ISG Provider Lens™ Digital Workplace of the Future - Services & Solutions - U.S. 2020 - Unified Endpoint Management
Pandemic-Driven Accelerated Workplace Technology Adoption by U.S. Clients
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected and challenged U.S. clients in multiple ways. The most apparent, immediate and explicit impact may be that it has suddenly forced many of them to accept and facilitate remote working. Enterprises across the country were making progress in the journey toward enabling a digital workplace, and they were all at different stages of maturity in terms of enabling automation and focusing on managing the employee experience. The pandemic has accelerated these moves, and clients are undertaking many digital workplace transformation initiatives that otherwise would have taken many years. From the workplace technologies side, this is an exciting and challenging time. Changing working models and modern remote work require technology to further improve and innovate like never before, and at a high pace. For service providers implementing and managing such technologies, the times couldn’t be more challenging, as they need to accelerate their workplace transformation initiatives, customize the technologies to unique business needs and maintain focus on employee engagement.
While there has been a lot of focus on managing the current remote working challenges, U.S. clients are also looking up to their technology and service partners to ensure that solutions and services take into account the future “new normal” way of working. It is now generally accepted that we may never go back to the old ways of working: A high number of clients are considering allowing more than 45 percent of their workforce to permanently work from home. This would require different technology outlooks for workers on campus, in offices and at home.
This year’s ISG Provider Lens report for Digital Workplace of the Future compares service providers and vendors for their solutions and services during these difficult times and positions them based on their current portfolios and their outlooks on the future. This report compares vendors and service providers across different quadrants that represent key workplace areas where COVID-19 has led to significant changes and development.
Digital Workplace Consulting
- ISG has been comparing service providers that offer workplace advisory and consulting around digital transformation for many years now, even though workplace consulting was usually seen as a part of managed and implementation services and not a separate offering. The pandemic has ensured that consulting is always an integral part of workplace transformation and that clients always need proper guidance before attempting any technology adoption or business process change that could affect employee experience. Clients are looking for service partners that can provide consulting catered to their business processes, industry and changing customer and employee expectations in the remote working world.
- Technology adoption has become a key element in the time of COVID-19. Previously, clients would adopt new technologies at their own pace. The pandemic and the resulting remote work culture have elevated the importance of such initiatives, and clients need to make sure they implement the proper work culture and associated change management to make the best use of technologies for business outcomes
- Perhaps for the first time, workplace technology transformation initiatives are being seen as closely tied to visible business benefits. Many workplace service providers and global system integrators were developing their offerings to be able to measure employee experience with workplace technologies and quantify their abilities to influence the experience. The resulting key performance indicators (KPIs) would translate into managed services contracts commonly known as experience level agreements (XLAs). The XLA approach requires significant focus on prior consulting to determine key parameters that need to be part of the XLAs.
Managed Workplace Services
- Service providers have been working with clients to help them adopt automated solutions to reduce incident tickets through technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). However, the level of adoption and implementation was not uniform throughout their client base. Because of the pandemic, end users cannot go to a tech café or support center and get in-person support. Neither can there be too much reliance on phone-based support, given high call volume from large users as everyone is working from home. The use of the latest technologies ensures employees perform self-help and tickets get automatically resolved so there is no interruption for the end-user.
- There are many KPIs that may be used in XLA-based contracts, ranging from enabling self-help to measuring users’ digital dexterity. In the current pandemic times, providers can extract the most important and most relevant KPIs for their clients based on their business and industry requirements. Client IT organizations are also beginning to understand the XLAs and are ready to implement some.
- Many service providers have developed miniaturized versions of their comprehensive service offerings to help clients quickly adopt them to enable remote work. Service providers have been able to offer quick customization of their capabilities to rapidly enable and manage remote working.
- There has been a strong focus on Microsoft 365 solutions that include Microsoft’s widely used office productivity suite, Windows 10 operating system and unified endpoint management solution. As it is easier to quickly integrate and upgrade within an existing Microsoft environment, multiple service providers have developed similar offerings for managed services around these technologies.
Managed Mobility Services
- With the pandemic, clients in the U.S. had to equip their large workforces to perform with minimal or no disruption. This included both devices and apps required by the end users. In addition to traditional computing devices such as PCs and laptops, clients also require managing multiple smartphones they issue to employees. In many cases where clients had logistical issues in sending devices to employees’ homes, they had to let employees work on their own personal devices and needed to ensure that access to apps and data was secured and managed without compromising the user experience.
- There has been a strong demand for and focus on the device-as-a-service model, where the service provider manages the entire device lifecycle. This involves providing users with devices at their own location and letting them enroll the devices in the enterprise device management system, which could be an enterprise mobility or a unified endpoint management solution. This model manages the entire device lifecycle from procurement to retirement and provides an opex- based operating model that is quite flexible for clients.
- After many years of anticipation, 2020 finally proved to be “the year of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)” where clients are adopting virtualized desktops at scale to enable their mobile and remote workforces. There has been less focus on on-premise VDI and more on the cloud-hosted virtual desktop solution also known as desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) (Not to be confused with device-as-a-service.). Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), released late last year, proved to be the most sought-after solution by clients for enabling this technology.
- Predictive analytics and device/app health monitoring solutions are in high demand, as they can ensure end users don’t face challenges in remote working and there is no dip in employee experience. Device management usually forms a key aspect of XLA KPIs.
Unified Endpoint Management
- While UEM solutions are designed for managing all kinds of devices that employees of an enterprise use through a single pane of glass, we have seen U.S. clients mostly interested in co-management functionality, where they can manage both legacy client management tools (CMTs) such as Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (earlier known as Microsoft System Configuration Manager or MSCCM) and modern mobility management tools . However, with COVID-19, there has been an accelerated shift towards modern management.
- UEM solutions are highly focused on secure access and increasing mobile security capabilities by implementing related technologies such as zero-trust mobile threat defense (MTD). As employees work from home, the threat of security breaches is paramount at both the data and the device level.
- UEM solutions are also extending their security capabilities at the application development level by providing protection for software development kits (SDKs). The solutions also provide app-wrapping and containerization to ensure workplace apps and data are protected regardless what device or network employees use.
- There has been some increased focus on the use of AI and ML technologies to enhance threat detection and incident prevention. AI can be used to assess user behavior to preempt a breach and ensure safety.
Enterprise Collaboration Solutions
- Clients in the U.S. distinguish enterprise collaboration from the traditional unified communication and collaboration (UCC) space that also includes solutions that provide meeting and conferencing capabilities. These solutions focus on enabling collaboration around teams and content collaboration can also provide task and project management capabilities.
- In the pandemic times, clients initially preferred to get the most out of their existing productivity suite solutions, which usually include email, productivity, meeting, file storage, intranet and chat apps to provide collaboration. While this worked for some, others had to invest in another solution for the collaboration they needed. Among those who didn’t invest in a third-party solution, Microsoft Teams emerged as the single most widely used solution.
- Clients are looking for collaboration solutions that can be adopted quickly, require less training, ensure a high level of engagement and provide visible business benefits. Many popular and widely used solutions may fail to excel in all these areas. Though clients understand that it is not just the tool but the underlying company culture that enables collaboration, unfortunately, the pandemic has reduced the scope to the tool.
- Collaboration solutions have come to the forefront of the workplace technology ecosystem and can determine the effectiveness of remote working technology. Successful clients ensure optimal utilization of these solutions and innovative approaches to enhance user productivity and digital dexterity.
Meeting And Conferencing Solutions
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises have not been able to host physical meetings and travel for conferences. Instead, they have relied on videoconferencing software solutions that saved them crucial time and money while enhancing convenience for end users. For employees working remotely from the comfort of their homes, the adoption of video as a mode of communication increased significantly, and major videoconferencing software vendors reported spikes in their daily and monthly active users.
- Collaboration solution vendors have realized their interdependency and have started to focus on interoperability to enhance ease of use. This trend has been prevalent across both hardware and software solution vendors. Users have also started to prefer integrated collaboration tools to enhance productivity and reduce going back and forth from one software to another in an environment of multiple devices and software. Productivity can be boosted by combining a consistent user interface with interoperability of various platforms.
- Deep integrations of videoconferencing solutions with productivity suites and CRM systems like Office 365, G Suite, Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk and ServiceNow have become a must to enable a seamless user experience. These vendors have started to support multiple integrations in addition to open APIs that allow enterprises and developers to customize their environment.
- As remote working has soared due to the pandemic, the use of meeting and conferencing solutions has also skyrocketed, and this, in turn, has attracted cybercriminals to these platforms. Consequently, the focus on security has become stronger in the videoconferencing market space. Users were trained in locking down meetings to enhance security, and vendors now need to balance security with ease of use.
- Innovation among videoconferencing vendors has accelerated and the focus on implementation of automation, smarter user experience with AI to eliminate mundane tasks and ease meeting fatigue has increased. Many software vendors have started to develop and implement speech-to-text, automated speech recognition, natural language processing, real-time transcription, sentiment analysis and facial recognition capabilities. The inclusion of 4K video meetings with enhanced audio capabilities has also become one of the focal points for many vendors.
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