Riverbed Named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Digital Employee Experience
IDC recognizes Riverbed's vision for unified visibility, observability, AI-powered operations, and digital experience management.
- By Colleen Marinelli
- 20-Jul-2026
2026 Vendor Assessment”, June 2026, IDC #US53014625.*
Riverbed has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Employee Experience 2026 Vendor Assessment.
As organizations increasingly look beyond endpoint monitoring toward a more comprehensive approach to digital employee experience, we believe this recognition reflects Riverbed’s long-standing vision: helping IT teams unify endpoint, application, and network visibility to improve employee experiences, accelerate issue resolution, and drive better business outcomes.
Digital employee experience has evolved significantly in recent years. What began as a focus on device health and endpoint performance has expanded into a broader operational discipline that spans applications, networks, collaboration tools, cloud services, automation, AI, and employee sentiment.
Employees don’t experience technology one layer at a time. They simply expect everything to work. When productivity declines, the root cause could be a device issue, a slow application, a network bottleneck, a cloud service disruption, or a collaboration problem. Solving these challenges requires a more connected approach to understanding and improving digital experience.
Why Riverbed’s Approach Aligns with IDC’s View of DEX
Today’s enterprises need more than endpoint telemetry. They need a unified view of the entire digital experience.
Riverbed Aternity brings together endpoint monitoring, application performance, network observability, employee sentiment, and sustainability analytics into a single platform. By correlating signals across these domains, organizations can move beyond isolated alerts and identify the root causes of digital friction faster.
This broader view is particularly important in hybrid and distributed work environments where employees depend on complex chains of technologies to stay productive. When issues arise, IT teams need the ability to connect what the employee experiences with what is happening across devices, applications, networks, and cloud services.
Rather than requiring teams to navigate multiple disconnected tools, Riverbed helps organizations understand how these systems interact and where experience breakdowns occur.
Beyond Endpoint Monitoring: The Evolution of DEX
The digital employee experience market is undergoing a major transformation.
Organizations are increasingly replacing reactive support models with proactive operations that continuously monitor experience, identify emerging issues, and help IT teams take action before employees are impacted.
At the same time, IT leaders are trying to reduce tool sprawl and eliminate siloed visibility. As observability, automation, IT operations, and digital experience converge, enterprises are looking for platforms that provide a complete picture of employee experience rather than isolated views of individual technologies.
This shift is accelerating demand for solutions that unify data across endpoints, applications, networks, and employee feedback to provide actionable insights and measurable business outcomes.
Turning Visibility Into Action
Visibility is only valuable if organizations can use it to improve outcomes.
Modern IT teams need solutions that not only identify problems but also help accelerate investigation, reduce operational effort, and support faster remediation.
One of Riverbed’s most differentiated capabilities is Aternity Replay, which helps IT teams virtually recreate and troubleshoot user issues without disrupting employees. By enabling teams to see what users experienced, Replay can significantly reduce diagnostic time and eliminate much of the guesswork traditionally associated with troubleshooting.
As organizations work to reduce downtime, improve productivity, and deliver better digital experiences, the ability to move quickly from insight to resolution becomes increasingly important.
AI-Powered Operations With Governance Built In
Artificial intelligence is becoming a foundational element of digital employee experience.
Organizations are rapidly exploring how AI can help identify issues faster, recommend corrective actions, automate repetitive tasks, and improve operational efficiency.
However, as AI becomes more deeply integrated into IT operations, governance becomes equally important.
Riverbed’s vision extends beyond AI-powered analytics. Riverbed’s agentic framework introduces a governed path to autonomous operations, combining AI-driven intelligence with policy controls, human oversight, and role-based experiences for employees, service desks, IT engineers, and business leaders.
This approach helps organizations move beyond simply generating recommendations toward creating trusted, scalable automation that operates within defined governance frameworks.
The future of DEX will not be defined by dashboards alone. It will be defined by how effectively organizations can transform insight into action while maintaining control, accountability, and operational resilience.
Built for Enterprise Scale
Many of the world’s largest organizations operate highly regulated, service-critical environments where performance, governance, and compliance are non-negotiable.
As enterprises pursue digital transformation initiatives, they need platforms that can support large-scale operations while helping IT teams reduce complexity and improve employee productivity.
Riverbed continues to invest in observability, automation, AI, and digital experience innovation to help organizations modernize IT operations, reduce digital friction, and create more productive digital workplaces.
From financial services and healthcare to government and global enterprises, organizations are increasingly seeking scalable platforms that can help them navigate growing complexity while maintaining exceptional employee experiences.
The Future of DEX Is Platform-Based
Digital employee experience is no longer a standalone monitoring function.
It is becoming a strategic pillar of modern IT operations and an important driver of productivity, employee satisfaction, and business performance.
As the market continues to evolve, organizations are looking for unified platforms that bring together observability, automation, AI, and experience intelligence to reduce operational silos and improve decision making.
We believe this shift represents the future of digital employee experience.
As technology environments become more distributed and complex, organizations need a better way to understand and improve the experiences employees have every day. Riverbed Aternity helps make that possible by unifying endpoint, application, network, sentiment, automation, and AI-driven insights in a single platform designed to help organizations move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive, intelligent, and increasingly autonomous operations.
Download the IDC MarketScape Excerpt
See why Riverbed was named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Employee Experience 2026 Vendor Assessment and discover the trends shaping the future of digital employee experience.
Source: IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Employee Experience 2026 Vendor Assessment, IDC #US53014625, June 2026.
*IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of technology and service suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor name.
