This IDC study shows that the collaborative application market in Japan reached 33.1 billion Yen in 2003. IDC forecasts that the market's average compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2003 and 2008 will be 2% and that the market will reach 36.6 billion Yen in 2008.
IDC Japan's Software research manager, Kazuyuki Ide, says, "The use of collaborative applications is indispensable in the daily activities of companies and consumers. Collaborative applications, therefore, will have to establish a system to increase the creativity and productivity of communities and to achieve front-end integration of Web-based applications rather than just be means of simple messaging and information sharing."