The content, communications and collaboration software market sector comprises software products, tools and hosted services to organize, access, use and share content. Content management and/or collaboration initiatives involve managing and interacting with a multitude of content types, including documents, records, images, forms and, increasingly, digital media. Included in this market sector are enterprise content management (ECM), e-mail and calendaring, Web conferencing and shared work spaces/team collaboration, IM, e-learning suites, information access with search, and ECM systems.

For the enterprise application software segment, content, communications and collaboration software does not include products targeted at specific business functions or processes, such as engineering design or customer service and support, in which some form of collaboration and knowledge management capability is included as part of the packaged application.