Key Vendor Takeaways From Forrester's Wave™ On Appliance-Based End User Experience Monitoring

End user experience monitoring has always been a favorite subject of Forrester readers interested in IT management software. This prompted us to publish a series of Forrester Waves on the topic. Because there are several technologies competing for clients' attentions, we elected to conduct an evaluation for each major technology; the first one evaluated appliance-based products. While the evaluated vendors can derive their own conclusions from the solution comparison, we have provided here specific recommendations for each of them. We found that appliance vendors, while using a similar technological foundation, present their products according to a relatively narrow marketing policy — most of the time, it's an extension of the culture derived from their market position in IT management, rather than from a study of the problems that the IT organization faces. While this is nothing new, the direct consequence for clients is that they may need several products to cover the requirements of different constituencies interested in understanding the end user experience better — and as the market matures, this could become an obstacle to broader technology adoption.