Posted by Stamford, USA: The worldwide social software and collaboration market is forecast to touch $4.5 billion in 2021, an increase of 17.1% from 2020 as per Gartner forecast.
This increase has two key drivers the need to support remote work during the pandemic and social software integrations within other enterprise applications, according to Gartner.
“Many of the existing use cases propelling social and collaboration market, such as coordinating a distributed workforce and providing a ‘virtual water cooler,’ got a sudden jolt from the pandemic,” said Craig Roth, Research VP – Gartner.
“Social and collaboration tools went from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ within a matter of weeks,” added Roth.
Even as some workers begin to return to offices, COVID-19 has caused a permanent change in workforce structure that will require additional investment in technologies to facilitate, capture and organise open conversations and information sharing.
The pandemic bent the long-term curve of this software market upward, with double-digit growth projected through 2022 (Table 1).
Table 1. Worldwide Social Software and Collaboration Revenue, 2020-2022 (Millions of Dollar)
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
| Social Software and Collaboration Software | 3,826.3 | 4,479.2 | 5,104.0 |
| Growth (%) | 8.7 | 17.1 | 14.0 |
Another key trend driving the market growth is the integration of social software as an embedded capability in other applications and platforms. This reflects in Gartner’s latest prediction.
By 2025, nearly 65% of enterprise application software providers will have included some form of social software and collaboration functionality in their software product portfolios.
“Providers of packaged business applications, such as ERP and CRM software, have previously offered basic social and collaboration functionality. However, they are now facing heightened expectations about the seamless inclusion of non-routine tasks such as conversations and marking up content, within their process-oriented products,” pointed out Roth.
“Partnerships between software providers will take on more importance, as a close relationship is required for tight integration of disparate application functions,” concluded Roth.