ISG Provider Lens™ Enterprise Service Management - Software - Enterprise Service and Workflow Management Platforms - Global 2025

As businesses undergo digital transformation, ESM platform provides the structural integrity and operational agility necessary to succeed.

ESM is a nascent software category with extreme variability in how vendors approach the discipline and the functionalities offered in their software. A true ESM solution sits atop the enterprises’ technology stack and manages the ITSM system and all other enterprise applications and business systems, including ERP, CRM, finance, sales, OT big data CloudOps and more. Most packaged ESM software solutions are not at this level today, but they do provide the pathways to achieve it. How well developed their pathways toward an integrated environment are, differentiates ESM software vendors.

Enterprise service management has traditionally been treated as a logical extension of IT service management, often focusing on aligning technology with internal processes. However, because of changes in business conditions, enterprise preferences and emerging technologies, ESM has evolved beyond its IT-centric origins to encompass a wide spectrum of enterprise processes, automation requirements and strategic objectives across business, organizational and technology portfolios. This transformation demands new ways of thinking about strategy, architecture and execution and an underlying modern software foundation that can support the transformation. ESM needs to break down silos and ensure enterprise operations are aligned, integrated and orchestrated. Therefore, they need to support and enable the evolution to architectures and processes that continue to become more cloud-centric, AI-driven and customer-focused. Organizations that succeed in building the architecture and choosing the right ESM software will improve their responsiveness and receive more business value from their technology investments.

Two core elements are essential for effective ESM: automation and orchestration. ESM engineering ability is needed to create these elements and effectively bring them together. Automating workflows accelerates the execution time and relieves people from repetitive or time-consuming tasks. Effective orchestration allows workflows to integrate across the organization without delaying or disrupting others, ideally by automating data exchanges and other system handoffs. True ESM is characterized by automation and orchestration that extend beyond IT systems operations into business areas such as finance, HR, customer service, inventory management, risk management and procurement. A strong competency in standard, traditional ITSM is a prerequisite for all serious contenders in the enterprise service management market, but it is not sufficient on its own for the vendor to be considered a true ESM leader.

Many companies in this study support ESM by making their core ITSM offering a platform that partners and customers can adapt to support other enterprise services. These vendors make their platforms adaptable by offering prebuilt connectors to popular enterprise software and graphical, low-code/no-code self-service development tools, enabling customers to create their own workflows. More comprehensive integrations and functionalities are available through ESM specialists that partner with ITSM providers. ServiceNow and BMC Software have the largest partner ecosystems, but many other vendors in this study are also well supported by partners that develop ESM solutions based on the client’s core ITSM system. Partners, integrations and ease-of-use for self-service tools are major factors that distinguish ESM software vendors from ITSM specialists.

Key indicators of an ESM software vendor’s maturity include the range of non-IT business areas and processes it supports and the automation and functionality it offers for those processes. Most ESM software vendors are currently ITSM-oriented and do not offer many prebuilt, packaged offerings for other services or specific industries. Leading business areas supported by ESM software vendors in this study include HR, facilities management and customer service. There are exceptions, and a few vendors have created packages that support functions or reporting requirements that are specific to vertical industries.

AI maturity is the other major differentiator among ESM software vendors. Nearly all vendors have embedded AI into their ITSM operations to monitor system performance and offer some form of automated self-help for IT service consumers. Some vendors have demonstrated improved efficiency in using AI to build self-healing ability into systems and prevent service disruptions, including for non-IT systems and processes.

Within AI, agentic AI (or autonomous AI) development is becoming crucial for performance and competitiveness. It is an example of the wide range of maturity among providers in this study. A few vendors have successfully commercialized agentic AI and demonstrated powerful results from their use cases. Others, including some leaders, have not released any autonomous AI agents. Most ESM software vendors increasingly focus on AI in general, with a particular emphasis on agentic AI.

The ESM market has grown exponentially as organizations recognize the need to unify IT and business services under a cohesive strategy. The risk of fragmentation is growing because of rapid advances in AI, cloud-native engineering and microservices adoption. ISG’s study aims to provide clarity, evaluating vendors on their vision, execution capabilities and maturity of their end-to-end ESM offerings.

Leaders in this market offer solutions that address the most touchpoints in the journey to end-to-end enterprise service management. They surpass other vendors owing to their ability to introduce ITSM-like automation and controls to more business services.

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