year-end bump in

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