Enterprise mobility 2023: UEM meets DEX

If there was ever any doubt about the way forward for unified endpoint administration (UEM) as a key part of enterprise mobility methods, the now-permanent shift to hybrid and distant work fashions has sealed the deal. UEM has turn out to be a essential a part of enterprise efforts to handle this complicated surroundings.Forrester Research’s 2022 Business Technographics Infrastructure Hardware Survey reveals that 28% of infrastructure {hardware} expertise resolution makers will probably be investing in UEM over the following 12 months. “This is in line with previous years, so we continue to see stable growth in the UEM market,” says Andrew Hewitt, senior analyst at Forrester.“However, most organizations today have a UEM solution in place,” Hewitt provides. “Most of the deals today are not net-new, but rather replacements of older endpoint management investments.”Research agency Gartner sees a number of forces shaping the present UEM market, says Dan Wilson, vice chairman and analysis analyst, Digital Workplace Infrastructure and Operations. One is that distant and hybrid work have completely changed solely in-office work, which has underscored the significance of UEM for managing all endpoint units utilized in a corporation.Another power is integration with endpoint analytics and endpoint safety instruments, to construct proactive and resilient defenses towards better-skilled adversaries, Wilson says. In addition, there’s a larger deal with intelligence and automation to drive operational effectivity and enhance digital worker expertise (DEX).[ How to choose the right UEM platform ] Trends in UEMOne of the extra notable UEM utilization tendencies has been the adoption of analytics capabilities for endpoint gadget monitoring, says Phil Hochmuth, program vice chairman, enterprise mobility at analysis agency IDC. “This has less to do with finding out what employees are doing in terms of productivity and more to do with automating end-user support,” he says.Along these strains, DEX instruments are making a big splash within the area, Hewitt says. Also often known as end-user expertise administration (EUEM) or digital worker expertise administration (DEEM) instruments, DEX software program measures, analyzes, and evaluates worker satisfaction with office expertise, offering corporations with steerage for enhancements. “Digital employee experience monitoring capabilities are now becoming common across the space,” Hewitt says. “We continue to see vendors investing in telemetry collection on the endpoint to drive visibility, benchmarking and remediation use cases.” This not solely helps IT directors to enhance expertise on the endpoint, he says, but additionally reduces prices by way of automation of expertise points.Forrester continues to see downward strain on UEM pricing, as a consequence of “commodification in the market as well as pressure from the Microsoft 365 suite, which includes Intune management,” Hewitt says. “Add-ons for digital employee experience at a higher cost point is one of the newer pricing trends.”Pricing is continuous to shift to a user-based, month-to-month payment mannequin and away from the device-based pricing that has been conventional in UEM, Hochmuth says. “This is an advantage for enterprises, as most users in organizations are probably using two or more devices in their daily digital workspace,” he says.The main distributors out there haven’t modified previously 12 months, Hochmuth provides. It’s nonetheless largely concentrated round Microsoft and VMware, with distributors akin to Ivanti, BlackBerry, Google, and IBM additionally within the combine, he says. [ Free download: UEM vendor comparison chart 2023 ] Gartner considers UEM to be a mature and steady market, says Wilson. Revenue progress amongst distributors tends to be pushed by enlargement inside current prospects, he says, and the first drivers of the market are modernization of endpoint administration and patching, in addition to automation and improved DEX.“Although Gartner continues to see increased adoption of UEM and modern [operating system] management in parallel, we still advise clients to be methodical with the transition from traditional approaches,” Wilson says. “This is especially true for those with significant technical debt and complexity, and those with more rigid policies and processes.”Enterprises ought to keep away from ready for the “perfect” UEM software that addresses all necessities, “because this rarely exists,” Wilson says. “Instead, choose a UEM tool that addresses most requirements, then look to fill gaps with complementary tools.” Looking forwardThe fast evolution of software-as-a-service-powered capabilities and the emergence of DEX instruments supply a glimpse into the following evolution of endpoint administration past UEM, Wilson says.“Over the next three to five years, we anticipate that the inability of enterprise IT leaders and managed service providers to scale staffing levels and skill sets to meet ever-increasing business and cybersecurity demands will catalyze the adoption of intelligence and automation,” he says. Gartner calls the following part autonomous endpoint administration (AEM).There can even be a more in-depth alignment of UEM and enterprise safety.“A major development we’re seeing come together is the integration of endpoint security and endpoint management roles in many large enterprises,” IDC’s Hochmuth says. “Businesses are starting to converge endpoint management security into either a single unit of support staff, or at least having these two previously separate groups interact and collaborate more closely.”The elevated deal with safety and compliance as a perform of UEM is driving this, in addition to heightened consciousness round threats akin to ransomware and endpoint gadget compromising by way of phishing, Hochmuth says.Another pattern is an elevated have to develop “self-healing policies” for endpoint units that may deliver them again to a predefined state in the event that they drift, says Forrester’s Hewitt. “Some UEM vendors are investing in making low-code orchestration available natively in the product, to enable this type of workflow,” he says. “If successful, it would enable IT [administrators] to accomplish greater amounts of automation within their platforms.”DEX will proceed to be a precedence for distributors. A 12 months in the past, not many UEM platforms had embraced DEX capabilities, in keeping with Hewitt. “Now, most of them do,” he says. “More have also made progress on the endpoint security front. We expect endpoint management platforms to pursue those two paths over the next [few] years. In two years, UEM as we know it today will look a lot different. Expect cloud, automation, experience, and compliance to play a much bigger role.”In the meantime, UEM will stay on the heart of post-pandemic enterprise mobility methods.Read subsequent: This story was initially printed in June 2015 and most lately up to date in February 2023. Click by way of to subsequent pages to see how mobility administration has advanced over time.