LONDON, Nov. 17, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Faced with the COVID-19 outbreak and new regulations to control it in the second quarter of 2020, large and small businesses in the U.K. ably implemented technology transformations that allowed thousands of employees to work from home, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.
The 2020 ISG Provider Lens™ Digital Workplace of the Future – Services & Solutions report for the U.K. found most organizations smoothly provided remote workers with the devices, bandwidth and collaboration tools they needed. The bigger issues raised by the transition were security and change management, the report says.
Public and private-sector enterprises wanted to ensure endpoints were secure and employees—especially older ones—didn’t lose touch with the organization. In this environment, effective change management programs and the ability to offer experience-level agreements (XLAs) are helping digital workplace providers stand out.
“The shift to remote work in the U.K. demonstrated that British employers and digital workplace providers were well equipped to implement the necessary technologies,” said Bryn Barlow, ISG partner, Digital Strategy and Solutions, in the U.K. “The ability to deal with the larger organizational issues is emerging as a differentiator in the industry and raises the importance of consulting providers as partners.”
The pandemic has brought into focus companies’ efforts to ensure home-based employees are healthy, productive and secure from cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities, ISG says. The transition to remote work has also made managed workplace solutions critical tools for tasks such as scaling virtual meeting capacity and securing home connections. Help desk services have taken on a central role in employee experience, and analytics is helping providers deliver better, more efficient remote help, according to the study.
Enterprises are increasingly adopting managed mobility services to give employees a seamless experience across fixed and mobile devices, the report says. As part of this, companies are demanding mobile integration with back-end systems such as CRM and ERP to help make remote workers even more productive. Unified endpoint solutions spanning both fixed and mobile systems, mostly from specialist providers, also are critical tools for ensuring security and a good employee experience.
The pandemic also has driven up deployment of unified communications and collaboration, with cloud-based solutions particularly gaining ground, ISG says. At first, companies scrambled to scale up collaboration and meeting capacity for their new remote workforces. Now security and the end-user experience are becoming major areas of focus.
The 2020 ISG Provider Lens™ Digital Workplace of the Future – Services & Solutions report for the U.K. evaluates the capabilities of 67 providers across five quadrants: Digital Workplace Consulting Services, Managed Workplace Services, Managed Mobility Services, Unified Communication and Collaboration Solutions and Unified Endpoint Management Solutions.
The report names Atos as a leader in four quadrants and Accenture, Computacenter, DXC Technology, HCL, TCS and Wipro as leaders in three quadrants. It identifies Capgemini, Fujitsu, Getronics, IBM, Microsoft and NTT Data as leaders in two quadrants. Avaya, Cisco, Citrix, Digital Workplace Group, Google, Ivanti, Okta, Slack, Trend Micro, Unisys, VMware and Vodafone each is named a leader in one quadrant. Hexaware and Unisys are named as Rising Stars—companies with “promising portfolios” and “high future potential” by ISG’s definition— in one quadrant each.
Customized versions of the report are available from Getronics and Unisys.
The 2020 ISG Provider Lens™ Digital Workplace of the Future – Services & Solutions report for the U.K. is available to subscribers or for one-time purchase on this webpage.
About ISG Provider Lens™ Research
The ISG Provider Lens™ Quadrant research series is the only service provider evaluation of its kind to combine empirical, data-driven research and market analysis with the real-world experience and observations of ISG's global advisory team. Enterprises will find a wealth of detailed data and market analysis to help guide their selection of appropriate sourcing partners, while ISG advisors use the reports to validate their own market knowledge and make recommendations to ISG's enterprise clients. The research currently covers providers offering their services globally, across Europe and Latin America, as well as in the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, the U.K., France, the Nordics, Brazil and Australia/New Zealand, with additional markets to be added in the future. For more information about ISG Provider Lens research, please visit this webpage.
A companion research series, the ISG Provider Lens Archetype reports, offer a first-of-its-kind evaluation of providers from the perspective of specific buyer types.
Starting this year, each ISG Provider Lens™ study will include a Global Summary to help enterprise subscribers better understand provider capabilities across all geographic markets covered by that study. All ISG Provider Lens™ reports also will now include an Enterprise Context feature to help executives quickly identify key insights related to their roles and responsibilities.
About ISG
ISG (Information Services Group) (Nasdaq: III) is a leading global technology research and advisory firm. A trusted business partner to more than 700 clients, including more than 75 of the world’s top 100 enterprises, ISG is committed to helping corporations, public sector organizations, and service and technology providers achieve operational excellence and faster growth. The firm specializes in digital transformation services, including automation, cloud and data analytics; sourcing advisory; managed governance and risk services; network carrier services; strategy and operations design; change management; market intelligence and technology research and analysis. Founded in 2006, and based in Stamford, Conn., ISG employs more than 1,300 digital-ready professionals operating in more than 20 countries—a global team known for its innovative thinking, market influence, deep industry and technology expertise, and world-class research and analytical capabilities based on the industry’s most comprehensive marketplace data. For more information, visit www.isg-one.com.