Gartner predicts that by 2027, most Digital Employee Experience (DEX) tool deployments focused only on IT use cases will fail to deliver sustainable ROI, and many organizations without a DEX strategy will struggle to reduce digital friction. IT leaders who don’t improve employee experience risk being replaced, while those fully leveraging DEX tools will significantly reduce their support backlogs.
DEX tools collect real-time data from devices, applications, and employee sentiment to provide insights that drive automation, self-healing, and improved IT support. These tools help IT teams enhance performance and compliance while reducing overhead.
For employees, DEX tools reduce digital friction and speed up issue resolution. Typical use cases include fixing configuration drift, boosting app adoption, optimizing device refresh cycles, improving security patching, preparing for OS upgrades, and simplifying onboarding with tailored technology bundles.
Below, we have shared the leaders in this quadrant, so you can determine if their solution is right for your organization.
Nexthink
This global SaaS offering, hosted in Amazon Web Services, is founder-led and privately owned. It offers DEX for all major virtualization environments, applications, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. It integrates with ITSM and ITAM tools and chatbots.
Strengths: Market Responsiveness, Marketing & Product
The market has been screaming for more extended offerings like Nexthink’s ServiceNow, Qualtrics, Moveworks and other integrated offerings. Additionally, the company does a good marketing job, demonstrated by its thought leadership across its DEX Show podcast, DEX Hub website, Experience conferences and survey-based reports. Lastly, Nexthink has an infinity platform, allowing it to be extensively scalable.
Weakness: Sales Strategy, Vertical Industry Strategy and Product Strategy
While marketing is a strength, Nexthink has expensive and hard-to-understand bundle options. It also has limited product, marketing and sales strategy differentiation and less endpoint diversity than competitors.
TeamViewer
TeamViewer is primarily a SaaS offering, hosted in Microsoft Azure. Operations range from Europe, North America and Asia. It provides DEX for applications and virtualization environments with ServiceNow and Atlassian Jira ITSM integration.
Strengths: Operations, Sales Strategy & Market Responsiveness
TeamViewer has staff to scale, DEX Packs, REST APIs and direct integrations, making its operations a strength worth considering. Additionally, Gartner thought their sales strategy was worth mentioning. They have three bundles and several add-ons and solution packs, giving customers a low entry cost with the option for expanded features down the road. Lastly, Gartner commended TeamViewer’s market responsiveness. Asserting that TeamViewer’s acquisition of 1E showcases their shift toward analytics and automation-enabled proactive operations.
Weakness: Vertical Industry Strategy, Product and Geographic Strategy
TeamViewer is undergoing a transition to align its DEX offerings with its established vertical industry strategy. This shift is particularly important as more than half of TeamViewer’s DEX installed base still operates in on-premises environments, while the company secures necessary certifications for its SaaS platform in highly regulated and federal government sectors. Concurrently, TeamViewer is managing a complex organizational and technological integration of Exoprise, 1E and its assets, a process with potential unforeseen challenges due to the need to unify teams, intellectual property, platforms and agents. Additionally, expanding beyond North America and Europe hasn’t been a major focus until recently.
ControlUp
The ControlUp ONE platform is a SaaS offering, hosted by Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Operations are based in the U.S., Europe and Israel. It offers DEX for all major virtualization environments and applications and Microsoft Teams and Zoom for UC. It integrates with ServiceNow for ITSM and several endpoint management and security tools.
Strengths: Product Strategy, Sales Strategy & Innovation
ControlUp demonstrates a strong product and sales strategy by expanding beyond virtualization into endpoints, apps, UC and security experience. Recent innovations include support for Windows 365 and ChromeOS, low-code automation via Workflows and real-user monitoring through the Avanite acquisition. Its unified ControlUp ONE Platform offers tailored, competitively priced bundles with flexible licensing and MSP support. Strategic partnerships, AI/ML integration, and a focus on tool consolidation and emerging areas like mobile and IoT further highlight ControlUp’s commitment to innovation.
Weaknesses: Vertical Industry Strategy, Marketing Execution and Geographic Strategy
According to Gartner, ControlUp faces challenges that may limit its growth potential in verticals with special regulatory or security requirements. Its marketing emphasizes its virtualization and IT operations, potentially overshadowing its broader platform capabilities and limiting awareness among Gartner clients of its non-virtualization use cases. Additionally, ControlUp’s international expansion efforts trail behind some competitors, with a geographic go-to-market strategy reliant on event-based marketing and channel partners across key regions.
Riverbed
Riverbed Aternity is a SaaS offering, hosted in Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. It offers DEX for all virtualization environments, applications and UC solutions. It directly integrates with ServiceNow for ITSM, Intel for visibility and Tableau for reporting and endpoint management.
Strengths: Market Responsiveness, Market Understanding & Business Model
Riverbed has demonstrated strong market responsiveness and understanding, particularly through the maturation of Aternity in 2024. Its unified agent and data platform simplify the rollout of new capabilities, while Aternity Mobile stands out as the market’s only mobile DEX offering. Deepening integration with Intel adds value through advanced connectivity analytics. Riverbed’s platform strategy effectively addresses diverse IT environments by managing mobile, network, infrastructure, UC and application experience, with OpenTelemetry ensuring extensibility for non-DEX buyers. The vendor’s roadmap reflects key customer demands and its profitable, growing business has outpaced market averages thanks to rapid product innovation and platform integration.
Weaknesses: Marketing Execution, Customer Experience and Sales
Riverbed faces several challenges that may impact its market position. Its platform-based messaging, which emphasizes broader capabilities across adjacent markets, can cause Gartner clients seeking dedicated DEX tools to overlook the vendor, a situation compounded by fewer thought-leading reports focused on DEX in recent periods. Customer success services and training are offered at no additional cost but are limited to target accounts and basic-level training, with advanced training delayed until late 2025. Additionally, Riverbed’s list pricing is higher than many competitors, and its installed base grew more slowly than leading vendors in 2024. While client renewals and extensions have slightly increased, they are not typically driven by replacing other DEX tools. Selling a broad platform vision remains challenging due to competing priorities among multiple IT roles within enterprises.
Lakeside Software: SysTrack
Lakeside Software, a private-equity-owned Leader in this Magic Quadrant, offers SysTrack as a SaaS solution hosted on Microsoft Azure. Serving global enterprises across the U.S., Europe and Asia/Pacific, SysTrack supports all major OSs, devices and virtualization platforms. It integrates with tools like ServiceNow, Qualtrics and Splunk, and provides built-in and low-code customizable remediations.
Strengths: Customer Experience, Market Responsiveness & Vertical Industry Strategy
Lakeside Software demonstrates strong customer experience, market responsiveness and vertical industry strategy. Customers value SysTrack’s Black Box data collection and retention capabilities for effective root cause analysis, and benefit from included customer success services, office hour sessions and success blueprints. As one of the most established vendors in the market, Lakeside aligns its value proposition closely with customer needs, leveraging its extensive data collection to inform product development, marketing and sales. The company serves a broad range of industries, engages additional verticals through partners and targeted content and is pursuing certifications to expand its SaaS offering into government and highly regulated sectors.
Weaknesses: Sales Execution, Product Strategy, Geographic Strategy
Lakeside faces several challenges that may impact its competitive positioning. Its installed base is smaller than some Magic Quadrant peers, and estimated growth has lagged behind the market average. The variety of SysTrack licensing options—per-user and per-device—requires careful selection to avoid compliance issues. In 2024, the company’s feature delivery did not always align with top Gartner client priorities, though its revised 2025 roadmap aims to address this with expanded AI and proactive IT tools. Additionally, Lakeside’s quarterly release cycle is slower than most competitors. As the smallest Leader in the quadrant, its global scalability is limited by staff concentration in North America and Europe, relying more heavily on partners to support other regions.
Omnissa: Workspace ONE Experience Management
Omnissa, a private-equity-owned Leader in this Magic Quadrant, offers Workspace ONE Experience Management as a SaaS solution on AWS, with global operations and customers. It supports all major OSs, devices and virtualization platforms, and integrates with ITSM tools like ServiceNow and BMC, as well as chatbots like Moveworks and Slack. Customers can use built-in remediations or create custom workflows via Freestyle Orchestrator.
Strengths: Innovation, Product & Geographic strategy
Omnissa demonstrates strong innovation, product capability and geographic strategy. Its GenAI-enabled Omni AI Assistant reflects a forward-looking approach to autonomous endpoint and experience management, complemented by expanded integrations with partners like CrowdStrike, IGEL, Intel, Zebra, Microsoft and Apple. The DEX tool integrates seamlessly with Workspace ONE UEM, Assist, Omnissa Access, Freestyle Orchestrator and Horizon, and supports all major enterprise workloads, endpoints and device types. Its microservices architecture enables high scalability, managing over 1 million devices per customer. With a globally distributed workforce and partners, Omnissa’s platform scales across all AWS regions with support for local data residency, and its regional go-to-market strategies align with customer needs worldwide.
Weaknesses: Customer Experience, Sales Execution, Marketing Execution
Omnissa faces challenges in customer experience, sales and marketing. DEX-related case studies and visibility are limited, with below-average ratings and minimal presence on its website. Customer success services are available but only for select accounts. Despite DEX growth in 2024, momentum must continue in 2025 to be sustained. The company has struggled to position itself in the DEX market, resulting in low awareness and few mentions by clients or competitors.
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