In a newly published study, International Data Corporation (IDC ) forecasts healthy growth for the content collaboration software market. The market is forecast to grow to a total of $6.2 billion by 2019, representing a 13.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2014-2019 period. An increasing portion of this growth will be driven by the need to connect unstructured, ad hoc collaboration with structured content-centric business processes – especially for decision making.

Additional key research findings include:

• Growth will come from the cloud. Content collaboration in the public cloud is expected to experience a strong CAGR of 23.1%, while on-premises growth is flat at 0.8%, an indication that 3rd Platform solutions will drive growth going forward.
• The future of content collaboration lies in the intersection between structured work in ECM and unstructured sharing in FSS. Increasingly demanding user expectations around personal productivity will continue to push the market toward more seamless and dynamic solutions that provide a locus for this intersection.

"We see a broad continuum of customer needs when it comes to effective collaboration around content. The need to exchange information with collaborators inside and outside the organization – and activate it in the context of critical business processes – is driving the convergence of several markets," said Vanessa Thompson, IDC Research Vice President, Collaboration and Communities, and Melissa Webster, IDC Program Vice President, Content and Digital Media Technologies . "The cloud is the big disruptor here. It will be interesting to watch the competitive maneuvering as vendors expand their offerings to compete across the broader continuum, and these markets collide."

The study, Worldwide  Content Collaboration Software Forecast forecasts the worldwide revenue for the content collaboration market in the period of 2015–2019.