Frost Radar™: Cloud Meetings and Team Collaboration Services Market, 2020

Frost & Sullivan’s global team of analysts and consultants continuously research a wide range of industries across the globe. The primary and secondary analysis spans the entire value chain, identifying organizations that consistently develop new growth strategies based on a visionary understanding of the future and a proven ability to effectively address emerging challenges and opportunities.

The research and analysis is the foundation of the Frost Radar, a robust analytical tool that benchmarks companies’ innovation focus and growth performance in a given market. The dynamic solution offers frequent rating and positioning of companies that are agitating, contending or revolutionizing the industry.

This Frost Radar covers the global market for personal cloud meetings and team collaboration services. Revenues analyzed as part of the growth index represent sales of public, multi-tenant cloud meetings and team collaboration services as offered by the original service provider and do not include sales of third-party solutions. Revenues include stand-alone cloud meetings, stand-alone team collaboration or combined cloud meetings/team collaboration services. Revenue estimations exclude any workload component not directly related to the cloud meetings and team collaboration functionality (e.g. telephony, productivity apps, CRM, contact center, etc.).

Cloud Meetings Services
These services blend cloud video conferencing with content sharing for informal and formal meetings. The video bridging infrastructure (bridges/multipoint control units/gateways, etc.) and associated software reside in the service provider cloud environment, and are owned and operated by the service provider. Typical cloud meetings include the following features: presentation, application, screen, and file sharing; point-to-point and multi-point video meetings, among users and rooms; public and private chat; join via mobile, browser, and desktop options; white boarding and annotation; polls and surveys; recording and archiving; integrated audio options; and broadcasting. New features and capabilities include high definition (HD) video, voice, and content; adaptive or intelligent audio; personal video image improvements (background and foreground manipulations); video auto framing and people detection/people count; virtual assistants; real-time and non-real time captions and transcriptions; meeting analytics; dynamic display control (e.g., gallery and active speaker view, shared content view, etc.); live reactions; and enhanced security and availability, among others.

This research includes revenues from webinars and webcasting services when offered by cloud meeting providers, as well as all audio conferencing when tightly integrated with cloud meetings. The research only includes cloud meetings services that are multi-tenant, excluding all on-premises and dedicated private cloud services, as well as sales of software/media servers sold to service providers. This study also includes revenues of cloud meetings SDKs for providers offering video-enabling services as part of their cloud meeting service offering. The study excludes revenues from stand-alone audio conferencing services and any rooms-related cloud meetings license and revenues (e.g., rooms-as-a-service or RaaS, and video-conferencing-as-a-service or VCaaS offerings that run on rooms’ hardware). Meeting room-related licenses and revenues are covered in other Frost & Sullivan research studies. The inclusion criteria for cloud meetings in this study consist of:
• Support for desktop sharing and multi-party video feeds
• Support for at least 50 individual participants
• Support for integrated VoIP audio
• Support for mobility

Team Collaboration Services
These services are workflow-focused software communications and collaboration applications that support persistent exchange of information among team members. Team collaboration services typically deliver several key benefits, including: superior user experience in comparison to traditional point-product software communications and collaboration graphical user interfaces (GUIs); persistent team spaces for contextual information sharing; integration of real-time with non-real-time communications; continuous agile feature updates delivered from the cloud; gamification elements; and access to functionality and information at anytime from anywhere.

Today, persistent team collaboration services have transformed into one of the most popular interfaces for communications and collaboration in the business space. In this research, Frost & Sullivan focuses on team collaboration services that offer business-grade real-time communications capabilities such as the escalation of text sessions to voice and video communications. The inclusion criteria for team collaboration service providers consist of:
• Support for persistent chat rooms (channels) that can be organized by topics, groups, or messages
• Support for two-way video and audio
• Support for file sharing
• Support for reliable search functionality
• Support for mobility
• Integration with third-party applications

In 2020, the global cloud meetings and team collaboration service market is expected to at least double its size in revenue, reaching $11.43 Billion, and increase 2.7x in installed paid licenses to 201.5 million.

COVID-19 pandemic and new WFH realities have set unprecedented levels of demand for cloud meetings and team collaboration services.
Major cloud meeting providers have reported 3x-4x growth in usage in the months since the pandemic’s onset. The same applies to team collaboration providers, adding millions of daily active users during the pandemic.

In terms of innovation, years of digital transformation have been squeezed into just a few months to cater to the demand of hundreds of millions of individuals working from home and distance learning.

With the number of post-pandemic WFH individuals estimated to settle at 4.5x the pre-pandemic levels, remote work will no longer be considered a privilege. Technology is ripe for disruptive innovation with the objective of elevating the user experience and addressing user behavior challenges.

From a market of 60+ providers of cloud meetings and team collaboraiton providers, Frost & Sullivan has analyzed 20 of the most prominent providers in the space, including: Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Avaya, BlueJeans by Verizon, CafeX Communications, Cisco, Enghouse Systems, Facebook, Google, Lifesize, LogMeIn, Microsoft, Pexip, PGi, Slack, StarLeaf, Symphony Communications, TrueConf, Zoho, and Zoom.

Author: Alaa Saayed