End-User Experience Management Solutions

Forrester renamed this category in February 2026, from End-User Experience Management Solutions to Digital Employee Experience Management Solutions, nearly twenty years after it first evaluated the market. The final edition under the old name published in Q3 2024, and that edition is the scorecard this article is about.

No newer edition will ever carry the old name. The report under the new name is planned for early Q4 2026 and is not out yet.

The final edition under this name: The Forrester Wave: End-User Experience Management Solutions, Q3 2024

Principal analyst Andrew Hewitt announced the results on August 1, 2024 in a blog post that also carried the definition the whole category hangs on. Digital employee experience is "the sum of all the perceptions that employees have about working with the technology they use" to do their daily work and manage their relationship with their employer.

The Q3 2024 Wave scored eight vendors against thirty four criteria, and the full tier table is public.

Two Leaders. Lakeside Software and Nexthink. Three Strong Performers: 1E, ControlUp, and Riverbed Technology. Three Contenders: Broadcom, now Omnissa, Ivanti, and Tanium.

Two Leaders, two different telescopes

The two Leaders see the same employee through different instruments.

Lakeside's SysTrack platform collects roughly ten thousand data points every fifteen seconds, feeding AI-driven predictive analytics. That is the density argument: the more telemetry you hold, the more problems you can predict before the employee notices.

Nexthink took the highest possible scores in vision, innovation, and roadmap, and Forrester's phrasing for it is "deep, holistic, and consumable approach to DEX," with adoption services called out for breadth and depth. That is the consumability argument: the insight the help desk can act on, not the raw stream.

Ten thousand data points every fifteen seconds is a telescope. Knowing what to do with them is a different instrument, and the scorecard put both instruments on the same rung. That is the honest state of this market: the winning philosophies are still competing, not settled.

The third Wave, smaller than the first two

This category has a clean measurement history. The Q4 2020 New Wave evaluated eleven vendors on ten criteria. The Q3 2022 Wave evaluated nine on thirty two. The Q3 2024 edition evaluated eight on thirty four. The field shrank while the scorecard grew.

A scorecard that grows criteria while shrinking its field is a market consolidating in real time. The 2022 edition's Leaders were 1E, Lakeside Software, and Nexthink, with ControlUp, Riverbed Aternity, and ThousandEyes as Strong Performers and Ivanti, Tanium, and VMware as Contenders. By 2024 ThousandEyes and VMware were out of the field, and Broadcom, the buyer of VMware's end-user computing business, was in as a Contender.

The entry bar has become the definition: endpoint telemetry at scale, sentiment capture, and the ability to act on both. Vendors that only watch, or only fix, no longer fit the field.

The leader who lost the rung

1E is the movement story of this edition. In 2022 Forrester called it "a remediation powerhouse," citing its Guaranteed State capability for automated mass self-healing that works even on offline endpoints. It was a Leader.

In 2024 it is a Strong Performer. The vendor's remediation did not get worse. The scorecard rotated. Low-code orchestration, in Hewitt's words, "took center stage this year," and the criteria stretched toward data richness, AI-based root-cause analysis, and customer enablement. 1E's 2022 citation praised remediation. The 2024 scorecard wanted data and orchestration, and the rung moved under the vendor.

That movement is the single most useful data point in the report. The market stopped scoring who fixes the endpoint fastest and started scoring who turns the endpoint into a decision surface.

What the scorecard was actually scoring

The use cases in the evaluation are the buyer's daily reality, and they are worth listing in full. Understand the daily technology experience from the end user's perspective. Track it with digital experience scores. Collect qualitative feedback, not just telemetry. Cut root-cause analysis time. Remediate through self-healing.

The report's sharpest line is about data: it "remains a key differentiator for vendors today, especially as they increasingly seek to use AI" to process large datasets. The AI in this market is not chatbots. It is the model that turns ten thousand data points per fifteen seconds into one decision the service desk can execute.

And the honest limitation of the old scorecard sits right there. It grades today's instruments. The AI-driven expansion of those instruments, from reactive troubleshooting to proactive remediation, from IT-centric monitoring to cross-functional value, is exactly what the next evaluation will measure, and it will measure it under a different name.

The name it took next

On February 23, 2026, principal analyst Christy Punch announced that the next evaluation cycle will publish under the name Digital Employee Experience Management Solutions, or DEXM. Her reasoning is blunt: "EUEM simply isn't the language practitioners use." "DEX is the vocabulary of today's market."

The market's vocabulary won, and the analyst's lost. Punch, who joined Forrester from practice, had never encountered the term EUEM before covering this market.

The renamed Wave is planned for early Q4 2026, and its stated criteria expansions read like the obituary of the old scorecard: AI innovation, automation depth, cross-functional value, measurable business impact. "What began as endpoint telemetry has become intelligent experience management at scale."

Where the market went is not a mystery. It went toward the employee, not the endpoint. Everything bought under the old definition gets re-scored under the new one within a year.

What to ask before the new name arrives

Which scorecard are you really buying against? The Q3 2024 tiers describe the old definition. The early Q4 2026 Wave will score AI innovation, automation depth, cross-functional value, and business impact. Ask every shortlisted vendor how it expects to fare under the new criteria, and get specifics, not confidence.

Is your pain metric density or decision density? Lakeside wins on data volume, Nexthink on consumability. If your team already drowns in telemetry, the densest dataset is not the best fit, no matter which rung it sits on.

Does the vendor remediate, or just observe? The category's whole rotation has been from watching to changing. Ask for self-healing evidence on your own estate, with your endpoints, before the contract, not after.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

Worth reading alongside Human Capital Management: this is the final scorecard Forrester ever published under the plain name Human Capital Management, and its lone confirmed Leader was credited for absorbing contingent labor and employee listening tools rather than for any single feature.

Buyers evaluating this should also weigh Digital Employee Experience Management Solutions, the closest coverage already published on this site: most technology problems inside a company never become a support ticket. This category exists to make the gap between what IT measures and what employees actually experience visible.

The neighboring coverage here is Outsourced Digital Workplace Services. Gartner's 2025 quadrant tracks a metric change that reframes the whole category: the old SLA measured whether the ticket got closed, and the new XLA measures whether the employee actually got their afternoon back.