Introducing Our 2018 Now Tech On Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)

We are excited to announce the publication of our Now Tech report on Unified Endpoint Management!

Forrester clients frequently ask us how to balance employee productivity with management and security. Unified endpoint management, the successor of enterprise mobility management (EMM) and mobile device management (MDM), can help you do it.

Forrester defines UEM as:

Products that provide a centralized policy engine for managing and securing employee laptops and mobile devices from a single console. 

Why Invest In UEM?

Our research reveals that UEM is critical to helping your business:

  • Improve employee experience. UEM gives employees a consistent experience across all their devices and apps, enabling them to do their best work, a key driver of employee experience.
  • Protect customer trust. UEM promotes visibility across all endpoints, preventing hackers from using the credentials from one device to exploit customer data stored on other devices or apps.
  • Increase IT agility. Because UEM consolidates mobile and PC management, firms can deliver employee services faster and more easily. 

The Now Tech Report Segments Vendors Into Three Categories 

Desktop and mobile teams face a complex and fragmented market of new and older players. The vendors included in this Now Tech differ in geography, size, functionality, and vertical market focus. To help you narrow down your UEM selection, we separated solutions into three categories according to 13 criteria: 

  • Client management providers. These vendors offer advanced PC controls and excel in supporting legacy apps, group policy objects, and other classic PC management capabilities.
  • Mobile specialists. These vendors manage PCs like mobile devices, using cloud-based MDM and mobile application management (MAM) techniques. They typically don’t have PC life-cycle management capabilities.
  • Hybrid suites. These vendors offer traditional PC management as well as management with MDM profiles. While they typically don’t have as granular PC management functionality as the client management providers, they have invested in building out a baseline set of capabilities that go beyond the OS APIs.

The UEM market has matured substantially in the past year, and many organizations are beginning to shift toward managing Windows 10 with modern MDM tools. See the full “Now Tech: Unified Endpoint Management, Q2 2018” report for our complete analysis — including adoption recommendations and detailed capabilities charts.

If you’d like to learn more about UEM and customers who have adopted it, please request an inquiry with me on Forrester.com on my bio page.