Measuring The Total Economic Impact Of Unified Endpoint Management

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Today, the average IT organization is spending at least 5%¹ of their organization’s annual revenue on IT investments – and the cost of each investment spans far beyond its price tag. Each one needs to be deployed and maintained by IT staff that is grappling with more tools and software products than ever before.

Of course, supporting an IT staff comes with its own set of costs and challenges. CIOs, CTOs, and their teams are human resource scarce and spread extremely thin, so the opportunity cost of focusing on one tool versus another has never been greater.

This complexity comes at a time where clearly defined IT strategies that bring about positive impact to the business are non-negotiable. According to IDG’s 2019 State of the CIO report², “62% of CIOs say that the creation of new revenue generating initiatives is among their job responsibilities.”

88% claim to be “more involved in leading digital transformation initiatives compared to their business counterparts.” Net-net, the onus is on IT leaders to streamline efficiencies, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and net a return on investment (ROI) for the business.

IT investment decisions driven by real customer data

Forrester has been instrumental in helping business decision-makers overcome their resource, budget, and investment challenges by introducing a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) methodology. Not only does the TEI take costs and benefits into account, but also the time saved and economic impact of strategic decisions made. Forrester’s TEI assessments are drawn from real client experiences with vendor products and services.

The team diligently documents customer outcomes to better understand their positive or negative business impact. Consulting this unique research methodology helps business decision makers justify and future-proof their investments.

Making the transition to unified endpoint management

If your organization is like most, it has a mix of devices that employees use to get work done – whether they’re corporate-liable or supported under a bring your own device (BYOD) program. With 464 custom apps deployed across the average enterprise³, procuring a means to manage devices and everything on them (not just apps, but also content and data) has become mission-critical for businesses.

Traditionally, mobile device management (MDM), enterprise mobility management (EMM), and client management tools (CMTs) have been relied upon to get the job done. However, business use cases for devices have become more complex and wide ranging. These shifts are necessitating a tool that makes it possible to manage everything from one place. This is unified endpoint management (UEM).

Commissioned by IBM, Forrester Consulting recently conducted a TEI analysis of IBM Security MaaS360 UEM customers to determine whether they are reducing TCO and netting a quick break-even on their investment. The Forrester team took the time to glean feedback from 19 MaaS360 UEM clients representing financial services, nonprofit, utilities, manufacturing, and professional services industries.

These individuals are responsible for managing anywhere from 500 to 100,000 devices for their respective businesses each day.

How UEM from IBM resulted in significant ROI⁴

Across the 19 clients that were interviewed, Forrester identified the following key benefits. These amount to a three-year 160% ROI and payback in less than 3 months:

• Endpoint configuration: a 96% reduction in time spend provisioning devices
• End-user setup: a 47% reduction in time spent getting employees up and running
• Modern management: $22,960 saved from simplifying their management approach
• Support ticket remediation: 50% fewer tickets and 55% less time taken to resolve them
• Security breach remediation: 80% reduction in number of incidents experienced

Of course, these benefits were experienced by a composite organization used to represent the 19 customers surveyed by Forrester. Organizations considering UEM that are actively seeking their own customized TEI assessment can now work with IBMers to do just that.

Request your own complementary assessment today to understand whether you can expect a return on your UEM investment, and if so, how quickly you can expect your payback period to arrive.