This is an update of the post we published in April.
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We are updating this post because we have captured data from an additional 600 institutions and over 1,500 newly listed products. This has changed our overall market view in three ways:
Product leaders have changed;
The market has grown more than anticipated;
The number of products used by institutions has increased.
With the rapid move to distance learning, universities and colleges are utilizing conferencing systems to help in the delivery of online courses and exams. This was a quick and easy answer to social distancing for students, faculty, and staff.
Most institutions simply used the system purchased previously or which was already part of one of their platforms. There was no time for RFPs or even for the comprehensive selecting of a new system.
Let’s look at the market distribution:
The initial top five in April were Blackboard, Zoom, Microsoft, Echo360, and Cosco Systems. Now, you can see that the new leaders in order of market share are Zoom, Blackboard, Microsoft, Cosco Systems, and Panopto.
The data used for this post is based on over 2,800 higher education institutions. About 53% of institutions use more than one system. As a general rule, bigger institutions have more than one conferencing system.
Unsurprisingly, we have seen an increase in new implementations since March, but this is a trend we have been seeing for years. The graph below shows the percentage of implementations per year from 2006 all the way up to and including 2020. The bottom bar graph shows the year 2020 with the highest number of new implementations of conferencing systems in HigherEd. It’s important to note that the 2020 numbers are by far the highest, even if we only have data for half of the year. In our last post, we had predicted that the number of implementations in 2020 would surpass 2019 in terms of new implementations and that it would double the numbers that we had at the time. Our prediction did come true, which means that our prediction abilities are on par with everyone else’s :).
Below, we added the top part of the graph to better illustrate how the market is changing. A few points to note:
Blackboard’s market share is more historic and looks to be tied up to its LMS. For the ones that are not following the LMS market, Blackboard’s share of new implementations looks to be shrinking at a similar rate.
Zoom and to a lesser rate, Microsoft, are the two companies that are increasing their new implementation rates. This is enhanced by the fact that the actual number of implementations is increasing.
Note:
We can’t validate that the implemented products are currently being used for teaching.
Blackboard includes Elluminate and Wimba.
Our data often trails by a few months so the numbers may have increased even more within the past few weeks.
