Story by Richard Miniter, Forbes
The pandemic helped make Zoom into the world’s most used videoconferencing tool, but its market share is slipping and competitors are closing in – including Webex by Cisco.
Webex? This isn’t the product that you remember and its new features could leave Zoom in the dust.
Behind Cisco’s bold challenge lies an interesting case study in how executives can take on dominant players in a fast-growing industry.
Cisco is playing for big stakes. U.S. videoconferencing hardware and software sales are set to explode from $7.7 billion in 2020 to almost $20 billion in 2030, according to Grand View Research. While pandemic-era remote working accelerated sales and revenue, the industry stands to benefit from other secular trends including surges in tele-medicine (the FDA just extended its uses), distance learning (especially for the U.S. military), mega-church services, online corporate training, and massively open online courses (Harvard’s CS50 computer science class alone attracts more than 100,000 paying users).
