Today, we released The Forrester Wave™: Unified Endpoint Management, Q4 2021. This is the third year we’ve published our unified endpoint management (UEM) Forrester Wave (see our past reports from 2018 and 2019), and this year, we looked at the top 11 vendors in the market and evaluated them across 24 criteria. Organizations looking to improve employee experience (EX) and simplify device management can use UEM to solve many of the traditional challenges associated with device management, such as OS diversity, legacy app distribution, multiple passwords, and targeted mobile and PC attacks. While the foundations of UEM haven’t changed much since our last evaluation, we found that UEM providers are expanding the value of their solutions with new use cases, through either organic development or integration with partners. Specifically, the 2021 UEM Forrester Wave yielded three important areas of integration:

  • Endpoint security. Many vendors in the space are now fully integrating endpoint detection and response capabilities into their UEM platforms, driving enhanced cooperation between IT operations and security teams.
  • End user experience management. The end user experience management market remains a separate market from UEM, but several vendors in this evaluation released new functionality to measure, track, and continuously improve the experience of employees using telemetry data.
  • Enterprise service management. Customers increasingly expect tight integration between service management platforms and endpoint management, enabling admins to execute remediation (e.g., patches) directly from service management platforms and vice versa.

There are three Leaders in today’s market: VMware, Microsoft, and Ivanti. This year, our evaluation focused heavily on how respective UEM Leaders help IT admins better support a remote and hybrid workforce, a key business priority going into 2022. We found that Leaders do this by enabling operations teams to:

  • Accelerate the transition to modern PC management, enabling better patching for remote endpoints.
  • Monitor end-user experience through analytics that track the experience of employees in various locations.
  • Automate key areas of the PC lifecycle, enabling a smoother onboarding experience for employees, particularly for remote employees.
  • Troubleshoot and remotely control both traditional laptops and mobile devices.
  • Embrace continuous authentication mechanisms designed to protect data wherever it resides.

Another five vendors — IBM, ManageEngine, Citrix, Matrix42, and Sophos — are Strong Performers; HCL Software, BlackBerry, and baramundi software are Contenders.

If you want to benchmark your current UEM against the providers in our Forrester Wave or are looking for a new provider, this Forrester Wave is the best starting point for you. Your criteria may differ, so we recommend that you go beyond the Forrester Wave graphic and:

  • Download the Excel sheet associated with the graphic.
  • View the detailed evaluations in the scoring guide.
  • Adapt the criteria weightings to fit your needs so you can see customized rankings of the providers.

For more information, Forrester clients may request an inquiry with Andrew Hewitt and Will McKeon-White.