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.
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
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, 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.
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 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.
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.