According to a new study from International Data Corporation, worldwide revenues in the collaboration applications market grew 28.4% year over year in 2021 to $29.1 billion. This growth was driven by a series of factors, including companies expanding collaboration to more people, the purchase and integration of multiple solutions to better meet corporate needs and price increases and/or feature upgrades. In addition, the growth extended across all collaboration markets and submarkets identified by IDC, including team collaboration applications, conferencing, virtual events, enterprise communities and email applications.

According to IDC, the tailwinds behind the market are obvious: Collaborative applications enable people to work from anywhere, create a more productive and inclusive work community and are key to digitally transforming a business. In addition, IDC said the growth of more connected frontline workers — and every other type of worker — will continue over the study’s forecast period, which goes until 2026.

“The expectation and adoption of these applications inside and outside the workplace is now a given,” Wayne Kurtzman, research vice president for social, communities and collaboration at IDC, said. “In the years ahead, collaboration platforms will become more engaging, visual, functional and community powered. These features, aided by intelligence, will rapidly evolve and support working from anywhere. A new array of metrics will also develop that tie activities to customer outcomes. IDC estimates that the collaborative applications market will grow to $63.8 billion by 2026.”

Study Highlights

• The increase in partners and customers wanting to collaborate with any given business is significant and continues to grow, yet many businesses remain slow to accept the offer to collaborate.
• Enterprise communities will be a market to watch. Companies that do not provide a well-moderated community will have users, even for business-to-business (B2B) companies, quickly form communities where enterprises cannot leverage it.
• Virtual events, or perhaps better called digital events, represent a great opportunity to engage audiences who may not be able to travel to key events. Supported with communities, this can create ongoing engagements at the pace of the individual.
• Fully connected enterprises, augmented with collaboration and intelligence, is already starting to create a new era of metrics. Newer KPIs will include key behavioral indicators (KBIs) that look at the effects of situational management, creativity, collaboration and problem solving and will be tied to actual customer outcomes. Integrations are key to this evolution.

The IDC report, Worldwide Collaborative Applications Forecast, 2022–2026: Adoption Creates the Collaboration Stack, looked at the evolving future of collaborative applications market and how we connect, meet, collaborate, form community and measure the impact of working together. The report provides a five-year forecast for worldwide collaboration applications revenue in current and constant dollars, as well as revenue by geographic region and deployment type (cloud and non-cloud).