Our take: Top takeaways from The Forrester Wave: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2024

Unily leads the intranet pack in latest Forrester Wave!

Unily is thrilled to have been named a Leader in the latest Forrester Wave and to have retained its status as the only triple Leader in the intranet market. This means Unily is still the only intranet vendor to have been named a Leader by Gartner, IDC, and Forrester, cementing its position as the true enterprise EX platform.

Forrester is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. The Forrester Wave provides an independent analysis of the intranet market, evaluating key vendors based on the strength of their strategy, current platform offering, and market presence. In this year’s Wave, Unily was found to have the strongest current offering of the 13 most significant players in the market.

The report is essential reading for enterprise leaders seeking to maximize organizational velocity, drive alignment, and build deeper connections across the employee experience.

In this article, we’ll cover an analysis of Unily’s evaluation followed by our take on the key market trends Forrester identified. Read on for a digest of the top takeaways.

Unily excels at employee engagement for the world’s most demanding organizations: Why?

Unily continues to be recognized for its superior employee communications capabilities suited to the needs of disparate, matrixed workforces. In this iteration of report, Forrester calls out a number of strengths that we believe position Unily as the enterprise platform of choice. Key strengths include:

• Focus on high-value automation: Unily offers customers an automation advantage through its flagship campaigns and Employee Journeys capabilities, as well as a host of other governed AI capabilities that elevate efficiency and digital experience satisfaction. Unily’s unmatched personalization capabilities help complex organizations deliver tailored, consumer-grade experiences that drive engagement and alignment.
• Exceptional analytics capabilities: As the need to prove platform ROI intensifies, Unily’s sophisticated approach to analytics provides technical platform owners and communications leaders with streamlined access to transparent, actionable insights.
• Enterprise-ready governance features: Recognizing that complex organizations require a platform that can support distributed governance models, Unily is commended for developing a platform architecture that enables flexible delegation of administration. Robust content governance features support large organizations in maintaining content accuracy across vast content libraries, with intuitive features for management by dispersed admins and content creators.
• Solving digital friction with impressive search and integration: Forrester further commended Unily for a strong integration framework that promotes exceptional interoperability between systems. As organizations strive to remove friction from the workday, Unily’s approach to integration allows leaders to connect and consolidate technology, shrinking complexity and simplifying bloated tech stacks. Through an impressive Global Search function, Unily enables its customers to unite disparate knowledge repositories and give employees a single destination to rapidly surface accurate information.

Our take on Forrester’s market trends: What does this mean for the future of intranets?

The report begins with a summary of the most notable trends in the intranet landscape and outlines critical areas that will drive the next wave of intranet innovation. This is what we think digital workplace and employee experience leaders need to know:

1. Customer satisfaction is higher than ever in the matured intranet market

The build vs buy narrative has dominated intranet discourse for many years. In recent times, a trend toward buy over build has emerged. The latest Forrester Wave speaks to the continued disillusionment with custom, build solutions, stating that:

“…business leaders who own and influence these initiatives are placing their bets on purpose-built cloud-first platforms and moving away from customized, homegrown, or on-premises systems.”

What’s interesting is that the report suggests that the shift to Out-of-the-Box solutions coincides with a sharp increase in customer satisfaction. Where company intranets were once viewed as archaic technologies that were a source of employee frustration, in today’s build-dominant landscape, the intranet is back in popular demand.

Having watched the intranet market mature over the last decade, Unily's tenured Head of Product Marketing, Matthew Boyd, explains that organizations no longer need to opt for custom solutions to meet niche requirements:

“Unily has always balanced the need for customization against the more critical demand for rapid time-to-value. We aim to deliver Out-of-the-Box flexibility, without sacrificing organizational velocity. We believe the customers shouldn’t have to choose between flexibility and speed, and our market-leading extensibility framework is a product of this belief.”

2. Automation and AI pave the way for the intelligent intranet of the future

As expected, AI and automation capabilities are identified as key areas of investment among intranet vendors. However, business leaders are warned to look beyond the hype and, “determine where intranet platforms can use intelligent services to benefit both leaders and employees.”

The Forrester analysis highlights some of the issues that can arise when AI is implemented without careful consideration for real-world applications, such as AI-powered dashboards that unfairly characterize employees as potential quitters.

Unily’s AI strategy focuses on delivering real-world value for our large enterprise customers through secure and governed AI. The businesses we work with are acutely attuned to the need to balance AI-powered innovation with considered application. They seek a partner with a measured approach who understands the nuanced world of employee experience and can determine value over vanity AI applications.

3. Journeys and Campaigns as a key area of vendor differentiation

Interestingly, the report identifies "Journeys and Campaigns" as a category with the highest number of weak scores, indicating a key area of vendor differentiation. Unily is proud to have scored maximum points in this category, demonstrating market-leading capabilities in this area.

It’s Unily’s belief that effective employee engagement and internal communication strategies hinge on robust campaign management capabilities. Where Unily was initially focused on supporting core intranet owners – typically internal communicators – to deliver more structured, consumer-grade communications campaigns, today, our automation strategy has evolved to encompass a broader range of use cases that offer focused value to new stakeholders.

Our Employee Journeys capability taps into the realm of HR, offering CPOs and CHROs the ability to craft guided digital journeys that support employees through key moments of the employee lifecycle. Journeys are used to enhance these crucial moments throughout an employee’s career, from recognizing key milestones like promotions to delivering a smooth and consistent onboarding pathway. Journeys functionality allows people leaders to solve challenges around consistency and scalability when it comes to executing a world-class employee experience strategy.

As these capabilities evolve further, we expect to see new stakeholders from different functions like HR become increasingly interested and involved in intranet initiatives. As such, leaders looking to invest in a futureproof technology should consider the strength of their chosen vendor’s Journeys and Campaigns offering.

Get your complimentary copy of the report today

To dive deeper into the insights shared in this year’s Forrester Wave: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2024, access a complimentary copy of the report from the link below. Want to see what Unily could do for your organization? Get in touch for a demo of our market-leading platform now.