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; 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.
Enterprise Networking and Communications refers to the products and services that enable secure, scalable, and high-performance connectivity and communication across distributed enterprise environments. This category includes markets that focus on core and edge networking, unified communications, private and public mobile networks, and managed network services—supporting digital transformation, and operational efficiency.
Gartner defines the enterprise wired and wireless LAN market as the infrastructure that enables secure connectivity across enterprise locations. This encompasses the hardware, software, and management capabilities required to deliver physical and logical network connectivity, enforce zero-trust security principles, and automate operations across campus, branch, and remote environments, including operational technology (OT) domains. Enterprise wired and wireless LAN infrastructures solve the operational complexity of delivering secure, scalable connectivity across distributed enterprise environments. As organizations expand across campus, branch, remote, and operational technology domains, traditional network deployment and management approaches become too resource-intensive and inconsistent to meet business demands. The offered capabilities address the business problem of fragmented network operations by unifying life cycle management (that is, provisioning, monitoring, policy enforcement, and incident response) into a single, software-driven system. This reduces manual effort, shortens resolution times, and improves compliance with governance and security requirements.
IT Infrastructure and IoT refers to the products and services that support the deployment, management, and optimization of core technology systems and connected devices across enterprise environments. This category includes markets that focus on enabling organizations to build and operate resilient, scalable, and intelligent infrastructure. It encompasses solutions for data center management, network infrastructure, and IoT connectivity—spanning on-premises, cloud, edge, and hybrid models.
Infrastructure monitoring tools capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components wherever they reside (e.g., in a data center, at the edge, or IaaS or PaaS in the cloud). This enables I&O teams to monitor the availability and resource utilization data of physical, virtual, software entities, and AI systems — including servers, containers, network devices, database instances, hypervisors, storage, and basic application monitoring. These tools collect data in near real time and perform historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor.
Integrated systems combine server, shared storage and network devices, along with management software and support in a preintegrated stack. The integrated system market has four segments: integrated infrastructure system, integrated reference architecture, integrated stack system and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) segment. The overall HCI segment is further subdivided into Hyperconverged Integrated Systems (HCIS), which provides both software and hardware in an appliance model and the software only segment in which vendors provide the Hyperconverged software. This is then integrated with HW by a reseller or the end customer.
Gartner defines observability platforms as products that help organizations understand and optimize the health, performance and behavior of applications, services, infrastructure and AI agents, as well as user experience. They ingest and analyze telemetry such as logs, metrics, events and traces to detect issues that affect end users, enabling early remediation. These platforms are used by IT operations, SRE, platform engineering, developers, security teams and product owners. Modern businesses rely on critical digital applications and services that directly influence revenue, client satisfaction and brand reputation. Outages, latency and degraded performance harm these outcomes. Observability platforms address this by ingesting, correlating and analyzing telemetry from applications, infrastructure and AI systems to detect anomalies, identify the root cause of issues and quantify user‑experience impact. These capabilities enable organizations to improve the availability, performance and resilience of digital services. As a result, observability platforms support revenue‑loss avoidance through early detection, faster mean time to resolution and prevention of customer‑impacting failures. They also accelerate development and platform engineering workflows by providing continuous feedback on code changes, deployments and model behavior. This allows teams to deliver new features and AI capabilities faster while maintaining reliability and improving customer experience.
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 WAN optimization tools as products that improve the performance of applications running across the WAN as well as reduce WAN service expenses. WAN optimization solutions continue to evolve, and now support four high-level needs: improving the response times for users of business-critical applications over WAN links or mobile connections; assisting in maximizing ROI for WAN bandwidth; optimizing data-center-to-data-center (DC-to-DC) traffic for faster storage replication and synchronization; and assisting in directing traffic across multiple WANS, such as a hybrid WAN or public cloud connectivity.