Analysis agency Gartner sees a number of forces shaping the present UEM market, says Dan Wilson, vp and analysis analyst, Digital Office Infrastructure and Operations. One is that distant and hybrid work have completely changed completely in-office work, which has underscored the significance of UEM for managing all endpoint gadgets utilized in a corporation.

One other power is integration with endpoint analytics and endpoint safety instruments, to construct proactive and resilient defenses towards better-skilled adversaries, Wilson says. As well as, there’s a higher give attention to intelligence and automation to drive operational effectivity and enhance digital worker expertise (DEX).

[ How to choose the right UEM platform ]

Developments in UEM

One of many extra notable UEM utilization developments has been the adoption of analytics capabilities for endpoint gadget monitoring, says Phil Hochmuth, program vp, enterprise mobility at analysis agency IDC. “This has much less to do with discovering out what workers are doing when it comes to productiveness and extra to do with automating end-user assist,” he says.

Alongside these traces, DEX instruments are making a major splash within the house, Hewitt says. Also referred to 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 firms with steerage for enhancements.

“Digital worker expertise monitoring capabilities at the moment are turning into widespread throughout the house,” Hewitt says. “We proceed to see distributors investing in telemetry assortment on the endpoint to drive visibility, benchmarking and remediation use circumstances.” This not solely helps IT directors to enhance expertise on the endpoint, he says, but additionally reduces prices by automation of expertise points.

Forrester continues to see downward stress on UEM pricing, resulting from “commodification available in the market in addition to stress from the Microsoft 365 suite, which incorporates Intune administration,” Hewitt says. “Add-ons for digital worker expertise at a better value level is likely one of the newer pricing developments.”

Pricing is constant to shift to a user-based, month-to-month price mannequin and away from the device-based pricing that has been conventional in UEM, Hochmuth says. “This is a bonus for enterprises, as most customers in organizations are in all probability utilizing two or extra gadgets of their each day digital workspace,” he says.

The main distributors available in the market haven’t modified previously 12 months, Hochmuth provides. It’s nonetheless largely concentrated round Microsoft and VMware, with distributors resembling 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. Income 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.

“Though Gartner continues to see elevated adoption of UEM and fashionable [operating system] administration in parallel, we nonetheless advise purchasers to be methodical with the transition from conventional approaches,” Wilson says. “That is very true for these with important technical debt and complexity, and people with extra inflexible insurance policies and processes.”

Enterprises ought to keep away from ready for the “excellent” UEM device that addresses all necessities, “as a result of this not often exists,” Wilson says. “As a substitute, select a UEM device that addresses most necessities, then look to fill gaps with complementary instruments.”

Wanting forward

The fast evolution of software-as-a-service-powered capabilities and the emergence of DEX instruments provide a glimpse into the following evolution of endpoint administration past UEM, Wilson says.

“Over the following three to 5 years, we anticipate that the lack of enterprise IT leaders and managed service suppliers to scale staffing ranges and ability units to satisfy ever-increasing enterprise and cybersecurity calls for will catalyze the adoption of intelligence and automation,” he says. Gartner calls the following section autonomous endpoint administration (AEM).

There will even be a better alignment of UEM and enterprise safety.

“A serious growth we’re seeing come collectively is the combination of endpoint safety and endpoint administration roles in lots of massive enterprises,” IDC’s Hochmuth says. “Companies are beginning to converge endpoint administration safety into both a single unit of assist workers, or at the very least having these two beforehand separate teams work together and collaborate extra carefully.”

The elevated give attention to safety and compliance as a perform of UEM is driving this, in addition to heightened consciousness round threats resembling ransomware and endpoint gadget compromising through phishing, Hochmuth says.

One other pattern is an elevated have to develop “self-healing insurance policies” for endpoint gadgets that may deliver them again to a predefined state in the event that they drift, says Forrester’s Hewitt. “Some UEM distributors are investing in making low-code orchestration accessible natively within the product, to allow such a workflow,” he says. “If profitable, it might allow IT [administrators] to perform higher quantities of automation inside 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, based on Hewitt. “Now, most of them do,” he says. “Extra have additionally made progress on the endpoint safety entrance. We anticipate endpoint administration platforms to pursue these two paths over the following [few] years. In two years, UEM as we all know it at this time will look quite a bit totally different. Count on cloud, automation, expertise, and compliance to play a a lot larger function.”

Within the meantime, UEM will stay on the middle of post-pandemic enterprise mobility methods.

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This story was initially printed in June 2015 and most just lately up to date in February 2023. Click on by to subsequent pages to see how mobility administration has advanced over time.