A recent study, titled “Collaboration Nation,” indicated that the majority of IT managers at medium to large enterprises are planning to increase spending on collaboration tools in 2010. The report itself was conducted by a company with a lot to gain from that conclusion: Cisco. Anyone looking for or familiar with business productivity software knows that enterprise collaboration suites are in high demand, and with the coming releases of products like Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, these platforms will soon be corporate mainstays. Video conferencing, of course, is a natural collaboration tool, and will likely be an integral tool with growth of the collaboration market.

Cisco commissioned the collaboration report, and it was conducted by InsightExpress; 2,023 end users and 1,011 IT decision makers from ten different countries were surveyed. (The report is the second of a two-part report the video conferencing giant commissioned to study the impact of social networking and collaboration in enterprise environments.) Fifty-six percent of the IT managers stated they expect collaboration spending to go up 10% or more, and most of them recognized that collaboration software will play an integral role in future success. And end users were even more enthusiastic, with 69% saying they’d be using video and web conferencing tools more often for workplace collaboration.

Again, video conferencing software is an innate collaboration tool, but we haven’t been hearing about many conferencing providers teaming up with collaboration software vendors. The larger video conferencing companies, like Cisco, seem poised to offer their products as standalone collaboration tools, but we’re curious to see if some of the smaller conferencing vendors team up with those dealing in complex collaboration suites.