Our Take on Why Lakeside SysTrack Was Named a Leader in the Forrester Wave™ for DEX Management

If your help desk is still the first to learn something is broken, this report is for you. The Forrester Wave™: Digital Employee Experience Management Solutions, Q4 2026 is live, and Lakeside Software was named a Leader with the highest score possible in 19 of 38 criteria, including Root Cause Diagnosis and Proactive Remediation.

The report, authored by principal analyst Christy Punch, covers “The 10 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up.” Lakeside Software is proud to be on that list and named a Leader for our DEX engineering platform, SysTrack.

What problem are you buying a DEX platform to solve?

Forrester describes the divide in the market this way: “The most notable evolution is the growing divide between platforms focusing on autonomous IT operations and those positioning DEXM for broader EX outcomes.” Before you draft a 20-page RFP, decide which problem you need solved first. The large enterprises we work with usually start from one of these:

• Problems reach IT as tickets, after employees have already lost time.
• Diagnosing an issue means piecing together what happened on a device from data that was never collected or is no longer retained.
• A DEX platform is in place, but most of the work is still reactive troubleshooting.
• The program is hard to justify, because costs are unpredictable and the business can’t see what changed.

Forrester points to the same gap between buying and results: “customer maturity continues to lag platform capabilities, making vendors’ ability to help organizations operationalize DEXM as critical as the technology itself.”

Lakeside’s answer, after 30 years in business, is to engineer recurring problems out of the environment instead of closing the same ticket again. The report notes, “Lakeside’s differentiated vision centers on site reliability engineering (SRE) principles to make the digital workspace measurable, resilient, and governed by service-level objectives.”

What the Forrester Wave says about Lakeside

The Wave evaluated vendors across 38 criteria. Lakeside received the highest possible score in 19 criteria, which we believe underscores the strength of our current offering and strategy.

How does SysTrack find and fix problems faster?

Regarding Lakeside’s SysTrack platform capabilities, the report notes, “Lakeside differentiates through deep, high-frequency telemetry that gives customers historical context and analytical precision to diagnose complex experience issues and act before problems generate support tickets.”

That telemetry includes more than 10,000 data points collected every 15 seconds on each device with 3 years of data retention. Equipped with this unbroken chain of information, Lakeside customer data shows reductions in MTTR of up to 75% and in ticket volume of up to 25%.

Lakeside received the highest possible score in 14 criteria within the current offering category, including Data Collection & Coverage, Endpoint Experience Telemetry, Root Cause Diagnosis, Proactive Remediation, and Intelligent Service Automation. We believe those scores reflect how SysTrack handles the full lifecycle of an IT issue, from solving problems faster to preventing them from happening at all.

How quickly can a large enterprise get started?

Buying DEX shouldn’t add months to the project. Whether your strategy includes applying your Azure MACC to purchase software through the Microsoft Marketplace, or working with leading GSIs and MSPs, Lakeside offers options to make it easy to get started.

On Lakeside’s strategy, the report notes its “above-par partner ecosystem, customer adoption, and supporting services give customers an accelerated path to operationalize DEXM, supported by a subscription-based pricing model that offers predictable costs.”

Lakeside received the highest score possible in 5 criteria within the Strategy category: Vision, Partner Ecosystem, Adoption, Pricing Flexibility and Transparency, and Supporting Services and Offerings. We believe the partnerships and pricing simplify procurement for the large enterprises we work with.

Get your complimentary copy of the DEXM Wave

Read the full Forrester DEXM Wave report for yourself—no registration required.

If you’d like to learn more about how Lakeside can support your DEX goals and lower IT costs, please contact us for a demo.

Special thanks

A lot of effort goes into these reports, and we’d like to thank principal analyst Christy Punch and congratulate her on her first Wave. To our customers who shared their experience with SysTrack during the process—you know who you are. We appreciate your participation and honest feedback.

Source: The Forrester Wave™: Digital Employee Experience Management Solutions, Q4 2026, Forrester Research, Inc., October 26, 2026.

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .