Understanding the Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) Market

Hello, I'm Richard Hill, a lead Analyst at co Cole. And today we're having a webinar about understanding the unified endpoint management market. The intention of this webinar is to provide an overview of the UEM market based on the latest co coal leadership compass research on unified endpoint management solutions.

Also, I will give my insights on how I see the UEM market devolving available products and which vendors or products and innovation leaders, as well as some criteria that your organization may want to consider when evaluating a UEM solution. So before we start, here's some information and there we go. As you may have already noted, we have a series of upcoming virtual events all in the very modern format, the next upcoming KC live events. Let's see. So the European identity and cloud conference on this year May 10th through the 13th with panels presentation keynotes, much more.

So please take a look at the Cooper Nicole website for the full agenda. And then there's managing complexity, how to define an enterprise cybersecurity fabric that delivers which is on June 22nd. That's a Casey live event where you could learn how to achieve cybersecurity resilience through smart tool choices to improve your organization's resilience in risk posture.

And then finally the cybersecurity leadership summit on 2022 this year, it's on November 8th through the 10th, in which you get firsthand experience from government officials and global academic experts to name a few, to build that effective security posture and mitigate cybersecurity risk in your organization. So there's a lot of Casey live events to attend as well as other types of events throughout the year. So please take a look at the website, research blog, post, and videos, and now for some housekeeping, everyone is automatically muted. So there's no need to worry about muting yourself.

We'll be running some polls during the webinar, which will be sharing the results at the end. And we'll also be recording the webinar and both the recording and slides will be available on the website. In addition, we'll save some time at the end for question and answer, and the go-to meeting control panel has an where you could type in your questions at any time. So with that, let's look at the agenda for today. I'll start out by talking about how we got to where we are today in regards to unified endpoint management.

Once I'm done, I'll review the methodology and evaluation criteria we use at Coco to come up with the various types of ratings in the leadership compass report. Next I'll look at the UEM leadership compass rating results and graphics. And then finally I'll give a brief summary and some insight from the UEM leadership compass. And as I mentioned towards the end will have some time for question and answer session. So I thought we'd start off by understanding how we got to where we are today.

It didn't really seem that long ago when the work environment consisted of a desktop computers and landline, if you're as old as I am, traditional client management tools were used for desktop computers, largely windows and relied on manual updates of software and patches that were layered on top of each other later, gold images of desktop operating systems were used to provide, you know, what is known as a, a good state for that operating system, but still require patches on a routine schedule, which would become known as patch Tuesday.

And as mobile phones became more economically available, laptops, tablets, computers, replace many of those stationary desktop computers and the business C control the employee's device regarding its operating system and software applications used as well as the security controls.

When the devices was within that perimeter of the organization and the mobile device management provided the tools to control the device functionality and help manage that life cycle of the mobile devices in their platforms and capabilities such as OS deployment, software, distribution, patch, management, monitoring, all that was, you know, helped to support the administration or to help automate other support functions that typically executed manually in the past. And then the enterprise mobility management solutions added mobile information, as well as application and content management.

The ability to push software updates or patches to devices became what is known today as more monitor endpoint management. And then the, as the range of endpoint devices, where the types of devices really started to expand past the desktop, the laptop, the tablets, and the mobile phones to now include things like office printers, IOT devices, wearables like apple watch, and even newer types of endpoint devices that support, you know, a virtual, augmented, or mixed reality environment using headsets like Oculus or hollow lens.

And then as we move forward, businesses are seeking to improve productivity and efficiencies. Well, employees still wanna work from anywhere at any time, especially during the COVID 19 world that we see today.

And as we have more devices coming on and, and there's a large push continually towards cloud environments, there's some convergence between the OT and it network systems for sharing data from OT devices collected and allowing both the business and operations to utilize and benefit from that information is sharing as well as increases in AI and machine learning analytics use of orchestration and automation. So in a nutshell, UEM is continuing to grow with the it requirements.

So as you may have saw the evolution of UEM capabilities continue to grow continuing the type of endpoints entering the workspace and other areas of the organization, some capabilities already exist in the it environment. And other types of adjacent capabilities to UEM are provided by third party solutions that augment or extend it into other market areas. So most likely the ability to integrate with through the UEM extension points will be needed.

So integration points may include APIs, which could be accessed directly through the API endpoint, such as making a restful call to the services, which could be private or partner public APIs. There's connectors are typically out of the box and they make the connection between the UEM solution itself and other popular third party solutions. And then SDKs, where developers could use a software library that they could just drop into their application to make function calls in their code. And then that in turn may make a call to a service API.

So which integration method should you use really depends on your own organization, DevOps needs and should be kept in mind when evaluating a UEM solution here. I thought I would just throw a quick graphic on UEM market growth from Grandview research. This is a chart basically showing steady growth over time. And I think from the point when this graph was created, I would expect the market to grow even more. Since hybrid work environments will continue at some level due to the pandemic and beyond as well as other market factors.

Okay, now let's move on to the topic of Cooper, Nicole UEM, leadership compass and its methodology, as well as the evaluation criteria we used. So Cooper Nicole conducts a very comprehensive process that was used during the unified endpoint management leadership compass, starting with determining the evaluation criteria for the market invite vendors to participate. Some vendors will participate.

Others may decline for various reasons, evaluate their response material regarding their product solution and hold briefing sessions to get a more in depth look regarding their product offering, hear from vendor customers through reference calls or advisory projects that Cooper Cole offers great products objectively based on the information we collected and, and then do turn peer reviews. As we prepare the report, do fact checks, and then we publish it. So it is a quite long and very detailed process that we conduct.

Here are some different areas that we look at in the leadership security, which is a measure, the degree of security within the product and what it could provide to customers functionality. And this is really a measure in relation to several factors, you know, what the vendor promises to deliver, what the current status is for a given market in the industry, what COER Cole expects the industry to deliver, to meet customer requirements.

And then the integration, the degree in which the vendor has the ability to integrate individual technologies or products in the portfolio, the degree of overhead to integrate with existing enterprise infrastructures, things like that, and interoperability the ability of that product to work with other vendors or standards that are used in that market and other technologies, for instance, usability, the overall ability to administer and maintain the solution over time.

And, you know, other things such as, you know, does it provide good documentation, good user interfaces, both for maybe user support, as well as administration and DevOps, things like that too. And then additional ratings are used as part of the vendor evaluation. So there is innovation, the vendor's ability to drive innovation in a direction which aligns with that Cola understanding of the market. There's a market position. So this is the position the vendor has in the market. These factors consider the vendor's presence in major markets as well.

Financial strength can be an important factor for customers making decisions and could be an indicator on how well the company could execute on the roadmap or be an acquisition target if they're only better venture finance, for example, and then ecosystem, which folks is mainly on partner base and their ability to act as a good citizen in the it environments, working with other products and services and partnerships is pretty much key there. All right. And then leadership compass also provides ratings for vendors for, for these categories.

So product leader based on features and overall capabilities, but not limited to the number or various products and services that they provide. Market leadership looks at certain criteria included, but not limited to the number of customers or partner ecosystems and global reach innovation is that as I mentioned, key capabilities that will help propel customers forward keeping up with that constant evolution and emerging customer requirements. And then finally, the, the overall leadership is a com combination view of the product, the market and the innovation ratings.

So some key criteria to consider when evaluating a UEM solution device management.

So management of the various endpoint types, which includes its life cycle management, onboarding provisioning, decommissioning operating system management, remote access for support troubleshooting device inventory, as some examples, application management, which focuses on that ability to control and apply policies to applications in regards to endpoint devices, as well as other application management features could include capabilities to enroll devices, end users via an app store or software packaging and deployment, and then distribution of application to the endpoints, whether it's bulk or otherwise white and blacklist applications, et cetera.

And then there's content management generally refers to that ability to apply those rules and policies again, to documents or other content on the endpoint device. And the rules and policies could be cos or could be fine grain enough to apply down to the individual file. So there could be other things like catalogs of enterprise documents or content security audit, logging, et cetera, and then patch management. This is a key one.

The category focuses on the ability to distribute and apply endpoint device system patches from various vendors where the patch is deployed on a schedule or a critical or emergency patch distribution that needs to be done rapidly when necessary other capabilities may be, you know, reporting or missing patch, discovery, security, hot fixes as well. And sometimes there's some level of automation involved there, centralized endpoint visibility. This is the ability to provide a consolidated view in management of all endpoints, regardless of where the solution is deployed.

So centralized endpoint visibility often features a single paying view with dashboards and provides visibility to device inventory, device, state, potential threats, policy management, controls, licensing, and reporting of the devices, endpoint intelligence, which is increasing in the market categories like this really measures the level of analytics or artificial intelligence to provide insights into different aspects of the UEM domain, as well as the ability to automate, assist or take action to remediate a endpoint related issue, as well as other capabilities.

Endpoint security is a wide range of endpoint security features such as the ability to collect and analyze information or detect and prevent the execution of malicious code. Sometimes prevent data loss, hardware, destruction, loss, productivity on the devices, and many other capabilities like filtering or crypto libraries, et cetera. And then finally, the admin and DevOps support is the ability to provide it environment support options for both administrators and the solution and the operation team that needs the tools and the automation and that continuous integration support.

So there are many types of functionality to consider when looking at the UEM solution. So here are the vendors that we looked in, looked at in the last E UEM leadership compass. So agan is a German company with the client management platform. Focusing on the doc region for Monday is privately owned company, serving midmarket strong in the EU. BMC is headquartered in the us it's he looks platform is a SA based operation management with client management. And some UEM features.

Citrix is another us company with this endpoint management solution, which was formally called Zem mobile intra spun out Ws O two in 2018. And it provides a single platform for I T UEM and the EMM type of use cases HCL big fix was formally owned by IBM. It means some IP partnership with IM which applies to part of the big fix portfolio. It focuses and has a strong presence in north America as well.

IBM, one of the largest us based firms it's mass 360 with Watson is a SAS based UEM platform. Ivanti has a global presence and it's neurons for UEM is really strengthened by its acquisitions from mobile iron and pulse secure manage engine is a Zoho company and it provides its desktop central platform for UEM capabilities metrics. 42 is another German company. Microfocus is UK based company and it's U UEM capabilities within its end work suite. Microsoft endpoint manager is a consolidation of its endpoint configuration management.

And in tune mirror door is a privately held company in Finland offers a cloud-based mobile device management platform. And hex node is a software division of Miko that offers a UEM solution quest. Another us based company that's has a case suite that provides UEM capabilities. And then VMware offers a workspace, one unified endpoint management as part of its portfolio. And then there's some other vendors to watch, but I'll leave that for you to look at in the leadership compass to get more details on that. So let's go quickly into the leadership rating charts and graphs.

So the overall leadership rating is a combined view of those three leadership categories that I mentioned, the product, the innovation in the market leaderships vendors can range from strong to week in any one of these three areas, which produces the graph that we look at. You recommend looking at all of the leadership categories and conduct your own individual analysis of the vendors and products to get a more comprehensive understanding of the players in the market.

And then product leadership is mainly based on the analysis of product features, the overall capabilities of various services, their functionality, strengths, and completeness, all products in the challenger section are found to be good products, but didn't make it into the leader section because of maturity or missing some features found amongst some of the leaders. Next is the innovation leaders.

So as, as you notice that some of these vendors are, could be grouped together, that typically indicates that there is some similar level of capabilities in this case for innovation. So UEM compass provides much more detail. So I would encourage you to take a look and then market leaders in the market shown here are a little more spread out with less grouping.

The market is comprised really of many factors, such as the number of customers, geographic distribution of customers, size of deployments and services, the size of the geographic distribution of partners, of, of their partner ecosystem, financial health, as well as many other factors. So market leadership from our point of view really requires that global reach. And then here's the ratings at a glance for a more granular look at UEM vendor capabilities, innovation market aspects. For example, some vendors may be strong in a product feature in weaker market or vice versa or a mix of both.

And for example, you could look at intra here where they have very strong functionality, they're newer to the market. And so they have a weaker rating in that regards, still a good product. Here we are. The second half of the vendors that we evaluated, I just split it up into two charts.

So some, maybe some information about the rating. So strong, positive, you might think of this as, you know, kind of that over the top ability in the specific area, outstanding support for a subject area and positive, which still means strong support for features in a given area of the company, but it may have some gaps or shortcomings compared to the leaders.

Neutral means acceptable support for feature areas or acceptable position of the company, but it may have several requirements that we set for these areas that are not being met and then weak considered below average capabilities in product rating, or it has significant challenges in the company rating. We'll move on to another type of chart that we have in the leadership compass. So this gives you a different way to look at some of the vendor solutions through a spider chart.

This shows also the magnitude and depth of a given category and leaders in the UEM space will show a more rounded set of capabilities while challengers may show some gaps in one or more of these areas. And these, this doesn't show all the capabilities. It's just some of the capabilities that we selected to highlight, to give another view into UEM, slush and capabilities. And to give you some examples, not all in alphabetical order to give you an idea of how some of these different vendors in this market may have different strengths and different areas.

And this is really where you need to do your own evaluation regarding, you know, what it is that you need in your organization and what capabilities you need to look at. So I'll leave it to you again, to look at the leadership compass for the rest of the spider chart ratings. And now let's move on to a quick summary, some key takeaways for reading the U UEM leadership compass. So a good takeaway is, is to understand that the leaders have a good mix of product features, innovation and market share, but each vendor has a specific strength.

And again, you should examine it in detail during your RFPs to see which UEM solutions fit your organization specific needs. The UEM market continues to grow and will be a focus and continue to grow for those hybrid work environments that I, I mentioned before. And then again, integration is key solutions may need to integrate with existing services in your environment, or may need third party solutions to augment the UEM solution. Also support for orchestration and automation of time consuming tasks is also important, evolves integration many times.

So I'd like to thank you for your time and for reviewing this again, everything the presentation and webinar is also on the Cooper Nicole website. So thank you.