*This post originally appeared on the AppSense blog prior to the rebrand in January 2017, when AppSense, LANDESK, Shavlik, Wavelink, and HEAT Software merged under the new name Ivanti.

The User Environment Management (UEM) market has been high profile recently. VMware bought a profile management product (Immidio) and today announced a new application bundle. Meanwhile, Al Monserrat left Citrix and now heads up RES Software touting their IT Store. So how do all these offerings compare and what makes up a complete UEM solution? What’s the cost of doing nothing or picking an incomplete UEM solution?

I’m well into my first month here at AppSense. Having been to six cities and Europe twice, I’ve quickly met many customers, partners and employees. I’m buoyed by the enthusiasm I’ve found for the innovative and powerful AppSense UEM solution. It’s clear that putting the user first in delivering a productive and secure user workspace across physical, virtual and cloud deployments is driving substantial business outcomes for our customers. These are exciting times at AppSense.

User Environment Management provides a whole host of benefits when delivered as a complete integrated end-to-end solution. Customer benefits include improving user productivity, reducing cost, improving security and control, adding flexibility at scale, and creating unified workspace management, among many other advantages. Customers and Solution Providers tell me the real business outcome they need is increasing the success of core workspace projects such as VDI and OS migration.

To fully achieve these benefits a complete UEM solution needs 6 core elements: personalization, policy, privilege, performance, data, and analytics. The 6 elements need to be integrated and work together seamlessly in order to deliver full value and results.

VMware’s announcement today is important because it finally moves them beyond simple personalization and articulates the need for at least modest policy as part of their offering. VMware recently revealed they’ve partnered with Lakeside Software to offer a standalone Systrack assessment tool as a free, non-integrated add-on. Immidio is included as part of the new Horizon Application Management bundle or as part of Horizon 6 Enterprise. So for customers who choose to pay for one of these options, a partial UEM solution will now be included.  VMware is wise to offer these added policy and analytics capabilities, even if not complete or integrated, as they are something Citrix cannot deliver today. It also gives VMware sales reps another angle to attack the massive Citrix install base.

RES also has personalization and some policy. Al, as their new CEO, will need to make some strategic choices on whether to invest and expand their core UEM feature set to complete a full UEM solution, or continue a focus on their IT Store emphasizing process automation with a partial UEM offering. While RES is certainly not free, we believe you get what you pay for.

Other free, partial offerings such as Microsoft’s U-EV or Citrix’s UPM purport to do basic profile management, which while limited is fine, as far as it goes.  These tools offer basic personalization capabilities, little or no management, and don’t scale well or perform in heterogeneous environments.

AppSense is the Global Leader in UEM and offers the only complete UEM solution. We’ve got over a decade of proven experience of managing the most complex environments at scale. There’s a big difference between introducing a new product or listing a feature on a data sheet and proving it works in large-scale production deployments in heterogeneous customer environments. What we do is not easy.

AppSense has 7.5m endpoints under management, 3400+ customers (~2x installed base vs. our closest competitor), a rich partner ecosystem and ridiculous amounts of experience managing physical as well as Citrix and VMware environments. AppSense will continue to work with both Citrix and VMware enabling our mutual customers to deliver best-in-class user experiences at scale. We’re laser focused on UEM. It’s all we do. And at Citrix Synergy in May, you’ll see what the leader is doing next to change the game and extend our lead. See below for registrations links to our Citrix Synergy events and a chance to see a tech preview of our game changing v10 solution.

So what’s the real cost of doing nothing or picking an incomplete UEM offering?  Risk. Poor user experience is the number one reason that workspace projects fail and licenses remain undeployed. Project managers and IT leaders who skimp on user experience often pay a hefty price.  Leading Solution Providers say that Citrix and VMware VDI deployments don’t make sense without AppSense. We couldn’t agree more.

So the real question is why any customer or partner would take a risk on a partial, piecemeal, unproven UEM solution from a second or third tier player? Sometimes free is worth exactly what you pay for it.

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Register today to engage with us at Citrix Synergy:

  • AppSense Live! with customer and partner testimonials
  • Vision Briefings with our CTO
  • AppSense Party for networking and fun!
  • AppSense Solutions Booth #303