This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current and future state of the endpoint management and enterprise mobility market. It includes an overview of the current market landscape, a technology buyer perspective, a market outlook, and IDC's advice for technology suppliers. The 2026 edition centers on the market's pivot from tool consolidation to autonomous endpoint management, examining why the time-to-patch gap persists despite widespread tactical AI adoption, how the convergence of IT operations and security operations is reshaping the buying center, and where Microsoft's Intune Suite bundling is compressing the addressable market for third-party suppliers."Endpoint management has spent a decade consolidating consoles, and 2026 is the year the market discovers that consolidation alone no longer moves the needle. Enterprises have adopted AI tactically across endpoint operations, yet roughly half still need a month or more to deploy a critical Windows patch — the gap between what our tools can see and what they will act on without a human is now the central problem in this market. Over the next three years, I expect the winners to be the platforms that earn trust incrementally, moving buyers from advisory to conditional to genuinely autonomous remediation, and that treat IT operations and security as one converged customer rather than two." — Phil Hochmuth, research vice president, Endpoint Management and Enterprise Mobility