Gartner defines access management (AM) as tools that include authentication, authorization, single sign-on (SSO) and adaptive access capabilities for modern standards-based web applications, classic web applications and APIs. AM’s purpose is to give people (employees, consumers and other users) and machines access to protected applications in a streamlined and consistent way that enhances the user experience. For people, SSO is part of the enhanced experience. AM is also responsible for providing security controls to protect the user session during runtime. It enforces authentication and runtime authorization using adaptive access. Lastly, AM can provide identity context for other cybersecurity tools and reliant applications to enable identity-first security.

Gartner defines account-based marketing (ABM) platforms as software that enables B2B marketing and sales teams to run ABM programs at scale, including account discovery and selection, planning, engagement and reporting. ABM platforms enable the creation of target account lists by unifying first- and third-party data. In addition, they may engage audiences by activating channels such as display advertising, social advertising, email and sales engagement using a mix of native capabilities and integrations.

Active metadata management is a set of capabilities that enables continuous access and processing of metadata that support ongoing analysis over a different spectrum of maturity, use cases and vendor solutions. Active metadata outputs range from design recommendations based upon execution results and reports of runtime steps through, and indicators of, business outcomes achieved. The resulting recommendations from those analytics are issued as design inputs to humans or system-level instructions that are expected to have a response.

Advertising technology (ad tech) platforms help digital marketing leaders plan, buy and manage digital advertising campaigns across channels, including, but not limited to, display, video, streaming TV and audio, mobile, social media and search. They provide functions for campaign planning, media buying, advertising analysis and optimization and automation. Ad tech platforms can be used by buy-side and sell-side agents.

Gartner defines the adaptive project management and reporting (APMR) market as technologies that can support multiple delivery models to optimize project management practices and complex resource management needs across an organization. These tools promote continuous collaboration and unification of diverse and distributed teams. To support accelerating rates of change and continuous value delivery, these tools adapt to changing customer needs and governance approaches across multiple organizational designs and operating models. They provide multiple execution approaches that are grounded in value-based decision making and the time-to-value perceptions of their customers. Organizations need tools to support the integration of traditional development practices alongside agile, adaptive and hybrid ways of working while driving high levels of productivity from contributors and team members. The dynamic and complex multiple organizational operating model design of all organizations makes the correct governance approach imperative, yet difficult to achieve. To drive organizationwide outcomes, APMR tools need to support adaptive decision making without incurring additional bureaucracy.

Gartner defines adversarial exposure validation (AEV) as technologies that deliver consistent, continuous and automated evidence of the feasibility of an attack. These technologies confirm how potential attack techniques would successfully exploit an organization and circumvent prevention and detection security controls. They achieve this by performing attack scenarios and modeling or measuring the outcome to prove the existence and exploitability of exposures. AEV is generally delivered as a SaaS solution with or without on-premises agents. AEV technologies provide automated execution of both simplified and/or extensible attack scenarios. Results data from an executed attack scenario is used for various outcomes, such as: validating a theoretical exposure as real, automating frequent controls testing, improving preventive security posture or improving detection and response capabilities.

Gartner defines AI code assistants as tools that generate and analyze software code and configuration. They use foundation models like LLMs, program-understanding technology, or both. Developers engage with these assistants to generate, analyze, debug, test, fix, refactor code, search dependencies, update libraries, create documentation, understand code, upgrade versions, translate languages and review commits. They help developers learn and explore codebases and access related information, such as frameworks and tools. AI code assistants integrate with developer environments, code editors, command-line terminals, chat interfaces, project management tools, monitoring, logging and deployment tools. Some are customized to an organization’s specific codebase and documentation. AI code assistants enhance software developers’ experience by boosting their efficiency, accelerating application development, minimizing cognitive overload, amplifying their problem-solving skills, enabling faster learning, fostering creativity and maintaining their state of flow.

Gartner defines the market of AI in communications service provider (CSP) customer and business operations as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products. They are either capabilities embedded in CSP-specific operational technology (OT) applications (such as channels, CRM and other business support system [BSS] applications) or industry-agnostic horizontal applications delivering AI/machine learning (ML)-based customer and business operations in CSPs. CSP customer and business operations refer to marketing, sales, customer acquisition, customer journey, billing and revenue management, revenue assurance, and related risk management. The scope of AI products covers data readiness, life cycle management of algorithms and their application to CSP customer and business operations. AI in CSP customer and business operations helps CSPs utilize AI/ML to generate insights and automate business processes across various customer and business operations areas. These areas include marketing, sales, configure-price-quote (CPQ), order management, product management, billing and revenue management, customer journey and care, revenue assurance, and fraud/risk management. Examples include intelligent chatbots utilizing natural language processing for customer interaction use cases to automate call center operations. These products assist with insights and automation and help CSPs manage the life cycle of AI/ML algorithms, gradually enabling ModelOps/AIOps.

AI Writing Assistant Software allows users to create original and high-quality content in different styles and tones. To create such content, it leverages machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, which provide suggestions based on previously entered material and perform writing-related jobs, including spell check, grammar check, text predictions, and plagiarism detection. In addition, the scope of content ranged from creating long-form content to short-form content, including blogs, landing pages, product descriptions, website headlines, and more. The typical user of the software are copywriters, content marketers, communication leaders, customer service agents, authors, journalists, bloggers, and other wordsmiths.

Gartner defines analytics and business intelligence platforms (ABI) as those that enable organizations to model, analyze and visualize data to support informed decision making and value creation. These platforms facilitate the preparation of data and the creation of interactive dashboards, reports and visualizations to uncover patterns, predict trends and optimize operations. By doing so, they empower users to collaborate and effectively communicate the dimensions and measures that drive their organization. The platforms may also optionally include the ability to create, modify or enrich a semantic model, including business rules. Analytics and business intelligence platforms integrate data from multiple sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, cloud services and external data feeds, to provide a unified view of data, breaking down silos and transforming raw data into meaningful insights. They also allow users to clean, transform and prepare data for analysis, in addition to creating data models that define relationships between different data entities.

The supply chain A&DI technology market spans capabilities that provide different types of analytics, focusing on predictive and prescriptive ones. Many of these offerings have been enhanced with AI and DSML capabilities to support supply chain decision making. These capabilities could either be part of a broader supply chain application/suite or a separate encompassing A&DI platform. Such a platform consists of existing and emerging technologies, including: Graph technology, Advanced analytics, AI, DSML, Model development & Digital supply chain twin (DSCT).

Gartner defines the application programming interface (API) management market as the market for software to manage, govern and secure APIs. APIs modernize IT architectures. They provide context, tools and resources to generative and agentic AI programs and provide access to systems, services, partners and data services. API management tools enable organizations to plan, deploy, secure, operate, version control and retire APIs, regardless of their size, region or industry.

Gartner defines API protection products as a category of specialized stand-alone security products focusing on protecting APIs from exploits, abuse and access violations, and assisting in remediating API exposures. These products offer features such as API discovery, API security testing, API posture management and runtime protection utilizing behavioral analysis. They should provide coverage for the internal- and external-facing APIs, and third-party APIs that organizations may consume. API protection products are delivered as cloud-based and on-premises solutions. Deployment can be offered in-line by intercepting ingress/egress API calls or out-of-band by deploying agents on application workloads and/or scanning code repositories.

Application Release Orchestration (ARO) tools provide a combination of deployment automation, pipeline and environment management, and release orchestration capabilities to simultaneously improve the quality, velocity and governance of application releases. ARO tools enable enterprises to scale release activities across multiple, diverse and multigenerational teams (e.g., DevOps), technologies, development methodologies (agile, etc.), delivery patterns (e.g., continuous), pipelines, processes and their supporting toolchains.

Application security posture management (ASPM) tools continuously manage application risk through collection, analysis and prioritization of security issues from across the software life cycle. They ingest data from multiple sources, maintain an inventory of all software within an organization, correlate and analyze findings for easier interpretation, triage and remediation. They enable the enforcement of security policies and facilitate the remediation of security issues while offering a comprehensive view of risk across applications.

Gartner defines the application security testing (AST) market as consisting of providers of products that enable organizations to assess applications for the presence and management of risk. These products identify risk by evaluating source code, performing runtime tests and inspecting supply chain components. AST products can be integrated throughout development workflows for continuous assessment or be used to perform ad hoc evaluations. They enable organizations to manage application risks by providing an integrated set of capabilities for risk identification, prioritization and triage, policy evaluation and enforcement, and remediation assistance. Market offerings are available in on-premises, SaaS and hybrid delivery models. Organizations leverage AST products to assess applications for the presence of security vulnerabilities and other risks (e.g., legal and operational) throughout their life cycle. These assessments are used to measure and manage the risks within individual applications, application components or groups of applications in the context of their business criticality and other key attributes (e.g., environment, sensitive data handling, etc.). AST products further enable organizations to evaluate software for compliance with internal policies as well as regulatory requirements established by governments or authoritative industry groups.

Gartner defines artificial intelligence applications in IT service management as tools that augment and extend IT service management (ITSM) workflows using AI. These analyze ITSM data and metadata (primarily found in ITSM platforms) to provide intelligent advice and actions on ITSM practices and workflows, such as IT service desk and support activities. This software can either be a stand-alone product, capabilities within an ITSM platform or an add-on to an ITSM platform.

Internal auditors play the critical role of being the third line of defense. When risk owners and management do not identify risk or adequately mitigate the risk, it is imperative for the internal auditors to provide independent and objective insight on risk. The audit management solutions market caters to this need by automating internal audit operations through its primary and secondary offerings. Audit management solutions help manage the complexity of the auditor's role, not the organization's risk.

Augmented analytics uses AI to automate analytics workflows in platforms, contextualizing user interfaces with automated insights, generative storytelling explanations and collaborative exploration. Driven by machine learning (ML) and generative AI, augmented analytics enables natural language queries and personalized analytics catalogs. It democratizes advanced analytics with augmented data ingestion, data preparation, analytics content and DSML model development. It also curbs human biases and accelerates insights for diverse users.

Gartner defines augmented data quality (ADQ) solutions as a set of capabilities for enhanced data quality experience aimed at improving insight discovery, next-best-action suggestions and process automation by leveraging AI/machine learning (ML) features, graph analysis and metadata analytics. Each of these technologies can work independently, or cooperatively, to create network effects that can be used to increase automation and effectiveness across a broad range of data quality use cases. These purpose-built solutions include a range of functions such as profiling and monitoring; data transformation; rule discovery and creation; matching, linking and merging; active metadata support; data remediation and role-based usability.

Gartner defines B2B marketing automation platforms (B2B MAPs) as software applications that support demand generation processes at scale. B2B MAPs help marketers capture and qualify leads and accounts, orchestrate marketing-driven engagement across the full customer journey, and use analytics to optimize and measure performance. B2B MAPs enable marketers to automate a wide range of activities intended to drive new customer acquisition, retention and growth. To support the pursuit of new commercial opportunities (from current or prospective customers), marketers use B2B MAPs to generate, prioritize, and manage leads and account buying groups across the revenue life cycle. This includes the distribution of marketing-generated and qualified leads to sales teams for further pursuit. Also, B2B MAPs are used to orchestrate and measure multichannel customer engagement campaigns and programs. B2B MAPs enable marketers to design and activate some communication channels natively — most notably, email and web landing pages — and orchestrate customer engagement through other channels via integrations with other tools/platforms.

Gartner defines backup and data protection platforms as technologies that capture point-in-time copies of enterprise data for the purpose of recovering it from multiple data loss scenarios, enhancing data protection initiatives, and expanding data insights and access capabilities. These technologies protect enterprise data, applications and infrastructure in hybrid, multicloud and SaaS environments. Backup and data protection platforms are available as software-only, integrated appliances and vendor-developed and hosted backup as a service (BaaS).

BaaS vendors deliver data protection as a service by hosting the backup software and the primary backup repository in privately operated or public cloud data centers. The backup infrastructure, including backup software and backup servers and storage, is managed by the BaaS vendor. Customers are still responsible for implementing backup policies and performing recovery tasks, but are not responsible for the day-to-day maintenance and operation of the backup system.

Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) Tools enable organizations to gain a deeper understanding of security posture vulnerabilities by automating testing of threat vectors such as external and insider, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. BAS complements red teaming and penetration testing but cannot completely replace them. BAS validates an organization's security posture by testing its ability to detect a portfolio of simulated attacks performed by SaaS platforms, software agents, and virtual machines. They generate detailed reports about security gaps and prioritize remediation efforts based on the risk level. The typical users of these technologies are financial institutions, insurance companies, and more.

Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the process of managing digital certificates from their creation to their expiration or revocation. Digital certificates are electronic credentials that verify the identity of individuals, devices, or organizations and enable secure, encrypted communication over networks. They are a fundamental part of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), ensuring trust and data integrity in digital interactions. CLM involves key stages such as requesting, issuing, installing, monitoring, renewing, and revoking certificates. This process helps prevent service disruptions, security breaches, and compliance failures. CLM is used by a wide range of users including IT administrators, security teams, DevOps engineers, and compliance officers who rely on it to maintain secure and reliable digital environments.

End-user computing and support organizations use client management tools (CMTs) to automate endpoint management tasks. CMTs perform the following technical functions: • OS deployment • Hardware and software inventory • Software distribution • Patch management • Configuration management (e.g., scripts) • Security configuration management • Remote control Organizations primarily use CMTs to manage PCs running Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS. Although most organizations still leverage separate management approaches for mobile devices and PCs, unified endpoint management (UEM) supports the convergence of enterprise mobility management (EMM) and CMT functionality. Organizations are increasingly looking for a single vendor and management platform to support PCs and mobile devices.

Gartner defines the cloud access security broker (CASB) market as products and services that address security gaps in an organization’s use of cloud services. This technology is the result of the need to secure cloud services which are being adopted at a significantly increased rate and access to them from users both within and outside the traditional enterprise perimeter, plus growing direct cloud-to-cloud access. They deliver differentiated, cloud-specific capabilities generally not available as features in other security controls such as web application firewalls (WAFs), secure web gateways (SWGs) and enterprise firewalls. CASB vendors understand that for cloud services the protection target is different: it’s still your data but processed and stored in systems that belong to someone else. CASBs provide a central location for policy and governance concurrently across multiple cloud services for both users and devices and granular visibility into and control over user activities and sensitive data.

Gartner defines cloud AI developer services (CAIDS) as cloud-hosted or containerized services and products that enable software developers who are not data science experts to use artificial intelligence (AI) models via APIs, software development kits (SDKs) or applications. Core capabilities include automated machine learning (autoML) including automated data preparation, automated feature engineering and automated model building, and model management and operationalization for language, vision and tabular use cases. Optional and important complementary capabilities include AI code models and assistants. Cloud AI developer services help organizations embed intelligence, such as AI and ML insights, into their applications. While that is what cloud AI developer services offer, it is more important to note how they accomplish this. These services democratize and increase the availability of AI and ML to software engineers through the automation and features offered. Traditional activities regarding data acquisition, data quality, feature engineering, algorithm selection and model training are augmented by the technology. Cloud AI developer services open up a world of possibilities for software engineers to build AI and ML production capabilities and features for enterprise-built applications.

This market covers core financial management suites that provide a view of an enterprise's financial position through automation and process support for any activity that has a financial impact. According to Gartner's definition, core financial management suites include: • The functional areas of general ledger (GL), accounts payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR), fixed assets (FA), project accounting, project costing and project billing. • Financial analytics and reporting capabilities • Basic indirect purchasing functionality. This market focuses solely on core financial management suites that are marketed and sold on a stand-alone basis and delivered as cloud services. It does not cover vendors that sell only a broader ERP suite that includes core financial management applications.

Gartner defines the market for cloud database management systems (DBMSs) as software products that store and manipulate data and are primarily delivered as platform as a service (PaaS) in the cloud. Cloud DBMSs may optionally be capable of running on-premises or in hybrid, multicloud or intercloud configurations. They can be used for transactional and/or analytical work. They typically persist data using a combination of proprietary and open components in a durable manner, enabling a full range of create, read, update and delete operations. They are used by application end users, designers, developers and operators of large database systems.

Gartner defines cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) for product-centric enterprises as a market for application technology that supports the automation of operational activities for the manufacturing, distribution, delivery and servicing of goods. Cloud ERP for product-centric enterprises is delivered under a SaaS license model (with frequent mandatory updates), where application support, infrastructure provisioning and management are the responsibility of the vendor.

Gartner defines the market for cloud ERP for service-centric enterprises as a market for application technology that supports the automation of operational activities for service-centric (nonproduct) industries, including financial management, order-to-cash, source-to-pay, human capital management and other administrative capabilities. Cloud ERP for service-centric enterprises is delivered under a SaaS license model (with frequent mandatory updates), where application support, infrastructure provisioning and management are the responsibility of the vendor.

Gartner defines cloud ERP services as services provided by third-party systems integrators to assess needs, implement solutions and evolve platforms that are transforming their back-office systems via the implementation of cloud-based ERP solutions. A cloud ERP solution is a set of applications (SaaS) that are sold/marketed as integrated products to support organizations. These integrated products include financial management (FM) functionality, human capital management (HCM), supply chain management (SCM) and other administrative ERP functionality.

Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solutions support the office of finance's budgeting, planning and forecasting efforts. Many also supplement the office's budgeting and planning process support with modeling, collaboration analytics and performance-reporting capabilities, to increase its ability to manage performance by linking corporate strategy and execution. The FP&A market is accelerating its shift from mature on-premises offerings to cloud solutions. New solutions built or significantly rearchitected as cloud services are typically easier to use and maintain than the previous generation of on-premises offerings. The vast majority of new FP&A sales are cloud-based. On-premises options still exist, but all vendors have greatly de-emphasized them or eliminated them entirely from their sales process. All the vendors in this market sell and support cloud-based FP&A solutions.

Gartner defines HCM suites for 1,000+ employee enterprises as cloud applications that deliver functionality for attracting, developing, engaging, administering and rewarding employees. HCM suites for 1,000+ employee enterprises are designed to support transactions and/or analytical processing on a cloud architecture for more than one of the following use cases within a single integrated solution: 1. Manage organization and employee data, life cycle processes and transactional employee/manager self-service. 2. Manage organizational structure through creating, planning, monitoring and controlling job positions. Maintain a record of workforce data through assigned positions for effective workforce management and budget planning. 3. Attract, select and onboard talent through recruiting, internal mobility and onboarding. 4. Retain and develop the workforce through compensation, learning, performance and career pathing. 5. Pay employees timely and accurately along with essential benefits to address employee requirements in health, retirement, wellness and/or well-being. 6. Manage the operational deployment of salaried and hourly workers to capture time, attendance and absences. 7. Deliver tools to assist employers in managing country-specific compliance with legislation and agreements pertaining to data residency and labor laws. 8. Integrate with notable enterprise applications and provide robust reporting capabilities (e.g., finance, procurement).

Gartner defines cloud human capital management (HCM) suites for regional and/or sub-1,000+ employee enterprises as cloud application suites that deliver functionality for attracting, developing, engaging, retaining and managing employees. Cloud HCM suites for regional and/or sub-1,000 employee enterprises are designed to support transactions and/or analytical processing for more than one of the following use cases within a single integrated solution: Manage organization and employee historical data, life cycle processes and transactional employee/manager self-service; Attract and retain talent through sourcing, applicant tracking, onboarding, performance management and learning; Manage organizational structure through creating, planning and limiting employee positions. Maintain a record of workforce data through assigned positions; Manage the operational deployment of salaried and hourly workers to capture time worked and absences; Deliver tools to help employers manage country-specific compliance with legislation and agreements pertaining to data residency and labor laws.

Cloud security posture management tools help in the identification and remediation of risks across cloud infrastructures, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). These tools continuously assess the security posture across multi-cloud environments by maintaining a current inventory of the cloud assets for proactive analysis and risk assessment to detect any misconfigurations. Once these misconfigurations are identified, security controls are developed and implemented. CSPM solutions also integrate with DevOps tools, streamlining the incident response process and ensuring continuous compliance with regulatory requirements and security frameworks by providing visibility of the cloud environment’s security posture.

Gartner defines cloud web application and API protection (WAAP) as a category of security solutions designed to protect web applications and APIs from different types of attacks, irrespective of the hosting location. Typically delivered as a service, cloud WAAP is a consolidation of multiple capabilities offered as a series of security modules and designed to protect against a broad range of runtime attacks. Core capabilities are web application firewalls (WAFs), distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, protection against advanced API attacks and automated (bot) traffic management. A cloud WAAP solution must incorporate all four core capabilities within the same offering.

Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) are a unified and tightly integrated set of security and compliance capabilities, designed to protect cloud-native infrastructure and applications. CNAPPs incorporate an integrated set of proactive and reactive security capabilities, including artifact scanning, security guardrails, configuration and compliance management, risk detection and prioritization, and behavioral analytics, providing visibility, governance and control from code creation to production runtime. CNAPP solutions use a combination of API integrations with leading cloud platform providers, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline integrations, and agent and agentless workload integration to offer combined development and runtime security coverage.

Gartner defines the collaborative work management (CWM) market as the market for stand-alone software tools that provide task-driven workspaces to enable end users to plan, coordinate and automate their work. These tools provide an integrated assembly of user-friendly capabilities for work planning, in-context collaboration, content collaboration, workflow and automation, reporting, analysis and dashboarding, intelligent assistance, and use-case acceleration on a platform that handles data management and administrative operations. Tools are defined by their purpose (work planning and execution), target users and breadth of functionality.

Gartner defines communications platform as a service (CPaaS) as a cloud-based platform used by developers, the IT team and other nontechnical business roles to build an array of communications-related capabilities using APIs, SDKs, documentation and no-code/low-code visual builders. The CPaaS tools facilitate access to multiple communications channels spanning voice, SMS, email, messaging apps, video and conversational capabilities, along with security. The purpose of CPaaS is to enable enterprises to improve communications workflows by providing simplified access to multiple communications capabilities. CPaaS enables enterprises to shorten time to market for new products and services, personalize communications, and orchestrate customer journeys across multiple channels. It delivers digital engagement and operationalizes customer experience, while also driving business efficiencies at scale with digital service delivery. It is modular/composable in design and can expand from initial single use cases to many others as additional business units learn of its value.

Gartner defines configure, price and quote (CPQ) applications as software that enables sales organizations to automate and optimize the creation of quotes and capture of orders. A CPQ application is a sales tool that captures the new goods and services a customer wants to buy or the changes a customer wants to make to existing goods and services. While generally focused on assisted sales channels, CPQ capabilities such as product configuration and pricing must be shared with the self-service commerce channel. The new purchases and changes must be priced, and a binding contract must be formed with the customer before sending an order to downstream fulfillment systems.

Gartner defines contact center as a service (CCaaS) as solutions offering SaaS-based applications that enable customer service departments to manage multichannel customer interactions holistically from both a customer-experience and employee-experience perspective. CCaaS is a key technology platform used to support the customer service experience, whether it be self-service or assisted by customer service representatives. All organizations need to offer customer assistance. The preference is for remote support via voice and digital channels over physical presence in offices and stores, though it is common for organizations to offer multiple options. The ambition is for customers to self-serve assistance, through web portals or chatbots. But it is also recognized that complex issues still need the support of employees. CCaaS technology is instrumental in orchestrating both self- and assisted-service engagement with customers. The technology can also manage the quality of engagement between the customer and the customer service representative, recognizing that premium customer experiences are achieved through premium employee experiences.

Workforce engagement management (WEM) software is a collection of technologies that help manage the customer service workforce to ensure a high level of operational performance while elevating employee well-being, discretionary effort and satisfaction. The core capabilities of WEM products include: • Evaluation and improvement • Time management • Metrics and recognition (that is, performance management) • Assistance and task management • Voice of the employee (VoE) feedback • Recruitment and onboarding

Gartner defines container management as offerings that support the deployment and operation of containerized workloads. It uses a combination of technologies (many open source) that enable agile application deployments and infrastructure modernization. Delivery methods include stand-alone software or as a service. Container management automates the provisioning, operation and life cycle management of containerized workloads at scale. Centralized governance and security policies are used to manage container workloads and associated resources. Container management supports the requirements of modern applications (also refactoring legacy applications), including platform engineering, cloud management and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Benefits include improved agility, elasticity and access to innovation.

Content collaboration tools provide an easy way for employees to use and share content both inside and outside the organizations. Since these tools can be used to collaborate with customers, partners and suppliers, they often provide rich security and privacy controls. Today, much of this functionality also can be found in other tools such as cloud office platforms, workstream collaboration platforms, content services platforms and content services applications. Functional differentiators in dedicated CCTs are difficult to identify.

Gartner defines content marketing platforms (CMPs) as software solutions that support the end-to-end content production process. These solutions facilitate creating and curating text, video, images, graphics, audio, e-books, white papers and interactive content assets that are distributed through paid and owned channels. These assets are used to tell connected stories that help brands engage with and nurture multiple audiences with content that drives awareness, demand, purchases and loyalty.

Content services platforms (CSPs) are foundational for managing and utilizing content within an organization. CSP technologies enable employees to retrieve and work with content in a modern and seamless way across devices and organizational boundaries. Core CSP functionalities include content capture, creation, consolidation, processing and retention to support personal, team, departmental and enterprise business operations.

Gartner defines contract life cycle management (CLM) market as a solution that proactively manages contracts from initiation through negotiation, execution, compliance and renewal. In this context, a contract is any agreement or contractual document containing rights and obligations that affect an organization now or in the future (e.g., a nondisclosure agreement). CLM solutions allow organizations to create, negotiate and store contracts in a centralized repository. Using these solutions helps mitigate organizational risk by enabling regulatory and policy compliance, providing governance over what is signed and with whom, and role-based access to terms and obligations with third parties. CLM solutions drive visibility, consistency and efficiency in the contracting process across an enterprise. Use cases are primarily aligned to parts of the process, such as presignature and postsignature. Different departments often prioritize a certain use case based on their involvement in the contracting process.

Gartner defines conversational AI platforms (CAIPs) as SaaS products that primarily enable the development of applications simulating human conversation across multiple channels and media. CAIPs leverage composite AI, including generative AI (GenAI) and natural language technologies. Conversations can use a mix of modalities such as text, voice and visual content. To support the building of conversational applications, platforms provide extensive coding options, from pro-code to no-code. Application areas include chatbots, virtual assistants (VAs) and conversational AI (CAI) agents. CAIPs are used to create, deploy and manage AI-driven conversational interfaces. These platforms enable businesses to develop VAs and conversational AI Agents that facilitate both customer-facing and internal interactions through pro-code/low-code/no-code tools. CAIPs empower businesses to centralize and democratize the development and management of multiple, diverse CAI initiatives, leading to more cohesive and efficient operations. The blend of capabilities provided by CAIPs is distinctive compared to those offered by other CAI solutions, such as targeted extensions for CAI found in other enterprise applications (e.g., CRM systems, contact center platforms) or stand-alone GenAI-native apps. In comparison, CAIPs are a better fit for strategic and scalable enterprise-grade CAI adoption.

Corporate learning technologies help organizations train, develop, engage and analyze their learners. They help organizations with compliance, certifications, onboarding, talent development, upskilling, collaboration, coaching and mentoring, sales training, partner education, and customer training.

Gartner defines the cyber-physical systems (CPS) protection platforms market as products that use knowledge of industrial protocols, operational/production network packets or traffic metadata, and physical process asset behavior to discover, categorize, map and protect CPS in production or mission-critical environments outside of enterprise IT environments. CPS protection platforms can be delivered from the cloud, on-premises or in hybrid form. Gartner defines CPS as engineered systems that orchestrate sensing, computation, control, networking and analytics to interact with the physical world (including humans). When secure, they enable safe, real-time, reliable, resilient and adaptable performance.

Gartner defines the CRM customer engagement center (CEC) as a cohesive set of software built around core case management tools, dedicated to providing customer service and support by engaging with customers, and intelligently orchestrating the processes, data, systems, and resources of an organization. CRM CEC is a key software platform used in delivering end-to-end customer service and support experiences. It enables customers to engage and interact with an organization as well as for the organization to orchestrate its internal and external processes and resources to fulfill the customer’s expected outcome.

Gartner defines communications service provider (CSP) customer management and experience (CM&X) solutions as commercial off-the-shelf software solutions that address all customer-facing operational requirements of CSPs. These include managing customer channels, customer information, incidents, products, pricing, quotes and offers, orders, customer care and partner relationships. CM&X solutions are part of business support system (BSS) solutions for CSPs and often work together with revenue management and monetization solutions as part of a complete BSS stack. Delivery options may include license and SaaS-based models.

Gartner defines custom software development (CSD) services as the professional services engaged by organizations to design, build, modernize or iterate custom applications and software products to meet their unique business needs. CSD services entail gathering business requirements and coding applications from inception, building applications on a platform as a service (PaaS), or assembling applications from existing web services or other reusable pieces of code. Services marketed as “software product engineering” or “digital product development” likely fall under the CSD services category as defined by Gartner. These solutions are typically not available as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and require custom development.

CCM software is defined as both a strategy and a market-fulfilled by applications that improve the creation, delivery, storage and retrieval of outbound and interactive communications. It supports the production of individualized customer messages, marketing collateral, new product introductions and transaction documents. It is a collection of computer programs that composes, personalizes, formats and delivers content acquired from various sources into targeted and relevant electronic and physical communications between an enterprise and its customers, prospective customers and business partners. It delivers targeted communications through a wide range of media including mobile, email, SMS, Web pages, social media sites and print. The CCM market has evolved from the convergence of document generation/composition and output management technologies. Current CCM solutions include the core elements of a design tool, a composition engine, a workflow/rule engine and multichannel output management.

Gartner defines customer data platforms (CDPs) as software applications that support marketing and customer experience use cases by unifying a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels. CDPs optimize the timing and targeting of messages, offers and customer engagement activities, and enable the analysis of individual-level customer behavior over time.

Cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) is focused on enabling security teams to overcome asset visibility and exposure challenges. It enables organizations to see all assets (internal and external), primarily through API integrations with existing tools, query consolidated data, identify the scope of vulnerabilities and gaps in security controls. These tools then continuously monitor and analyze detected vulnerabilities to drill down the most critical threats to the business and prioritize necessary remediation and mitigation actions for improved cyber security.

Gartner defines a Data and Analytics Governance Platform as a set of integrated business and technology capabilities that help business leaders and users to develop and deploy a diverse set of governance policies and monitor and enforce those policies across their organizations’ business systems. These platforms are unique from data management in that data management focuses on policy execution, whereas these platforms are used primarily by business roles — not only or even specifically IT roles.

Gartner defines the market for data and analytics (D&A) services as consulting and system integration (C&SI) and managed services. These services manage data for all uses (operational and analytical), and analyze data to drive business processes and improve business outcomes through more effective decision making. The core capabilities for vendor solutions in the D&A services market include: D&A strategy and operating model design Data management Analytics and business intelligence (ABI) Data science and machine learning D&A governance Program management Enterprise metadata

The data center and cloud networking vendors covered in this market provide hardware and/or software solutions to deliver connectivity primarily within enterprise data centers. This includes data center core/spine switches, access switches (top of rack [ToR], leaf), virtual switching, Ethernet fabrics, network operating systems (NOSs) and network overlays, and the requisite management, automation and orchestration of those components.

DCO/HIMS is composed of the following Data center outsourcing services: Managed services for traditional data center (DC) environments: Mainframe managed services ERP hosting managed services Managed servers and network equipment Managed services for hosted and private cloud infrastructure Managed services for public cloud and edge environments: Hybrid infrastructure managed services Data center consolidation and transformation services Cloud migration services This complex set of data center capabilities and services is increasingly based on managed virtual private cloud services plus hyperscale public cloud services. It is managed via a mix of remote infrastructure management (RIM) services leveraging traditional tools, cloud management platforms (CMPs), and intelligent automation and/or hyperautomation.

The market for data integration tools consists of stand-alone software products that enable organizations to combine data from multiple sources and perform tasks related to data access, transformation, enrichment and delivery. They enable use cases such as data engineering, delivering modern data architectures, self-service data integration, operational data integration and supporting AI projects. Data management leaders procure data integration tools for their teams, including data engineers and data architects, or for other users, such as business analysts or data scientists. These products are primarily consumed as SaaS or deployed on-premises, in public or private cloud, or in hybrid configurations.

Data intelligence solutions for sales aim to enhance company master data and market insight information. They are mostly used by B2B sales organizations that are looking to improve their sales execution by empowering their employees with high-quality, real-time or near-real-time data to win more deals, and shorten the sales cycle. The market also consists of sources of real-time social and news insights on companies and people, created by ingesting external direct data feeds or web crawling news and social network posts. Most providers feed this data into account and contact records that can be integrated directly into sales force automation and CRM lead management systems.

Gartner defines data loss prevention (DLP) as a technical control designed to prevent data loss in order to comply with personal data regulations, prevent unintended disclosure, minimize insider risk and ensure that sensitive data is not overly accessible. DLP controls are typically applied to reduce the data risk for two states of unstructured data: data at rest and data in motion. Depending on the state of the data, DLP applies detective, preventive or corrective controls, including alerting, quarantining, blocking, redaction or access restriction.

We define a data management solution for analytics (DMSA) as a complete software system that supports and manages data in one or more file management systems (usually databases). DMSAs include specific optimizations to support analytical processing. This includes, but is not limited to, support for relational processing, nonrelational processing (such as graph processing), and machine learning and programming languages such as Python and R. Data is not necessarily stored in a relational structure, and multiple models can be used — for example, relational, XML, JSON, key-value, text, graph and geospatial.

Data masking is based on the premise that sensitive data can be transformed into less sensitive but still useful data. This is necessary to satisfy application testing use cases that require representative and coherent data, as well as analytics that involve the use of aggregate data for scoring, model building and statistical reporting. The market for data protection, DM included, continues to evolve with technologies designed to redact, anonymize, pseudonymize, or in some way deidentify data in order to protect it against confidentiality or privacy risk.

Data preparation is an iterative and agile process for finding, combining, cleaning, transforming and sharing curated datasets for various data and analytics use cases including analytics/business intelligence (BI), data science/machine learning (ML) and self-service data integration. Data preparation tools promise faster time to delivery of integrated and curated data by allowing business users including analysts, citizen integrators, data engineers and citizen data scientists to integrate internal and external datasets for their use cases. Furthermore, they allow users to identify anomalies and patterns and improve and review the data quality of their findings in a repeatable fashion. Some tools embed ML algorithms that augment and, in some cases, completely automate certain repeatable and mundane data preparation tasks. Reduced time to delivery of data and insight is at the heart of this market.

Gartner defines a data science and machine learning platform as an integrated set of code-based libraries and low-code tooling. These platforms support the independent use and collaboration among data scientists and their business and IT counterparts, with automation and AI assistance through all stages of the data science life cycle, including business understanding, data access and preparation, model creation and sharing of insights. They also support engineering workflows, including the creation of data, feature, deployment and testing pipelines. The platforms are provided via desktop client or browser with supporting compute instances or as a fully managed cloud offering.

Data security posture management (DSPM) discovers previously unknown data across on-premises data centers and cloud service providers (CSPs). It also helps categorize and classify previously unknown and discovered unstructured and structured data. As data rapidly proliferates, DSPM assesses who has access to it to determine its security posture and exposure to privacy, security and AI-usage-related risks. DSPM is delivered as software or as a service.

The market for distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation includes vendors that detect and mitigate DDoS attacks and offer it as a dedicated offering. It includes specialty vendors, whose primary focus is DDoS mitigation, as well as providers that offer DDoS mitigation as a feature of other services. These include dedicated appliance-based vendors, communication service providers (CSPs), content delivery network (CDN) vendors, hosting providers and cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS) vendors.

Gartner defines desktop as a service (DaaS) as the provision of virtual desktops by public cloud or other service providers. DaaS provides desktop or application end-user experiences from virtual machines (VMs) accessed using a remote display protocol. DaaS vendors incorporate a fully managed control plane service into their offerings, which facilitates user connections and provides a management interface. DaaS can be delivered preconfigured as a service. Alternatively, it can be delivered as a platform, in which case the client is responsible for assembly, configuration and management. DaaS is charged through subscription- or usage-based payment structures.

Gartner defines DevOps platforms as those that provide fully integrated and orchestrated capabilities to enable continuous delivery of software using agile and DevOps practices. The capabilities span the development and delivery life cycle built around the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, including planning, creation, artifact management, security, quality engineering, change management, compliance, environment management, deployment and monitoring. DevOps platforms support team collaboration, consistency, tool simplification and measurement of software delivery metrics. They are delivered primarily as cloud-hosted services with some options for on-premises deployment. DevOps platforms simplify the creation, maintenance and management of the components required for the delivery of various types of modern software. Platforms create common workflows and data models, simplify user access, provide production-like development and test environments, and provide a consistent user experience (UX) to reduce cognitive load. They lead to improved visibility, auditability and traceability for the software delivery value stream. This end-to-end view encourages a systems-thinking mindset and accelerates feedback loops. Organizations use DevOps platforms to minimize tool friction resulting from complex toolchains, manual handoffs and lack of consistent visibility throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). This enables product teams to deliver faster customer value without compromising quality. The DevOps platforms market reflects the consolidation of technologies across development, security, infrastructure and operations to streamline software delivery.

Gartner defines a digital adoption platform (DAP) as software that overlays employee- and customer-facing applications with in-application guidance to drive adoption, proficiency and engagement. It supports digital transformation by streamlining and accelerating how employees or customers learn and engage with technologies. It provides consistent experiences that help users complete work efficiently across multiple applications. In addition, DAP analytics provide actionable insights to improve experience, optimize work and adoption/utilization, boosting the ROI of applications.

Gartner defines digital commerce as the technology that enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience. The platform provides necessary information for customers to make their buying decisions and uses rules and data to present fully priced orders for payment. The commerce product must support interoperability with customer data, product content (e.g., price, availability) and order functionality and data via APIs. Digital commerce is commonly delivered as single or multitenant SaaS, or as single-tenant hosted or managed hosted (PaaS) applications. It could be offered for on-premises implementations in some circumstances. Digital commerce enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience, providing the necessary information for customers to make buying decisions.

Gartner defines digital communications governance and archiving (DCGA) solutions as designed to enforce corporate governance and regulatory compliance, and derive insights from an evolving number of digital communications tools utilized by organizations. For the various communications tools in use across the enterprise, DCGA solutions enable consistent policy management and enforcement, reveal new data insights, and provide reporting capabilities of their use. Organizations utilize DCGA solutions to proactively manage, monitor, collect and archive communications content. They are critical to an organizations’ efforts to meet a growing number of regulatory compliance mandates and an expanding scope of organizational communications governance and data insights. Compliance requirements include monitoring, oversight, audits and investigations for regulated industries such as financial services and health sciences. They also extend to investigation requirements of the public sector to respond to public records requests. Corporate governance requirements include employee conduct and handling of sensitive data in the use of digital communication tools.

Digital employee experience management tools measure and help IT continuously improve employee sentiment toward and the performance of company-provided technology. They continuously surface actionable insights, drive self-healing automations, and optimize support and employee engagement via the near-real-time processing of aggregated data from endpoints, applications, employee sentiment and organizational context. These insights enable self-healing and can enhance employee interactions with self-service portals and chatbots. They also help IT support, asset management, procurement and other teams whose work depends on reliable information. DEX tools help IT improve the digital employee experience by quickly identifying and remediating technology issues. Benefits for IT teams include greater visibility of device and application performance, reliability and usage; reduced overhead through automation; and improved endpoint configuration and patch compliance. Benefits for the workforce include reduced digital friction that impedes productivity, the ability to offer feedback, faster issue resolution, and rightsized virtual and physical endpoints with optimized life spans.

Gartner defines digital experience monitoring (DEM) as the measurement of the availability, performance and quality of the user experience of applications. This can include internal users (employees), external users (customers and partners) or a digital agent connecting to an API. In addition to performance, DEM enables observability of user behavior and journeys based on their interaction with applications. DEM tools allow I&O leaders to understand the availability, performance and reliability of business applications, networks and infrastructure by focusing on understanding the user experience. This is in contrast to other performance monitoring approaches, such as observability platforms, that understand the inner workings of applications.

A digital experience platform (DXP) is a cohesive set of integrated technologies designed for the composition, management, delivery and optimization of personalized digital experiences across multiple channels in the customer journey. A DXP orchestrates multiple applications to allow the creation, management and presentation of seamless digital experiences. It forms part of a digital business ecosystem via API-based integrations with adjacent technologies. DXPs serve B2C and B2B use cases.

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) market provides for the recovery of enterprise applications at another location in the event of a disaster. The provider can deliver the service as a fully managed, assisted recovery or as a self-service offering. DRaaS is designed to ensure business continuity by providing organizations with a cloud-based solution for recovering critical workloads and data in the event of a disruption, outage or disaster. This service is particularly valuable for organizations that lack the resources, expertise or geographically distanced secondary data centers required for traditional disaster recovery strategies. DRaaS addresses the need for rapid, reliable recovery, enabling organizations to minimize downtime and data loss, and to meet their business continuity objectives.

Gartner defines document management as the tools and practices used to capture, store, process, and access documents and content in support of personal, team and enterprise needs. It is used for a wide range of collaborative and operational purposes, enabling the digital workplace, content collaboration, content-centric processes, content services for enterprise applications and content governance. Gartner estimates that 70% to 80% of enterprise information is unstructured, posing a significant challenge for organizations that must unlock the potential and mitigate the risks of content. Document management tools are critical to enterprise application strategies that need to support unstructured information or content.

Edge distribution platforms are highly distributed, edge-based, integrated networks and cloud delivery infrastructures that provide the following as-a-service functionality: edge compute and storage, web application and perimeter security, content and API acceleration, data and analytics, and AI application infrastructure.

Electronic signatures are a digital representation of an individual’s agreement that is intended to be the equivalent of a “wet” signature. Electronic signatures encompass a set of methods that can be applied to a digital document to capture intent to sign, and consent to sign electronically. They do this by electronically gathering metadata related to all signing events, and creating an audit trail that is cryptographically sealed to ensure document authenticity, nonrepudiation and integrity of the electronically signed document. This audit trail may also contain various supporting evidence of the individuals signing the document, such as names, email addresses, identity proofing and authentication steps. Evidence details may vary with each product, but the audit trail provides evidence to support the legal value of the document. A digital signature (as it relates to document signing) is a type of electronic signature that, in addition to the requirements of an electronic signature, also requires that each signer sign the document with a digital certificate that is explicitly issued to them.

Gartner defines email marketing as the use of the email channel to deliver and optimize marketing messages — such as brand newsletters or contextually relevant, real-time and personalized communications — in support of engagement across the customer journey. Email service providers often bolster their technology platforms with supplementary managed services to improve the value and scalability of the email channel. Email marketing helps marketers deliver information to their audiences after obtaining an email address. This can take the form of product or service updates, new promotions, transaction updates and more. As a relatively inexpensive method for communicating at scale with contacts, email provides value for different use cases across the full customer-engagement life span. Email is the most effective channel for several marketing objectives, including demand generation, conversion to sales, and customer loyalty and advocacy.

Gartner defines an email security platform as a product that secures email infrastructure. Its primary purpose is the removal of malicious (phishing, social engineering, viruses) or unsolicited messages (spam, marketing). Other functions include email data protection, domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC), investigation, and remediation through a dedicated console. These solutions may integrate as a secure email gateway (SEG) for predelivery protection or as an integrated cloud email security (ICES) solution for postdelivery protection. Email security platforms protect an organization’s email infrastructure from social engineering, phishing, business email compromise, spam, malware attacks and data theft. These platforms are deployed independently but integrated with other network and endpoint security controls to improve the overall risk posture of the organization. They offer cybersecurity teams visibility into email-related security incidents for investigation and remediation.

EMNSs automate the distribution and management of messages to relevant stakeholders for localized events and regional and catastrophic disasters across multiple channels. Use cases include organizational crises, business-critical operations, IT outages, and public and personal safety.

The ECA market consists of vendors offering a discrete application, well-defined module, or cohesive set of capabilities that enables people in “communicator” roles to plan, create, coordinate, and distribute internal communications across the workforce or to specific audiences. ECAs include analytics that measure interactions and effectiveness of communications across content, channels, devices, campaigns and feedback loops to assess business and employee value.

Employee Recognition and Reward Systems are designed to acknowledge and reward employees for their accomplishments and behaviors that align with organizational goals. These systems enable real-time recognition through various forms such as e-cards, badges, and awards, while rewards can include tangible or monetary benefits like bonuses, gift cards, promotions, or extra vacation days. Integration with HR systems streamlines processes, automates tracking and reporting, and eliminates manual data entry. Additional features like peer-to-peer recognition, public recognition, personalized development opportunities, feedback mechanisms, gamification, and wellness programs further enhance the effectiveness of these systems. These systems enhance employee motivation, improve job satisfaction, and provide data-driven insights for assessing program effectiveness, benefiting managers, HR teams, and employees across various industries.

The Endpoint Detection and Response Solutions (EDR) market is defined as solutions that record and store endpoint-system-level behaviors, use various data analytics techniques to detect suspicious system behavior, provide contextual information, block malicious activity, and provide remediation suggestions to restore affected systems. EDR solutions must provide the following four primary capabilities: • Detect security incidents • Contain the incident at the endpoint • Investigate security incidents • Provide remediation guidance

Gartner defines an endpoint management tool as a platform or tool that provides configuration management, patching and deployment of operating systems and applications for computers or mobile devices. Endpoint management tools are used to provide management capabilities for endpoint devices of various operating systems. These tools help maintain cybersecurity hygiene and enable end-user computing operations and automation by facilitating operating system and application deployment, patching and configuration management.

Gartner defines an endpoint protection platform (EPP) as security software designed to protect managed endpoints — including desktop PCs, laptop PCs, virtual desktops, mobile devices and, in some cases, servers — against known and unknown malicious attacks. EPPs provide capabilities for security teams to investigate and remediate incidents that evade prevention controls. EPP products are delivered as software agents, deployed to endpoints, and connected to centralized security analytics and management consoles. EPPs provide a defensive security control to protect end-user endpoints against known and unknown malware infections and file-less attacks using a combination of security techniques (such as static and behavioral analysis) and attack surface reduction capabilities (such as device control, host firewall management and application control). EPP prevention and protection capabilities are deployed as a part of a defense-in-depth strategy to help reduce the endpoint attack surface and minimize the risk of compromise. EPP detection and response capabilities are used to uncover, investigate and respond to endpoint threats that evade security protection, often as a part of broader threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) capable products.

Gartner defines enterprise agile planning (EAP) tools as products that enable organizations to scale their agile practices to support a holistic enterprise view. These tools act as a hub for defining, planning, managing and deploying work. They also serve as an information hub for the disparate islands of metrics from the full life cycle. Just as agile is an evolution of development methodologies, EAP tools are an evolution of project-/team-centric tools. They support a business-outcome-driven approach to managing the full life cycle of agile product delivery at scale.

Gartner defines the market for enterprise architecture (EA) tools as tools that allow users to capture interrelationships and interdependencies within and across an organization’s ecosystem of applications, capabilities, processes, operating models, roles, information and technologies. EA tools provide a central repository to capture data and metadata about artifacts that describe the enterprise. Users build models and viewpoints to represent the relationships between these artifacts, helping describe and shape the future of the enterprise. EA tools enable analysis of trends, disruptions, and other drivers of enterprise change to deliver realistic roadmaps and explore potential scenarios. EA tools provide a means to model the IT and business aspects of the enterprise, in support of business outcome delivery. Doing so requires the collaboration of multiple stakeholders across the organization, with each playing a different role at a different time. The models and methods used by the stakeholders will vary depending on their role, and must be integrated and connected to other models to be useful.

Enterprise asset management (EAM) is a business application used most comprehensively by asset-intensive industries to execute, track and optimize inspections, maintenance and repair of industrial plants and equipment. Examples of these industries are heavy discrete and process manufacturing industries, oil and gas, rail, and power and utilities. An alternative term used for EAM is “computerized maintenance management system (CMMS),' which generally consists of small-scale, single-site applications with less functionality around parts management and resource scheduling.

Enterprise business process analysis (EBPA) tools enable business and process modeling, manage process repositories and support analysis aimed at transforming and improving business performance. These tools emphasize cross-viewpoint (strategy, analysis, architecture, automation) and cross-functional analysis guiding strategic and operational decisions.

High-productivity application platform as a service (hpaPaaS) solutions provide services for declarative, model-driven application design and development, and simplified one-button deployments. They typically create metadata and interpret that metadata at runtime; many allow optional procedural programming extensions. The underlying infrastructure of these solutions is opaque to the user, as they do not deal with servers or containers directly. The rapid application development (RAD) features are often referred to as 'low code' and 'no code' support. HpaPaaS solutions provide support for: • UI capabilities via responsive web and mobile apps • Orchestration or choreography of pages, business process, and decisions or business rules • Built-in database • 'One button' deployment Only vendors providing 'enterprise' hpaPaaS — as a public cloud service — are considered in this market.

Gartner defines enterprise low-code application platforms (LCAPs) as software platforms for the accelerated development and maintenance of applications, using model-driven development tools, generative AI and prebuilt component catalogs for the entire application’s technology stack. Enterprise LCAP features include support for the collaborative development of all application components; runtime environments for high performance, availability and scalability of applications; and application deployment and monitoring with detailed usage insights. Enterprise LCAP platforms feature governance controls and insights, self-service capabilities, APIs for integration with external DevOps tooling, success management with exhaustive technical documentation, training programs and a comprehensive global partner network. Enterprise LCAPs provide the foundation for developing a wide range of applications and application components with distributed data architectures, including complex multimodal front ends, business workflows, agentic AI and integration capabilities. The enterprise LCAP market is closely related to the citizen application development platform (CADP) market, as they both aim to address the use cases listed below. However, they are distinctively different in terms of the target audience and complexity of the applications built on the platform.

Enterprise mobility management suites provide policy and configuration management tools for applications and content, based on smartphone operating systems. The market has evolved from previous-generation mobile device management products that lacked application and content management. IT leaders now see the potential to leverage mobility to better run, grow and transform their organizations. They are using mobility management suites to deliver IT support to mobile end users and to maintain security policies.

Enterprise search engines are specialized search tools designed to help organizations index, search, and retrieve information stored within their internal data repositories. Unlike general web search engines that index and search the entire internet, enterprise search engines focus on the internal data of an organization, which can include documents, emails, databases, intranet sites, and other digital assets or data sources. Modern enterprise search engines often incorporate Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) and AI-powered technologies to enhance their capabilities and improve the search experience. This type of search engine is adept at handling both structured and unstructured data, making it invaluable for diverse use cases such as knowledge management, customer support, and business intelligence. By integrating these enterprise search software capabilities, organizations can ensure that employees have quick and relevant access to the information they need, thereby improving productivity and decision-making.

Gartner defines the enterprise wired and wireless LAN infrastructure market as the hardware and software that enables local connectivity for users and devices. The infrastructure components include enterprise-class wired switches and wireless access points, and the management software that secures, manages, tests, optimizes and automates the network. Organizations across vertical markets rely on enterprise wired and wireless network infrastructures to connect and transmit data for both fixed and mobile devices, enabling end users to access applications that are located either on-site, in remote private or public destinations. In addition to end-user connectivity, these infrastructures offer capabilities for diverse market needs, including: 1. Discovery, identification, security, management and segmentation of Internet of Things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) devices. 2. Design and planning for network infrastructure requirements. 3. Implement zero-touch provisioning for deployment and configuration of the network infrastructure devices. 4. Offer support, testing and maintenance for network infrastructure components. 5. Establish a resilient infrastructure to withstand disruptions and provide continuous operations. 6. Implement robust security measures to safeguard the network infrastructure. 7. Scalability and flexibility for efficient management and control plane communication processes. 8. Provides a no-touch or low-touch environment for operations on Day 2

Gartner defines event marketing and management platforms as tools that enable B2B marketers to execute virtual and/or in-person events for external audiences. These platforms provide native capabilities to engage and communicate with prospective attendees, registrants and sponsors, manage logistics, deliver content and enable attendees to engage with other participants. Out-of-the-box integrations with sales force automation and marketing automation platforms are provided to track engagement. Features and capabilities are provided in a self-service model, with some platforms offering managed service support to run the technology when preferred. The event technology market does not include webinars or internal meeting-specific solutions.

The market for ESP platforms consists of software subsystems that perform real-time computation on streaming event data. They execute calculations on unbounded input data continuously as it arrives, enabling immediate responses to current situations and/or storing results in files, object stores or other databases for later use. Examples of input data include clickstreams; copies of business transactions or database updates; social media posts; market data feeds; images; and sensor data from physical assets, such as mobile devices, machines and vehicles.

Organizations use expense management software to simplify their expense reimbursement and reconciliation process. The software provides facilities for expense report creation, submission, approval, reimbursement, and accounting. The software replaces the manual paperwork with an automated workflow to upload, track and submit expense receipts conveniently. These reimbursement receipts are accessible to the administrators through a streamlined process to approve the claims while checking for any corporate policy violations. In addition, the software assists organizations in keeping track of their employee’s corporate expenses.

Extended detection and response (XDR) delivers security incident detection and automated response capabilities for security infrastructure. XDR integrates threat intelligence and telemetry data from multiple sources with security analytics to provide contextualization and correlation of security alerts. XDR must include native sensors, and can be delivered on-premises or as a SaaS offering. Typically, it is deployed by organizations with smaller security teams.

External attack surface management (EASM) refers to the processes, technology and professional services deployed to discover internet-facing enterprise assets and systems and exposures that could be exploited by malicious threat actors. EASM is useful in identifying unknown assets and providing information about the organization’s systems, cloud services and applications that are available and visible in the public domain and therefore can be exploited by an attacker/adversary. This visibility can also be extended to the organization’s subsidiaries or third parties. EASM are most commonly cloud-based products and services but can also be delivered ‘as a service’. EASM appeals to security operations functions involved with penetration testing, vulnerability management and threat hunting who want better visibility of their internet-facing assets to complement their threat and exposure management program.

Gartner defines field service management (FSM) as modular software that manages work and commercial interactions for organizations whose workforces travel to remote locations. These workforces install, inspect, maintain and repair consumer, commercial or industrial equipment, assets and systems. FSM software may also help manage, maintain and monitor these under a predefined service or maintenance contract. FSM software is delivered primarily as cloud-based services and mobile apps; however, some FSM vendors also provide the option to deploy some or all components on-premises.

File analysis (FA) products analyze, index, search, track and report on file metadata and file content, enabling organizations to take action on files according to what was identified. FA provides detailed metadata and contextual information to enable better information governance and organizational efficiency for unstructured data management. FA is an emerging solution, made of disparate technologies, that assists organizations in understanding the ever-growing volume of unstructured data, including file shares, email databases, enterprise file sync and share, records management, enterprise content management, Microsoft SharePoint and data archives.

Gartner defines file and object storage platforms as software and/or hardware platforms that offer object and distributed file system technologies for storing and managing unstructured data over NFS, SMB and Amazon S3 access protocols. File and object storage platforms store, secure, protect and scale an organization’s unstructured data with access over the network using protocols such as NFS, SMB and Amazon S3. Use cases include analytics, workload consolidation, backup and archiving, hybrid cloud, object-native applications, cloud IT operations, and high-performance files.

Gartner defines finance and accounting (F&A) business process outsourcing (BPO) as the use of third-party outsourcing service providers to handle transactional finance processes such as purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash and record-to-report. BPO service providers remotely connect to clients’ systems to carry out these operations. BPO service providers can also offer proprietary or partnered process automation solutions to enhance transactional processing efficiency. F&A BPO services are typically delivered from global delivery centers.

Gartner defines financial close and consolidation solutions (FCCS) as applications that enable CFOs and their teams to manage the organization’s group close, consolidation and reporting processes. The FCCS market equips organizations to (1) manage and drive financial control across their close cycles through configurable workflows and dashboards that support collaboration and provide a centralized auditable view; (2) execute financial consolidation across multiple legal entities (LEs) and geographies; (3) meet accounting standards for currency translation, intercompany elimination and top-side adjustments; and (4) generate reporting that adheres to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and regional compliance.

Gartner defines financial planning software (FPS) as the key tool that enables data-driven financial resource allocation, investment and spending decisions by supporting effective planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. FPS enables organizations to link their strategies to financial and operational plans through cloud-based software. It facilitates the creation and management of financial plans, budgets and forecasts by breaking down information silos and integrating operational KPIs. FPS analytics and reporting features offer a holistic performance view, connecting both operational (nonfinancial) and financial metrics, enabling stakeholders to make data-driven decisions.

Gartner defines full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure software as the market consisting of complete software solutions that include virtualized compute, storage and networking from a single instantiation designed to run on-premises or in a colocation environment. It consists of those vendors that develop and sell hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software comprising the vendor’s own server virtualization, software-defined storage and network management tools. The full-stack software solution may also be integrated with a hardware stack, as a complete offering spanning both software and hardware. Recently, this market has been heavily influenced by the positioning of storage virtualization and private cloud infrastructure looking to revirtualize compute and providing alternatives to incumbent vendors.

General-purpose disk arrays (GPDAs) satisfy the storage needs of applications and middleware, such as databases, backup/restore systems and archiving solutions running on physical or virtual servers. Block-and-file protocols — e.g., Fibre Channel (FC), Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), Network File System (NFS), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and SMB — dominate this market. NVMe-oF, an emerging protocol designed to enhance the performance of solid-state arrays (SSAs), will not be supported by hybrid disk arrays or all hard-disk drive (HDD) arrays, perhaps other than those with flash-centric architectures delivering submillisecond response times. Gartner segments the external, controller-based storage market into the GPDA space, which includes all disk and hybrid arrays, and the SSA market. This market excludes SSA, object and distributed file system storage, as well as software-defined storage (SDS).

Generative AI (GenAI) apps use generative AI capabilities for user experience and task augmentation to accelerate and assist the completion of a user’s desired outcomes. Generative AI refers to technologies that can generate new derived versions of content, strategies, designs and methods by learning from large repositories of original source content. When embedded in the experience, generative AI offers richer contextualization for singular tasks such as generating and editing text, code, images and other multimodal output. As an emerging capability, process-aware generative AI agents can be prompted by users to accelerate workflows that tie multiple tasks together. Apart from helping save time and money, generative AI apps help improve branding of businesses by creating more engaging and effective content while also creating more engaging and immersive experiences for customers. Please note that this market is based on Beta research and is continuously evolving. We will be making changes as and when there are new updates.

The global industrial IoT platform delivers multiple integrations to industrial OT assets and other asset-intensive enterprises’ industrial data sources to aggregate, curate and deliver contextualized insights that enable intelligent applications and dashboards through an edge-to-cloud architecture. The global industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform market exists because of the core capabilities of integrated middleware software that support a multivendor marketplace of intelligent applications to facilitate and automate asset management decision making. IIoT platforms also provide operational visibility and control for plants, infrastructure and equipment. Common use cases are augmentation of industrial automation, remote operations, sustainability and energy management, global scalability, IT/operational technology (OT) convergence, and product servitization of industrial products.

Gartner defines global WAN services as POP-based services supporting multiregional corporate networks. These services address enterprise challenges such as hybrid working practices, accelerating digital and cloud transformations and improving enterprise network agility. Providers own and operate their own global core networks and sell directly to the client. Services include transport-centric/unmanaged, managed, co-managed network services, or network as a service via a monthly fixed or usage-based fee model. Core transport services are often complemented by ancillary services like carrier-based cloud interconnect, SD-WAN, SASE or managed services. Services are measurable and consumable through web-based customer interfaces via portals and programmable APIs.

The hybrid cloud storage market comprises diverse deployment patterns with underlying technologies that address a wide range of data types. Products in this market must facilitate seamless data services across different environments, including disparate data centers, colocations, edge locations and public cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud data solutions are offered through various means such as distributed hybrid infrastructure (DHI), hybrid cloud storage platforms, data transfer appliances, hyperconverged solutions, storage arrays, software-defined storage (SDS) products and comprehensive data management software.

Gartner defines identity governance and administration (IGA) as the solution to manage the identity life cycle and govern access across on-premises and cloud environments. To accomplish this, IGA tools aggregate and correlate disparate identity and access rights data, and provide full capability controls over accounts and associated access.

Gartner defines the indoor location service market as “the hardware, software and service components that provide indoor location coordinates and services.” Indoor location solutions use differing hardware components, data collection methodologies, location data elements, location engine algorithms and architectures to achieve the core functionality of the indoor location market. Solutions provide the location of a static/mobile asset or person, as defined by the needs of the specific vertical market.

Infrastructure monitoring tools capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components, no matter where they reside (e.g., in a data center, at the edge, infrastructure as a service [IaaS] or platform as a service [PaaS] in the cloud). This enables I&O leaders to monitor and collate the availability and resource utilization data of physical and virtual entities — including servers, containers, network devices, database instances, hypervisors and storage. These tools collect data in real time and perform historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor.

Innovation management tools market help organizations manage the flow of ideas from initial concept generation to final value realization or commercial exploitation. They support diverse methods to generate ideas, both internally or externally; to prioritize and select ideas; to act on selected ideas; to observe and measure activity and impact; and to operate innovation programs at scale. Product capabilities include trendspotting, crowdsourcing, brainstorming or hackathons; stage-gate automation for idea evaluation and selection; and ways to manage a portfolio of active ideas (including idea execution to bring ideas to realization via project or product management).

Gartner defines the insider risk management (IRM) market as solutions that use advanced analytics, monitoring, and behavior-based risk models to detect, analyze and mitigate risks posed by trusted insiders within an organization. These solutions monitor the activities of employees, service partners and key suppliers to ensure their behavior aligns with corporate policies and risk tolerance levels. IRM platforms can be delivered as cloud-based services or on-premises solutions, or in hybrid forms. When effectively implemented alongside proper governance, they provide comprehensive visibility, real-time detection, and proactive intervention to safeguard against data theft, fraud and other malicious or unintentional insider threat activities.

Gartner defines Insight Engines as follows: Insight engines apply relevancy methods to discover, analyze, describe and organize content and data. They enable the interactive or proactive delivery or synthesis of information to people, and data to machines, in the context of their respective business moments. Insight engines should be viewed as platforms on which applications are provided, developed or augmented by applying the capabilities listed above to specific employee and customer experience use cases. Such applications are provided out of the box by vendors (e.g., intranet or site search), developed through technical partnerships (e.g., search within third-party applications), developed with customers in-house (e.g., expert finder), or developed through integration with third-party applications (e.g., extracting data from documents to support RPA).

Integrated Development Environment (IDE) software provides a unified interface to write, test, and debug code efficiently. It typically includes a source code editor, compiler or interpreter, debugger, and build tools, all within a graphical user interface (GUI) that simplifies navigation and development workflows. Most IDEs also support features like intelligent code completion, syntax highlighting, version control integration, and project management tools. By offering everything in one place, IDEs reduce setup time, minimize context switching, and help developers detect and fix errors quickly. This results in faster, more organized, and more accurate software development. IDEs are widely used by programmers, software developers, data analysts, and engineers working across various programming languages and platforms, from web and mobile apps to enterprise systems.

Gartner defines Integrated risk management (IRM) as the combined technology, processes and data that serves to fulfill the objective of enabling the simplification, automation and integration of strategic, operational and IT risk management across an organization.

Gartner defines integration platform as a service (iPaaS) as a vendor-managed cloud service that enables end users to implement integrations between applications, services and data sources, both internal and external to their organization. iPaaS enables end users of the platform to integrate a variety of internal and external applications, services and data sources for at least one of the three main patterns of integration technology use: data consistency, multistep process and composite services. These integration use cases are most commonly implemented via intuitive low-code or no-code developer environments, though some vendors provide more complex developer tooling.

Gartner defines intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions as specialized data integration tools that enable automated extraction of data from multiple formats and various layouts of document content. IDP solutions ingest data for dependent applications and workflows and can be provided as a software product and/or as a service. Organizations receive and process documents in multiple formats to enable activities such as onboarding new suppliers, receiving applications for loans or insurance claims. This results in large volumes of documents, the content of which is designed for human comprehension rather than machine processing. Extracting data from content is essential for document processing and the automated activities this supports. IDP solutions fulfill this role, augmented by and potentially replacing people. Documents are received in physical form, typically paper, which must be scanned for digitization, or in digital form, such as emails and PDFs. The content of these documents has varying layouts, ranging from structured formats, such as tabular or outline (e.g., list or hierarchy of headings) or invoices or contracts, to unstructured formats (i.e., free-flowing, such as an email). Layouts that fall between structured and unstructured, or mixing the two, are often referred to as semistructured.

Gartner defines an intranet packaged solution (IPS) as a general-purpose, unified, multichannel software product available via public or private cloud deployment. It delivers a versatile range of business-to-employee digital experiences, including internal communications, community and social interaction, knowledge bases, self-service functions, and access to training and business applications. IPS products utilize web and mobile channels to support these experiences, while also offering native support for other channels such as email, AI assistants, digital signage, in-app plugins and messaging apps. The web channel may consist of a single site or a collection of IPS-created sites, encompassing various site types such as portals, “front doors” or hubs. An IPS is typically sponsored by HR and internal communication leaders as part of digital workplace initiatives. An IPS aims to provide consistent digital experiences that help employees perform their best work, connect to the organization’s culture, align with the organization’s strategy, and advance their skills and expertise. It facilitates the creation, deployment, management and evolution of multichannel communications, serving as a common resource for information and knowledge sharing across the organization. Deploying an IPS enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of intranet projects.

Gartner defines the invoice-to-cash (I2C) applications market as cloud-based applications that enable corporate controllers to automatically manage collections and apply customer payments to invoices. I2C applications typically gather, disseminate, track and analyze data from and to internal and external sources. They make I2C processes more efficient and effective, including managing and monitoring deductions, disputes and credit risk. They also typically can ensure invoices are delivered to customers and that customers have options to pay them. I2C applications enable I2C transaction processing across multiple ERP systems. Organizations use I2C applications to collect and apply customer payments to open invoices, perform credit and collections activities, manage deductions and disputes, and deliver and present invoices to customers for payment. I2C applications are cloud-based tools that provide organizations with a standard way of processing across ERPs, while creating flexibility for buyers in how they receive or access invoices as well as pay and dispute them. I2C applications allow an organization to connect and exchange data with multiple ERP systems and other operational tools, such as customer relationship management tools, as well as with partners such as credit and collections agencies, logistics providers, banks and payment service providers. They use data to determine credit risk, automate collections and cash applications activities as well as help manage the resolution of deductions and disputes. Such activities result in faster collection of cash, improved visibility to cash flow, an improved customer experience and reduced process cost.

Gartner defines IT service management (ITSM) platforms as software that offers cohesive workflow management and automation for organizations to plan, deliver, support and improve integrated IT services. ITSM platforms provide a system of record for ITSM practices, including request, incident, problem, change, knowledge, service level and configuration management. Typically offered as SaaS, ITSM platforms are also available for on-premises deployments as per organizational needs. ITSM platforms are key tools used to manage IT support issues and aid employee productivity. IT leaders require robust ITSM platforms to drive business value in the services they provide, and are increasingly looking for these products to support digital business transformation outside IT. By capturing, tracking and reporting on service-related activities across the estate, the platform acts as a coherent system of record for ITSM-related actions. ITSM platforms boost infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams’ efficiency through automating processes, streamlining decision making and providing seamless integration with third-party applications. As organizational needs grow, advanced multichannel support features enhance the end-user experience, helping IT services remain agile and aligned with business goals.

Gartner defines IT vendor risk management (IT VRM) as the discipline of addressing the residual risk that businesses and governments face when working with external service providers, IT vendors and related third parties. The scope typically addresses risks related to data protection, business continuity, security and other risk domains as relevant to laws, regulation and industry practices.

Gartner defines managed detection and response (MDR) services as those that provide customers with remotely delivered security operations center (SOC) functions. These functions allow organizations to perform rapid detection, analysis, investigation and response through threat disruption and containment. They offer a turnkey experience, using a predefined technology stack that commonly covers endpoints, networks, logs and cloud. Telemetry is analyzed within a provider’s platform using a range of techniques. The MDR provider’s analyst team then performs threat hunting and incident management to deliver recommended actions to their clients. MDR offers outcome-driven security incident management that is predicated on the detection, analysis and investigation of potentially impactful security events and the delivery of active threat disruption and containment actions to respond to and mitigate the impact of cyber breaches.

Gartner defines managed IoT connectivity services as a market that enables secured connectivity, data collection, analysis and additional decision services. Managed IoT connectivity services are delivered fully managed, including dedicated help desk and project and service management capabilities, although hybrid managed and self-managed could also apply as delivery models. Self-managed is delivered through a self-service IoT connectivity management portal, including Level 2 and Level 3 back-office support. Internet of Things (IoT) devices can use various connectivity technologies. Connections can be cellular (2G, 3G, 4G/LTE and 5G); satellite, low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks (3GPP and non-3GPP); and managed field-area networks (FANs). Managed IoT connectivity services also enable organizations to securely collect, analyze and interact with data streams, therefore providing businesses with the ability to monitor, manage and control (manually and through automation) assets associated with business processes. This includes connected consumer, commercial or industrial products. Additionally, managed IoT connectivity services may encompass integrated and managed IT infrastructure and systems, operational technology (OT) infrastructure and systems, software, network services (connectivity), and IT services. Managed IoT connectivity services are a solution element within the broader solution sets of digital businesses and OT systems in enterprise environments.

Gartner defines the managed mobility services (MMS) market as a set of bundled vendor-provided IT services, outsourced business process services, software as a service and managed services commonly aimed at enterprises’ IT and procurement teams. These life cycle services typically include procuring, provisioning, activating, kitting, shipping, managing, securing, supporting and decommissioning mobile devices. A mobile estate here comprises smartphones, tablets and/or ruggedized devices. MMS services can be applied to both corporate-liable and individual-liable (or “bring your own device” [BYOD]) devices. MMS helps ensure operational and commercial effectiveness for an organization and its mobile device users. This includes securing information created/accessed/modified by mobile devices; maximizing device (and consequently user) availability, visibility and control of the mobile estate; inventory and usage optimization; lowering total cost; and improving ROI and the employee experience (EX).

The managed network services (MNS) market focuses on externally provided, network operations center (NOC) functionality, as well as relevant network and security life cycle services that deliver current and emerging requirements to end users. Gartner defines the MNS market as globally capable providers of remote service management functions for the network and security operations of enterprise networks, including: Managed LAN services (MNS for LAN) Managed WAN services (MNS for WAN) Managed security (MNS for security) functions

Managed print services (MPS) is the term for a service offered by an external provider to take primary responsibility for an enterprise’s print infrastructure. MPS programs are designed to meet certain objectives, such as driving down costs, improving business efficiency, enabling digital transformation (including reducing reliance on print), or reducing environmental impacts. The core components of MPS include: 1) Thorough requirements assessment. 2) Optimization of new and existing hardware. 3)Provision of service, parts and supplies within defined service levels. 4) Active management and reporting on devices, utilization and other key performance indicators (KPIs). 4) User training and change management to support solution adoption. In addition to core services some add-on components have become popular: a) Print server consolidation or elimination and cloud solutions. b) Digitization and automation of previously paper-reliant workflows and integration with business systems (document and content management digital platforms). c) Security capabilities for print infrastructure, along with security consultancy services. d) Sustainability and green initiatives programs and services.

Manager and Leadership training develops the skills and competencies managers and leaders need to effectively lead their teams to strong performance and high engagement and to guide their organizations in meeting evolving business priorities. Training can focus on soft skills (such as change management), technical skills (such as AI literacy), and support for specific moments (such as delivering performance reviews). Manager training and leadership training is often delivered online to enable scalable deployment and is usually then accessible on-demand. The training solutions are often integrated into an organization’s Learning Management System (LMS) and supported by skills assessments to help direct training selection. Solutions have varying degrees of available customization to meet clients’ specific needs. Typical buyers include CLOs, heads of L&D or HR, and Talent Development managers, with HRBPs and Learning Technologists playing key influencer roles.

Gartner defines manufacturing execution systems as a specialist class of production-oriented software that manages, monitors and synchronizes the execution of real-time physical processes involved in transforming raw materials into intermediate and/or finished goods. These systems coordinate the execution of work orders with production scheduling and enterprise-level systems like ERP, product life cycle management and quality management systems. MES applications also provide feedback on process performance, and support component and material-level traceability, genealogy and integration with process history, where required.

Gartner defines marketing work management (MWM) platforms as a self-service system of record for marketing projects and productivity. MWM platforms provide a holistic view into past, current and planned work and enable the optimization of resources applied to marketing initiatives. MWM platforms offer intake management, resource allocation, project orchestration, operational performance measurement and workflow automation, and more. Native or integrated tools may enable varying degrees of strategic, financial and talent planning.

Master data management (MDM) is a technology-enabled business discipline where business and IT organizations work together for the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of enterprises’ shared master data assets. Organizations use MDM solutions as part of an MDM strategy, which should be part of a wider enterprise information management (EIM) strategy. An MDM strategy potentially encompasses management of multiple master data domains (e.g., customer, citizen, product, “thing,” asset, person/party, supplier, location, and financial master data domains). Data and analytics (D&A) leaders procure MDM tools for data engineers or less-technical users, such as data stewards.

Meeting solutions are real-time communication services with their associated devices that support live interactions between participants for internal and external collaboration, presentations, learning, training sessions and webinars. Meeting solutions power diverse use cases, such as one-on-one meetings, remote sales engagements, board meetings, telehealth sessions, remote banking and consulting services, to name just a few. Meeting solutions enable rich information sharing and interaction by combining audio and video, in-meeting chat, content and screen sharing, and visual collaboration and whiteboarding.

Vendors in the mobile application development platform market offer tools, technologies, components and services that together constitute the critical elements of a platform. These products enable an enterprise to design, develop, deploy, distribute and manage a portfolio of mobile applications running on a range of devices and addressing the requirements of diverse use cases. Buyers in this market are looking to address the challenge of building and delivering a sizable portfolio of mobile apps for customers, partners and employees.

Gartner defines mobile marketing platforms (MMPs) as software solutions that help organizations create, activate, execute, analyze and optimize mobile marketing campaigns and experiences. The platforms target audiences on their mobile device through multiple message types such as SMS/text, push notifications, messaging apps and in-app messages. These platforms enable marketers to engage customers and prospects through a range of mobile-specific tactics — spanning mobile websites, mobile applications, smart device engagement, messaging (such as SMS and native applications), push notifications (such as on mobile apps and off websites), location-triggered interactions and mobile wallet cards. Mobile tactics are particularly suited to, for example, providing time-sensitive notifications to audiences, whether that’s in response to a live event, location-specific moment or a fulfillment update. MMPs also help measure and optimize the effectiveness of mobile strategy. MMPs can operate as stand-alone solutions within a marketing organization’s tech stack, or operate alongside other marketing technology. These technologies can include a set of capabilities within a multichannel marketing hub (MMH), marketing automation platform (MAP), customer data platform (CDP) or other marketing automation applications. Stand-alone MMPs are a more specialized solution, often used in conjunction with an MMH, email platform or B2B MAP.

Mobile threat defense (MTD) products protect organizations from malicious threats on iOS and Android devices, at the device, network and application levels. To successfully attack a mobile device, mobile malware must circumvent the controls built into mobile OSs, such as those for app store curation and native mobile OS hardening. MTD products tend to focus on preventing and detecting anomalous behavior by collecting and analyzing indicators of compromise, as well as expected behavior. MTD products gather threat intelligence from the devices they support, as well as from external sources, and use an analysis engine that resides in the cloud, on-premises or on an MTD app installed on devices.

Gartner defines multichannel marketing hubs (MMHs) as software applications, primarily delivered as SaaS, that orchestrate personalized campaigns and event-driven customer journeys across marketing channels. These applications leverage customer data, predictive models and real-time insights to optimize the timing, channel and content of interactions. MMHs apply advanced analytics, AI and prescriptive intelligence to help marketing and technical teams manage the end-to-end life cycle of customer journeys. Although MMHs overlap with customer data platforms (CDPs) and personalization engines, their primary focus is enabling marketing users to manage large-scale consumer interactions, particularly in owned media channels such as email and app push. Multichannel marketing hubs empower marketers to deliver personalized media and orchestrate customer journeys, thus driving revenue, engagement and loyalty. These SaaS applications unify customer data, predictive insights and real-time decision making to optimize interactions across digital channels. MMHs enable multidisciplinary teams to manage campaigns and event-driven journeys via advanced analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and prescriptive intelligence.

An MXDP is an opinionated, integrated set of front-end development tools and “backend for frontend” (BFF) capabilities. It enables a distributed, scalable development approach (in terms of both teams and architecture) to build fit-for-purpose apps across digital touchpoints and interaction modalities. At minimum, an MXDP must support cross-platform development and building of both custom iOS and Android app binaries, responsive web apps, and at least one of the following: PWAs, chatbots, voice apps, wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) apps, and augmented-reality (AR) and mixed-reality (MR) apps.

Gartner defines network access control (NAC) as technologies that enable organizations to implement policies for controlling access to corporate infrastructure by both user-oriented devices and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Policies may be based on authentication, endpoint configuration (posture) or users' role/identity. NAC can also implement postconnect policies based on integration with other security products. For example, NAC could enforce a policy to contain the endpoint based on an alert from a SIEM. An organization should evaluate the following capabilities: • Device visibility/profiling • Access control • Security posture check • Guest management • Bidirectional integration with other security products.

Network automation platforms are products that automate and orchestrate multiple vendors’ network functionality. These platforms support a broad range of capabilities including provisioning, deprovisioning, orchestration, troubleshooting, operations, workflow, configuration management, event-driven automation, validation and reporting. These platforms are well-suited to add value on top of existing point network automation tools by orchestrating end-to-end network workflows across existing automation tools. Network automation platforms interact directly with network devices, other automation and orchestration tools, network management systems/controllers, and/or network services. These platforms increase agility and efficiency of network infrastructure while lowering costs; reducing the amount of manual human errors; and improving compliance with required rules, regulations and laws.

Network detection and response (NDR) products detect abnormal system behaviors by applying behavioral analytics to network traffic data. They continuously analyze raw network packets or traffic metadata within internal networks (east-west) and between internal and external networks (north-south). NDR products include automated responses, such as host containment or traffic blocking, directly or through integration with other cybersecurity tools. NDR can be delivered as a combination of hardware and software appliances for sensors, some with IaaS support. Management and orchestration consoles can be software or SaaS.

Gartner defines the network firewall market as the market for firewalls that use bidirectional stateful traffic inspection (for both egress and ingress) to secure networks. Network firewalls are enforced through hardware, virtual appliances and cloud-native controls. Network firewalls are used to secure networks. These can be on-premises, hybrid (on-premises and cloud), public cloud or private cloud networks. Network firewall products support different deployment use cases, such as for perimeters, midsize enterprises, data centers, clouds, cloud-native and distributed offices.

Network management tools are software applications used to monitor, maintain, and administer computer networks. They help in ensuring the network's efficient operation, detecting and resolving problems, and optimizing performance. Key functions include monitoring network traffic, managing network devices, ensuring security, and troubleshooting issues. Network Administrators, IT Managers, and Security Professionals utilize these tools to monitor and manage network hardware effectively. They track the performance of network devices such as routers and switches, ensuring these devices operate optimally. Additionally, they maintain and update the configuration of these network components to ensure robust security and efficient network functionality.

The Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) market consists of tools that leverage a combination of data sources to provide a holistic view of how networks (including corporate on-premises, cloud, multicloud, hybrid and other networks) are performing. Data sources include: Network-device-generated traffic data Raw network packets Network-device-generated health metrics and events NPM tools provide diagnostic workflows and forensic data to identify the root causes of performance degradations — increasingly through the adoption of advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning algorithms (ML). Finally, based on network-derived performance data, NPM tools provide insight into the quality of the end-user experience.

Gartner defines observability platforms as products used to understand the health, performance and behavior of applications, services and infrastructure. They do this by ingesting telemetry (operational data) from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, logs, metrics, events and traces. Observability platforms enable analysis of the ingested telemetry, either via human operator or machine intelligence, to determine changes in system behavior that impact end-user experience, such as outages or performance degradation. This allows early, and even preemptive, problem remediation. Observability platforms are used by IT operations, site reliability engineers, cloud and platform teams, application developers and product owners. Modern businesses rely heavily on critical digital applications and services, which are revenue-generating, client-facing and important to the efficient operation of the business. Outages, performance degradation and unreliability directly impact top-line revenue, client sentiment and brand perception. Observability platforms are used by organizations to understand and improve the availability, performance and resilience of these critical applications and services. Investment in and successful deployment of observability platforms leads to revenue loss avoidance and enables faster product development cycles and improvements in brand perception.

Onboarding Software enables employers in streamlining and automating the processes of smooth transition into the workplace of new hires. The key capability of the software focuses on facilitating the workflow of the onboarding process from pre-hire to the first six months, typically. To do so, it includes a combination of features such as form processing to ensure compliance with government regulations; data completion/verification to ensure the accuracy and completeness of employees’ provided information; and social/cultural assimilation to help new hires in understanding the organization's social and cultural dynamics via leadership videos, team introductions, learning courses, assigning mentors and more. Some vendors may also provide the capability of offboarding and cross-boarding of existing employees from or within the organization. These platforms are primarily utilized by human resources (HR) departments within organizations. Additionally, managers and team leaders may also utilize onboarding software to facilitate the orientation and training process for new team members under their supervision.

Gartner defines the OFD market as the market for solutions that detect and prevent fraudulent actions within digital channels (browsers and mobile apps). OFD solutions provide a spectrum of capabilities within digital channels to prevent direct and indirect financial losses and to mitigate risks. Their core capabilities: Mitigate the activity of malicious automated bots; Detect account takeover (ATO) attacks and trigger remedial actions; Detect fraudulent activity in high-risk events along the digital customer journey, such as when customers make payments, transfer funds, perform account management actions or access personally identifiable information (PII).

The operational database management system (OPDBMS) market is defined by relational and nonrelational database management products suitable for the traditional transactions used to support business processes. These include a broad range of enterprise-level applications — both purchased business applications, such as ERP and CRM applications, and custom-made transactional systems. Our definition of this market also includes DBMS products that support interactions and event processing (data in motion) uses for the Internet of Things (IoT). OPDBMSs may support multiple different delivery models, such as stand-alone DBMS software, cloud (public and private) images or containerized versions, certified configurations and database appliances.

Gartner defines the outsourced digital workplace services market as the services performed by providers to deliver consulting, implementation and support for enhancing the digital employee experience of end users who depend on endpoint virtual and physical devices and applications to conduct business. Services offered by outsourced digital workplace services (ODWS) vendors include integrated digital workplace (DW) services that work to increase employee engagement, enhance employee experience and productivity, and improve digital dexterity in support of the organization’s business strategy.

Gartner defines personalization engines as technology that enables marketing professionals to identify, set up, conduct and measure the optimum experience for an individual based on knowledge about them, their intent and context. Personalization engines apply context about individual users and their circumstances to select, tailor and deliver messaging such as content, offers and other interactions through various digital channels in support of three use cases: marketing, digital commerce, and service and support.

Predictive analytics software uses advanced analytics capabilities to analyze current and historical data to make predictions about future events. This software connects data from different data sources and employs techniques like data mining and statistical analysis to forecast future trends, detect patterns, identify potential risks and opportunities, and plan for the best possible outcome. As a result, organizations can make better business decisions with machine-generated analytics, visualization, and reporting on predictive insights. These can be used in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, finance, marketing, and manufacturing.

The primary storage platform (PSP) market addresses the need of I&O leaders to operate and support standardized enterprise storage products, along with platform-native service capabilities to support structured data applications. PSP products like primary enterprise storage arrays provide mandatory and common enterprise-class primary storage features and capabilities needed to support the platform. Platform-native services like storage as a service (STaaS) and ransomware protection, with PSP product capabilities, are required to support platform-native services. The PSP market has emerged at the convergence of two major enterprise storage market developments: the evolution of the PSP product market in conjunction with the demand for hybrid, multidomain platform-native storage services, extending on-premises services to public cloud, edge and colocation environments.

Gartner defines privileged access management (PAM) as tools that provide an elevated level of technical access through the management and protection of accounts, credentials and commands, which are used to administer or configure systems and applications. PAM tools — available as software, SaaS or hardware appliances — manage privileged access for both people (system administrators and others) and machines (systems or applications). Gartner defines five distinct tool categories for PAM tools: privileged account and session management (PASM), privilege elevation and delegation management (PEDM), secrets management, cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) and remote PAM (RPAM). Privileged access is access beyond the normal level granted to both human and machine accounts. It allows users to override existing access controls, change security configurations, or make changes affecting multiple users or systems. As privileged access can create, modify and delete IT infrastructure, along with company data contained in that infrastructure, it presents catastrophic risk. Managing privileged access is thus a critical security function for every organization and requires a specific set of procedures and tools. PAM tools focus on either privileged accounts or privileged commands.

Process mining platforms offer comprehensive analysis of end-to-end processes by extracting event data from information systems. This includes automated process discovery (extracting process models from an event log), conformance checking (monitoring deviations by comparing model and log), social network/organizational mining, automated construction of simulation models, model extension, model repair, case prediction and history-based recommendations. Process mining platforms extend process mining capabilities via advanced process analytics, process improvement detection and process improvement recommendations.

Product roadmapping tools for software engineering have simplified product-related communication and streamlined product management and development efforts. This document profiles selected vendors and tools that can assist with: Management of software product vision and strategy alignment Communication of ideas and requirements Decision making through an understanding of user behavior, data and analytics, priorities, and consequences Defining software features and business capabilities, and handling backlogs Planning and tracking software development releases Financial and budget management Collaboration on timelines Communication, negotiation and updates Integration planning and resource tracking Report generation and notifications Managing feedback from developers, teams and users Support for continuous development and continuous integration

PPM software providers covered under this market definition aim to support the selection, planning and execution of a variety of different work packages or containers, including, but not limited to, traditional projects. They often fold in collaboration and communication capabilities and allow work teams and project offices to report, monitor and identify course correction in resource-intensive project and work environments. Providers included in this market offer these capabilities directly through their own products, but frequently recognize that specific integration points may also be needed to connect niche tools or data sources. The PPM capabilities identified as essential or critical include: • Project demand management • Project planning and management • Time management • Resource management • Resource capacity planning • Project portfolio management • Project collaboration • Program management • Reporting services • Security and user management • Integration • Usability

Gartner defines public cloud IT transformation services (PCITS) as services designed to deliver transformational outcomes via the utilization of cloud-native professional and managed services. It includes migration, modernization, optimization and the building of new, transformational solutions on public hyperscale cloud infrastructure and platform services. Organizations seeking to use public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and similar platforms engage with providers in this market to realize the greatest transformational benefits. PCITS transforms client applications, workloads and data to the public cloud to achieve their clients’ business outcomes. It promotes use of cloud-native tools, AI/generative AI (GenAI)/data and analytics (D&A) and manages IT operations in the public cloud. It employs globally consistent cloud management, optimization and modernization to continuously manage reliability, scalability, interoperability and more.

Gartner defines the market for quality management system (QMS) software as the business information management system that manages quality policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs). This may include, but is not limited to, customer requirements, quality documents, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements, manufacturing capabilities, robust design, auditing procedures and protocols, nonconformance/risk management activities, testing criteria, and industry-specific regulations (for example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] or the Federal Acquisition Regulation [FAR] requirements).

Gartner defines the real-time transportation visibility platform (RTTVP) market as platforms that provide real-time location and status insights into orders once they have left the warehouse. This includes other facilities, such as those of a brand owner, supplier, contract manufacturer or service provider. Such platforms, owned and managed by third-party software vendors, represent part of the supply chain visibility market that predominantly — but not solely — addresses domestic road transportation modes. RTTVPs obtain data through integration (via API or electronic data interchange [EDI], for example) with carrier systems, direct feeds from telematics (in-cab or in-trailer devices) or other technologies or apps.

Remote Desktop Software allows secure access and control of remote devices across multiple platforms. The software provides the same level of access as being physically present to manage and control the resources of the remote device. The software offers secure transfer of files in a live or unattended support session. The Remote Desktop software is generally used by the IT professionals performing maintenance and support personnel assisting end-users.

Gartner defines revenue enablement platforms (REPs) as platforms that unite sales and customer-facing enablement and revenue functions. They encompass revenue-generating roles such as sales, customer success, marketing, partners and presales. They support both sales enablement and marketing leaders in providing a holistic enablement program. REPs are deployed as SaaS with mobile capabilities. The platforms have capabilities for digital content, learning, practice and coaching and engagement analytics as well as AI and conversational intelligence for skill building. Revenue enablement platforms unify digital content management, learning, practice and coaching. They integrate with sales force automation (SFA) or marketing automation platforms, provide the ability to create and curate content focused to sales use cases and buyer journeys, feature buyer engagement analysis and measure content effectiveness. REPs drive effectiveness through behavior change resulting in improved revenue growth. They provide an organization the ability to control, focus and leverage its messaging delivered by revenue-facing roles to customers while gaining insight on customer and seller engagement with that content. They measure and build role skills and competencies through microlearning and retention quizzing, role-play practice and coaching, and analytics that improve commercial execution.

Gartner defines robotic process automation (RPA) as software that automates tasks within business and IT processes using software scripts that emulate human interaction with the application UI. RPA enables a manual task to be recorded or programmed into a software script, which users can develop through programming or by using the RPA platform’s low-code and no-code GUIs. This script can then be deployed and executed into different runtimes. The runtime executable of the deployed script is referred to as a bot or robot.

Gartner defines SaaS management platforms (SMPs) as software tools that aim to help organizations discover, manage, optimize and automate the SaaS application life cycle from one centralized console. Core SMP capabilities include discovery, cost optimization, employee self-service via an application store, insights to increase adoption and automation of onboarding/offboarding activities. As SaaS adoption accelerates, IT leaders will struggle to discover and support SaaS-hosted applications in accordance with company, market or geographic policies and regulations. Increased SaaS costs — combined with limited visibility into the entire SaaS portfolio (including unapproved SaaS) and high levels of overdeployed and underconsumed licenses — result in significant financial, operational and cybersecurity risk.

Sales engagement applications (SEAs) streamline how sellers execute sales activities and deal workflows at scale. They optimize seller productivity by combining three key capabilities into a single interface: multichannel engagement (e.g., email, voice, SMS, video, social media), outbound workflow execution and time-saving AI/automation. Sellers rely on SEAs to streamline guidance into whom to engage and when, and what messaging to use, while capturing sales activities back into sales force automation (SFA) platforms.

Sales force automation (SFA) platforms are AI-enhanced tools that streamline sales tasks, helping teams manage buyer interactions across various channels. By using AI, these platforms optimize sales activities with advanced analytics and actionable insights, improving contact, pipeline and opportunity management. AI features like machine learning and natural language processing enable platforms to predict customer needs, personalize strategies and guide sellers through complex processes. AI-driven tools aid in forecasting and decision making, allowing teams to anticipate market trends and customer behaviors. SFA platforms enhance the user experience for sellers, ensuring scalability and facilitating seamless buyer-seller interactions and shared customer experiences, and providing leaders with visibility. SFA is a foundational sales platform implemented to automate and augment an organization’s core sales processes while utilizing AI and advanced analytics. It enhances the seller’s ability to engage with customers on all interaction touchpoints and devices. It not only optimizes sales-relevant tasks but also provides actionable next best actions for improved sales contact, pipeline and opportunity management.

Gartner defines sales performance management (SPM) as a suite of applications that enable the implementation and administration of commission-based incentive plans for sellers and other revenue producers, with variable short-term incentives. Vendors typically offer seat-based platform access for sales operations leaders, frontline sales leaders, territory managers and finance roles. Clients may integrate SPM applications with their customer relationship management toolset for workflow and data connectivity, and for opportunity estimation to drive seller behavior.

Scheduling Automation software is a tool designed to automate and streamline the process of scheduling and managing appointments, meetings, tasks, and other time-related activities. The software improves overall efficiency in scheduling processes, enhances communication, reduces manual efforts, and scheduling conflicts. The typical features include calendar integration, online appointment booking, availability management, reminders and notifications, time zone management, and resource allocation. It is widely leveraged by individuals, teams, or organizations across various industries, such as healthcare, customer service, education, project management, and more.

Gartner defines software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) as products used to connect branch locations to other enterprise and cloud locations. SD-WAN products provide dynamic path selection based on business or application policy, routing, centralized orchestration of policy and management of appliances, virtual private network (VPN) and zero-touch configuration. SD-WAN products are WAN transport/carrier-agnostic and create secure paths across physical WAN connections.

Gartner defines search and product discovery as applications that augment digital commerce solutions to facilitate navigation, filtering, comparisons and, ultimately, selection of products. They provide search (keyword, semantic and visual), merchandising (automation, configuration and curation of business rules) and product recommendations. These applications also provide catalog navigation (including SEO keyword automation and guided selling assistants). Personalization, optimization and analytics capabilities should also be available. Platforms are deployed as SaaS. They provide administrative tooling to enable digital commerce roles (merchandisers, content managers and search specialists) to support customer experiences via no-code. With the emergence of generative AI, conversational search and guided selling assistants are now appearing. Search and product discovery applications can provide the digital customer journey from landing on a website or app to finding the correct product and adding to basket. Search results can be highly visual, using engaging layouts and multimedia. Content other than product information, such as educational information, compliance materials, customer reviews and related news may also be included in search results to engage customers and further support buying decisions.

Secure enterprise browsers (SEBs) are solutions that deliver enterprise security policies and controls through a centrally managed custom web browser, plug-in or browser extension. SEBs provide security and policy enforcement for web, SaaS and private applications, as well as browser hardening delivered through the browser rather than at the endpoint OS or network level. SEBs also enable visibility, control and auditability of web application data accessed by end users from managed or unmanaged devices without the need for in-line decryption of web traffic.

Secure web gateways (SWGs) utilize URL filtering, advanced threat defense and legacy malware protection to defend users from internet-borne threats, and to help enterprises enforce internet policy compliance. SWGs are implemented as on-premises appliances (hardware and virtual) or cloud-based services, or in hybrid mode (combined on-premises appliances and cloud-based services). Vendors continue to differ greatly in the maturity and features of their cloud-based services, and in their ability to protect enterprises from advanced threats.

The SACBT market is characterized by vendor offerings that include one or more of the following capabilities: 1. Ready-to-use training and educational content. 2. Employee testing and knowledge checks. 3. Availability in multiple languages, natively or through subtitling or partial translation (in many cases, language support is diverse and localized). 4. Phishing and other social engineering attack simulations. 5. Platform and awareness analytics to help measure the efficacy of the awareness program. Training modules are available as cloud-hosted SaaS applications or on-premises deployments via client-managed learning management systems (LMSs), and also support the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) standard, enabling integration with corporate LMSs.

Security information and event management (SIEM) is a configurable system of record that collects, aggregates and analyzes security event data from on-premises and cloud environments. SIEM processes security event data for the purposes of threat detection, investigation and response. It natively supports data normalization and offers user-configurable detection content and reporting to orchestrate threat mitigation and satisfy compliance requirements. These solutions are delivered via a SaaS platform or client-hosted on-premises or private cloud. The security information and event management (SIEM) system must assist with: 1. Aggregating and normalizing data from various IT and operational technology (OT) environments. 2. Designing and executing near real-time monitoring and alerting content. 3. Enriching and investigating security events of interest. 4. Supporting manual and automated response actions. 5. Maintaining and reporting on current and historical event data.

Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) solutions combine incident response, orchestration and automation, and threat intelligence (TI) management capabilities in a single platform. SOAR tools are also used to document and implement processes (aka playbooks, workflows and processes); support security incident management; and apply machine-based assistance to human security analysts and operators. SOAR solutions must provide: - Highly customizable workflow process management that enables repeatable automated tasks to be turned into playbooks that run in isolation or joined together into more sophisticated workflows. - The ability to store (locally or in a third-party system) incident management data to support SecOps investigations. - Manually instigated and automated triggers that augment human security analyst operators to carry out operational tasks consistently. - A mechanism to collate and better operationalize the use of threat intelligence. - Support for a broad range of existing security technologies that supports improved analyst efficiency and acts as an abstraction layer between the desired outcomes and the custom-made set of solutions in place in your environment.

Gartner defines security service edge (SSE) as an offering that secures access to the web, cloud services and private applications regardless of the location of the user, the device they are using or where that application is hosted. SSE protects users from malicious and inappropriate content on the web and provides enhanced security and visibility for the SaaS and private applications accessed by end users. Security service edge provides a primarily cloud-delivered solution to control access from end users and devices to applications, as well as websites and the internet. It provides a range of security capabilities, including adaptive access based on identity and context, malware protection, data security and threat prevention, as well as the associated analytics and visibility. It enables more direct connectivity for hybrid users by reducing latency and providing the potential for improved user experience. Capabilities that are integrated across multiple traffic types and destinations allow a more seamless experience for both users and administrators while maintaining a consistent security stance.

Server virtualization includes a range of technologies that abstract an underlying infrastructure layer (networking, storage and compute [including memory]). In doing so, it improves hardware utilization, workload portability, automation and availability. Server virtualization is most often associated with hypervisor-based server workloads running in data center environments on industry-standard servers. In reality, server virtualization incorporates multiple technologies, spans locations from public cloud to edge, and supports initiatives for both cloud-native transformation and infrastructure modernization. It includes hardware-, cloud- and software-based technologies.

Gartner defines a service-centric ERP suite as comprising: Financials, HCM and indirect procurement (administrative ERP) PSA — includes project planning and resourcing, project management, and project accounting and billing Specialized industry-specific modules or applications — for example, grant management in higher education and public sectors A service-centric ERP suite must provide at least financial management functionality from administrative ERP and either PSA or industry-specific modules for at least one service-centric industry. Optionally, the vendor may provide other administrative ERP capabilities (such as HCM and indirect procurement).

Social marketing management (SMM) tools equip organizations with the ability to orchestrate and manage a wide range of social communication efforts across various marketing teams and social platforms within a single tool. These software solutions help marketing leaders monitor, collect and analyze social data; develop, publish and promote content; identify and engage with their audience; and track the performance and impact of these communications.

Gartner defines software asset management (SAM) managed services as services that expert providers deliver to manage the software, SaaS and cloud assets of end-user organizations. Their delivery includes skills, processes, technologies and governance to transform and run the SAM discipline on behalf of the client. SAM managed services employ the providers’ proprietary skills and methodologies to transform and run SAM and FinOps disciplines on behalf of the client, augmenting the client’s resources. Delivered by skilled resources and leveraging the provider’s expertise, intellectual property (IP), rigor and best practices, SAM managed services address the gap in available SAM and FinOps skills, enable scalability and enhance maturity. At the same time, they deliver day-to-day SAM and FinOps activities and oversee the full life cycle. SAM managed services are delivered directly to end-user customers, on either a continuous or a project basis, employing required discipline to meet software and cloud cost optimization, and governance objectives.

Software asset management (SAM) tools aim to decipher the complex and ever-changing world of software licensing. Core capability of SAM tools include discovery, normalization, reconciliation, optimization and reporting. SAM tools help address these common use cases: Discovery of software on on-premises, virtual and cloud platforms; Software entitlement management through a central repository, to track purchase data and contractual commitments; Spend management through demand forecasting, downgrading of entitlements, and reallocating of unused licenses or licenses assigned to leavers; Provision of software data insights by identifying licenses allocated to users and devices, software metering, providing usage data to procurement teams, and rightsizing. Ability to share data on software rationalization opportunities; Risk identification by detecting shadow usage, as well as end-of-life and end-of-support software; Increased collaboration between teams that participate in the software application life cycle, including all stakeholders internal and external to IT; Creation of reporting dashboards for operations teams and management.

The software test automation market offers tools, technologies, components and services that together constitute the critical elements of automated testing. It includes tools for performing static code analysis, functional testing, and load and performance testing in an automated way. These tools enable an organization to design, develop, maintain, manage, execute and analyze automated tests for applications running on different platforms (including desktop, web, mobile and server). They can run automated tests by driving the user interface (UI) of an application (known as UI test automation), or interact with the application through an application programming interface (API test automation) or communication protocol.

The Solid-State Arrays (SSA) market is defined by customer requirements for highly automated, guaranteed low latency solid-state storage arrays compared to older larger and slower electromechanical storage array offerings which use hard-disk drives (HDDs). Solid state arrays that are developed, offered, sold and marketed by vendors in this market must have a dedicated model, name and cannot be configured with HDDs at any time. However, many different types of solid-state storage can be used within the SSAs in this market. This is why colloquially this market is often called the 'flash array' market, but this is quite limited as 'flash' refers to only one type of relatively slow solid-state technology called NAND. Therefore, SSAs within this market can use many other types of solid state other than 'flash.' Examples of other types of solid-state storage within this market are Storage Class Memory (SCM), 3D XPoint and Z-NAND.

Gartner defines the source-to-pay (S2P) suite market as an integrated set of solutions to source, contract, request, procure, receive and pay for goods and services across an enterprise. These solutions typically are sold as cloud-based software as a service. Source-to-pay suites allow organizations to manage all of their sourcing and procurement activities within a single integrated solution. These solutions are modular in nature, allowing customers to activate/implement the functionality that is relevant for their needs, and are ERP/financial-system-agnostic. The integrated nature of these solutions allows for data to easily flow across the source-to-pay process, providing needed visibility to upstream and downstream information. For example, users can view a purchase order alongside its related contract, the sourcing event that led to the contract, and connected downstream documents like receipts, invoices and payments.

Gartner defines strategic cloud platform services (SCPS) as standardized, automated, public cloud offerings integrating infrastructure services (for example, computing, network and storage), platform services (for example, application, data and value-added services such as AI/ML) and transformation services (resources to help customers adopt cloud-oriented IT delivery models). Although owned by the service provider, infrastructure and platform services may be hosted in providers’ infrastructures or customers’ data centers. Services should be elastically scalable, metered by use and consumable via web-based interfaces and programmable APIs. Transformation programs may be delivered by automated, self-service interfaces, and managed interactions facilitated by account teams/partners.

Gartner defines the strategic portfolio management (SPM) market as comprising both cloud-based and on-premises applications for enterprisewide strategic planning and execution, supporting advanced portfolio management. SPM offerings integrate multiple portfolios with interdependent structures, creating a dynamic model of the path to realize strategic outcomes. These products are ideally suited for organizations pursuing digital strategies, which demand extensive stakeholder collaboration to continually adapt to changing conditions. Organizations use SPM to align portfolios with strategy and apply value-based decision making for ongoing flexibility in the midst of progress, disruptions and opportunities. Digital strategies combine portfolios representing different contexts, such as business capabilities, investments, applications, services, assets, programs, products and projects. Strategists, business leaders, IT leaders and PMOs cooperatively align the utilization of these diverse portfolios to progressively achieve strategic objectives.

Strategic sourcing application suites are a set of related, integrated solutions that support upstream procurement activities; in other words, the strategic work the procurement team does for planning, assessment and performance management. Strategic sourcing application suites are used primarily by companies with $800 million or more in annual revenue that, typically, have the necessary critical mass of spend. The strategic sourcing application suite delivers four primary capabilities. Most vendors offer these capabilities as separately licensable modules: Spend analysis is a software- and service-based solution for cleansing, enhancing, classifying and analyzing spend data. It features rule-based data cleansing, automated category-level classification, analytics and decision support. Automated spend analysis is used in procurement and sourcing to quantify spend by supplier, category and part, and to identify opportunities for cost reduction and supply base resizing.

Gartner defines supply chain planning (SCP) solutions as platforms that provide technological support to enable a company to manage, link, align, collaborate and share its planning data across an extended supply chain. An SCP solution supports planning, ranging from demand planning through detailed supply-side response planning, and from strategic planning to execution-level planning. It is the planning decision repository for a defined end-to-end supply chain. It is also the environment in which end-to-end-integrated supply chain decisions are managed. It establishes a single version of the truth for planning data and decisions, regardless of the underlying execution technology environment.

Tag management system (TMS) simplifies the deployment and management of tags. Tags are snippets of code or tracking pixels embedded in a website or app to collect data and facilitate third-party services. These tags are used for various purposes, including analytics, advertising, marketing, and personalization. TMS allows users to add, edit, and manage tags without directly altering the website's code, often through a user-friendly interface. This helps streamline the process, reduces the need for constant IT involvement, and improves website performance by loading tags asynchronously.

Talent acquisition (recruiting) suites are used by recruiting teams to manage the job application selection process. Capabilities include an applicant tracking system, which handles the job requisition, job posting, application, and candidate selection workflows, and a combination of candidate relationship management (also known as sourcing or pipelining) and/or employee onboarding modules. Today’s talent acquisition suites offer a variety of functions with an emphasis on automation and AI-enabled capabilities to provide a streamlined, engaging experience for all stakeholders involved in the hiring process, such as recruiters, hiring managers and candidates. Organizations that do their own hiring require a means to engage, select and onboard would-be employees.

A talent management (TM) suite is an integrated set of modules that supports an organization’s need to plan, attract, develop, reward, engage and retain talent. The modules offer functionality that includes the areas of workforce planning, recruiting and onboarding, performance appraisal, goal management, learning management, competency management, career development, succession and compensation. The functional modules align with the key human capital management (HCM) processes of: • Plan to source • Acquire to onboard • Perform to reward • Assess to develop A boost to demand in the TM suite market has resulted from the delivery of functionality to improve workforce engagement and collaboration. Further, growing demand for greater analytical capabilities and predictive insights to improve decision making in relation to workforce actions has improved the market’s general health.

Test Data Management (TDM) is the process of provisioning data for development and testing in preproduction environments. It ensures efficient, high-quality datasets while safeguarding data privacy and sensitive corporate information to meet compliance and security requirements. Modern TDM solutions leverage synthetic data generation, alongside data subsetting and masking techniques, to provide realistic yet secure test data. These solutions are widely used by software developers, QA engineers, data analysts, and IT security teams to optimize testing, maintain regulatory compliance, and enhance application reliability.

A traditional enterprise reporting platform includes capabilities to create trusted, sanctioned and highly controlled production reports and dashboards, which are then automatically distributed to large numbers of users in an enterprise and customers, or embedded in applications. It is most often deployed against a well-modelled data warehouse and/or data mart, including an optimization layer featuring online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes. It also requires a reusable semantic layer to give content authors consistent and governed access to data sources, metrics, and other data definitions such as hierarchies and groups. These platforms are designed to support modular development of IT-produced analytics content.

Gartner defines transportation management systems (TMSs) as software that supports multimodal planning and execution of the physical transport of goods across the supply chain. It allows a shipper to manage varying levels of transportation complexity across multiple transport modes and geographic regions. TMS solutions are utilized by shippers of differing sizes, operational complexity, industries and geographic locations.

All unified communications (UC) solutions are intended principally to improve user productivity and enhance business processes that relate to communications and collaboration. Gartner defines UC solutions — equipment, software and services — as offerings that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communications methods to achieve those aims. UC solutions integrate communications channels (media), networks and systems, as well as IT business applications, and, in some cases, consumer applications and devices. UC offers the ability to significantly improve how individuals, groups and companies interact and perform. The UC solutions that enterprises deploy range from stand-alone suites from single vendors, to integrated applications and platforms from multiple vendors. UC is often deployed to extend and add functionality to established communications investments.

Gartner defines unified communications as a service (UCaaS) as a multitenant, subscription-based service that is cloud-delivered. It provides business telephony features; public switched telephone network (PSTN) connectivity that enables inbound and/or outbound external calling; and collaboration features, such as messaging and meetings. UCaaS services can be consumed by end users with traditional handsets, desktop clients, web clients, meeting room systems and mobile apps. UCaaS is used by organizations to securely communicate and collaborate — both internally and externally. It includes telephony, messaging and meetings. UCaaS providers may offer variations of each of the three core modes of communication and also offer a range of cloud contact center functionalities, either self-developed or through integration/partnerships with cloud contact center specialists. Gartner’s definition of meetings for the UCaaS market mostly focuses on the capabilities for internal collaboration, work from home and external presentation meeting use cases. Other specialized use cases — such as webinar, remote support, distance learning and training — are often available from UCaaS offerings, but are not mandatory for inclusion in this research. These use cases are part of a separate market defined by Gartner (the meeting solutions market).

Gartner defines the unified threat management (UTM) market as multifunction firewalls used by small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Typically, midsize businesses have 100 to 1,000 employees. UTM vendors continually add new functions on UTM platforms, and therefore, they encompass the feature set of many other network security solutions, including: • Firewall • Intrusion prevention systems (IPSs) • VPN • Secure web gateway (SWG) • Centralized management console • Advanced malware detection

Gartner defines user authentication as the journey-time process that provides credence in a claim to an identity established for a person for access to digital assets. User authentication is delivered by some combination of (a) an authenticator, (b) signals evaluation and (c) an authentication decision point, which may be from different vendors.

Video editing software empowers users to edit, manipulate, and transform raw media files into professional videos by providing a comprehensive set of editing tools and features. The software offers a user-friendly interface for importing media files from different content sources and arranging them in a specific order and timing for precise editing. The techniques for precise editing include cutting, cropping, rotating, adjusting the color, adding transitions, applying effects, and enhancing audio quality. In addition, it saves all the edited videos into different formats and resolutions and shares them across different platforms. The usual users hail from the fields of entertainment, marketing, education, and corporate communications.

Visual collaboration applications center on an infinitely scalable, shared digital canvas where teams can creatively collaborate on asynchronous and real-time work activities. These applications support colocated and remote users in creating, co-editing, reviewing and sharing content to visualize complex ideas and processes. All providers provide templates and elements to enable structured work activities. Some providers also offer extended capabilities, such as voice and video communication, and APIs to connect with other business applications and generative AI tools, although none of these capabilities are the core focus of visual collaboration applications. These applications are generally offered as cloud-based SaaS products, but a few providers offer on-premises and private cloud deployment options. Providers typically market their products as a canvas, whiteboard, workspace or platform where visual collaboration and work take place.

Gartner defines a voice of the customer (VoC) platform as one that integrates feedback collection, analysis and action into a single interconnected platform that helps understand and improve the customer experience. Sources of feedback extend beyond direct surveying to include other, more indirect and inferred sources. VoC platforms enable leaders responsible for functions such as customer service, marketing, or sales to better manage the customer experience (CX) through a deep understanding of customer needs, motivations, goals and behaviors. The resulting insights trigger recommendations and actions across the enterprise.

VA solutions identify, categorize and prioritize vulnerabilities as well as orchestrate their remediation or mitigation. Their primary focus is vulnerability and security configuration assessments for enterprise risk identification and reduction, and reporting against various compliance standards. VA can be delivered via on-premises, hosted and cloud-based solutions, and it may use appliances and agents. Core capabilities include: - Discovery, identification and reporting on device, OS, software vulnerabilities and configuration against security-related criteria - Establishing a baseline for systems, applications and databases to identify and track changes in state - Reporting options for compliance, control frameworks and multiple roles Standard capabilities include: - Pragmatic remediation prioritization with the ability to correlate vulnerability severity, asset context and threat context that then presents a better picture of true risk for your specific environment - Guidance for remediating and configuring compensating controls - Management of scanner instances, agents and gateways - Direct integration with, or API access to, asset management tools, workflow management tools and patch management tools

Gartner defines a warehouse management system (WMS) as a software application that helps manage and intelligently execute the operations of a warehouse, distribution center (DC) or fulfillment center (FC). WMS operations natively exploit mobile devices along with bar codes and potentially RFID or other scanning/sensing technologies, to form the transactional foundation of warehouse management. This enables efficiencies of directed work activity (optimization) and the delivery of accurate information in near real time. Core WMS capabilities address, among others, the needs to receive, put away, store, count and pick, pack and ship goods. Gartner also includes additional integrated functionality offered by WMS providers beyond core WMS. These extended WMS capabilities can include more advanced capabilities, such as managing labor or optimizing the locating of inventory within a facility.

Gartner defines Web Application Firewalls (WAF) as solutions designed to protect web applications and APIs from a variety of attacks, including automated (bots), injection and application-layer denial of service (DoS). WAFs should provide signature-based protections, and should also support positive security models (automated allow lists) and/or anomaly detection.

Gartner defines WCM as the process of creating, managing and delivering content to one or more digital channels. This is achieved through the use of specific content management features based on a core repository. WCM tools are used to manage content to be delivered to websites and other digital channels. These tools are used by both IT and marketing/business. They may be procured as commercial products or open-source tools and are typically cloud-based. The functionality of WCM solutions goes beyond the publication of webpages. It also includes: - Content-creation functions, such as assembling content components, pages, websites, microsites and landing pages. - A content repository that organizes different content types and their metadata. - Library services, such as check-in and check-out, versioning and rollback. - Security and roles, and permissions management. - Management features such as layout and templates, menus and navigation, and workflows. - Content and application deployment functions. - Personalization capabilities. - The ability to integrate, via APIs, with adjacent technologies such as digital commerce platforms, CRM, and marketing automation platforms. - Hybrid and headless capabilities for API-driven multiexperience content delivery beyond websites and to other channels — such as mobile apps, progressive web apps (PWAs), single-page applications (SPAs), digital and voice assistants and smart devices.

Gartner uses the following market definitions: Web analytics tools — Specialized analytics tools used to understand and improve the digital CX, attract and retain users, and analyze operations and actions taken across responsive websites and mobile apps. Product analytics tools — Tools and processes used to understand the behavior of users across products or services to inform decisions about how to improve the product experience and increase product engagement. Digital experience analytics tools — Tools that provide diagnostic insights into visitor activity and the CX on responsive web and mobile apps, enabled by advanced analytics and machine learning, session replay and heat map technology.

WFM is a solution comprising software, services and (often) hardware that helps organizations manage the operational deployment of their workers. In most cases, WFM is deployed for hourly paid/blue-collar employees. However, the deployment of WFM for both hourly and salaried workers is justifiable in several cases, including when the organization: Seeks to use the same absence management and/or access control system for both salaried and hourly workers; Captures salaried workers’ overtime and uses that data to calculate gross pay; Schedules salaried workers to work dynamic shifts, rather than set “office” hours; Allocates and tracks salaried workers’ time to projects or tasks and a WFM system is already in use

The workstream collaboration (WSC) market consists of products that deliver a conversational workspace based on a persistent group chat. Products in this market are primarily used to organize, coordinate, and execute outcome-driven teamwork such as that associated with the project- or process-related activities. Secondary uses can include ad hoc collaboration and community discussions.

Gartner defines zero trust network access (ZTNA) as products and services that create an identity and context-based, logical-access boundary that encompasses an enterprise user and an internally hosted application or set of applications. The applications are hidden from discovery, and access is restricted via a trust broker to a collection of named entities, which limits lateral movement within a network.