Cisco beat Microsoft in the worldwide enterprise UC collaboration market in Q4, according to new data from Synergy Research Group.
Although Microsoft saw its market share equal Cisco’s in Q1 2014 at 14 percent, Q4 ended with Cisco holding 16 percent of the market and Microsoft holding just over 13 percent.
The next closest players were Avaya, IBM and Polycom in turn, who held market share of around 6 percent, 4 percent and 3 percent respectively.
The report also revealed that revenues for the unified communications market were at an all-time high, up 2 percent year-on-year in Q4. Strong growth was shown in the hosted voice & UCaaS, hosted contact centre, enterprise social networking and enterprise presence segments.
Revenue from cloud solutions were also up 6 percent.
Enterprise voice and telepresence, as well as premise-based solutions, showed decline.
"While revenues from enterprise IP telephony are clearly continuing to decline, Cisco saw a very nice year-end bump in its telephony revenues which helped it to distance itself from Microsoft," said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst.
He added: "The real bright spot for Microsoft is that it has clear leadership in hosted/cloud solutions which are also the highest growth part of the market. Cisco dominates in premise-based solutions but the general trend is for hosted/cloud revenues to catch up with and surpass premise-based revenues."
