The enterprise collaboration (EC) market in China has rapidly evolved over the past few months. 2019 was rich in new product launches; several existing and new vendors released their team messaging and videoconferencing products and solutions. Content development tool vendors improved offerings for office productivity, content services, and collaborative work management. Then the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 initiated a large-scale work-from-home experiment nationwide, which stimulated the growth of the market and accelerated vendors’ product roadmaps. Our research reveals that:

  • Three types of vendors are competing in this nascent market. Cloud vendors — Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent — are expanding the functionalities of their team messaging apps to build enterprise collaboration platforms. Traditional office automation system vendors such as Landray, Seeyon, and Weaver are transforming their content services and office productivity solutions to stay relevant. And specialist vendors, such as BizConf and 263 Enterprise Communication, develop rich collaboration scenarios that tend to focus on a single EC segment.
  • Employee experience needs improvement. Intense competition has yet to yield many benefits for customers. Very few surveyed clients are satisfied with the level of integration between different EC vendors’ product offerings. Large vendors typically repel integration with each other’s solutions. Adopting multiple siloed solutions represents challenges for firms’ EC strategies, which compromises the overall employee experience and renders unclear the value of such initiatives.
  • Firms need to navigate the EC vendor landscape carefully. The intense competition will accelerate the development for both communication and content development categories of the EC market. Cloud vendors will increasingly isolate mature functionalities as stand-alone products. Mature vendors will advance analytics capabilities via AI in EC segments or evolve existing offerings with verticalized solutions. Firms need to cautiously navigate through this complex landscape, as similar products might have different positioning strategies.

The rushed adoption created significant pain points for employees and organizations alike and revealed the absolute necessity for better, more user-centric planning. The Forrester report “Navigate The Enterprise Collaboration Landscape In China” can help you understand the opportunities, challenges, capabilities, and innovation trends. And if you’d like to discuss your company’s EC strategy, feel free to reach out to me directly or set up an inquiry by emailing inquiry@forrester.com.