Who are Nexthink?

Nexthink is one of the best known names in digital employee experience, or DEX, a category the company itself is widely credited with creating. If your IT team is looking for better visibility into how employees actually experience their laptops, applications, and networks, and wants to fix problems before the helpdesk phone rings, Nexthink is a name that will come up early in your research.

Viewpoint Analysis is a Technology Matchmaker. Our aim is to be the place enterprise buyers go to understand the software and technology market before speaking to vendors. Read on to learn more about Nexthink and the DEX space.

Who Are Nexthink?

Nexthink was founded in 2004 in Prilly, Switzerland, growing out of artificial intelligence research at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Pedro Bados, one of the original founders, remains at the helm today as CEO, having led the business from its academic roots to a global platform used across thousands of organisations. The company is dual-headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland and Boston, Massachusetts, with further offices across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

In 2025, Nexthink took a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners at a valuation of around three billion dollars, a deal that brought fresh backing while keeping its existing leadership team in place. The company has continued to expand its platform through acquisition, including its purchase of AppLearn to add digital adoption capability alongside its core monitoring and analytics business. Today Nexthink describes itself as the leader in digital employee experience management, with its Infinity platform used to give IT teams real time visibility into the technology experience of millions of employees worldwide. The business has grown from its academic origins into a genuinely global operation, employing well over a thousand people across offices on five continents, and it continues to be recognised by analysts including Gartner and Forrester as one of the leading names in its category.

What Does Nexthink Do?

Nexthink helps IT teams see what employees are actually experiencing on their devices, applications, and networks in real time, rather than relying on helpdesk tickets or periodic surveys to find out something has gone wrong. This falls within the broader IT Operations Technology market, where the shift has been away from reactive firefighting and towards proactive, data led management of the digital workplace.

The platform continuously collects telemetry from endpoints, applications, and the network, then uses this data to score and trend the digital experience over time. This means IT teams can identify a failing update, a misbehaving application, or a network issue affecting a specific group of users before it generates a flood of support tickets, and can often resolve it through automated remediation without any employee ever noticing a problem occurred.

Nexthink has increasingly built agentic AI into this proposition, moving from dashboards that tell IT teams what is happening towards systems that can diagnose root causes and take remediating action automatically. Its Spark product extends this idea to employees directly, giving them a personal IT agent that can resolve common issues without raising a ticket at all, while Amplify brings Nexthink's experience data into existing ITSM tools such as ServiceNow to add context to tickets that do get raised.

The platform also extends beyond the physical estate into virtual desktop infrastructure and mobile devices, giving IT teams a single, consistent view of experience regardless of how or where an employee is working. For organisations managing large, complex, and increasingly hybrid technology estates, this breadth of visibility is a large part of the appeal.

Underpinning all of this is a large volume of continuously collected telemetry, which Nexthink turns into benchmarks and trend data that IT leaders can use to justify investment, track the impact of a change, or demonstrate the value of the IT function in terms the rest of the business understands. Rather than treating employee experience as a soft, hard to measure concept, Nexthink's pitch is that it can be scored, trended, and managed in much the same way as any other operational metric.

Nexthink Technology Areas

Nexthink's platform spans several connected areas of digital employee experience management, and most customers use a combination of these depending on the maturity of their IT operation and the specific problems they are trying to solve. A brief summary of each is below.

Workplace Experience: real time monitoring and analytics across the core digital estate, giving IT a continuous, scored view of employee experience.

Application Experience: deeper diagnostics focused specifically on how individual business applications are performing for end users.

VDI and Mobile Experience: extends the same experience visibility into virtual desktop infrastructure and mobile device fleets.

Flow: automated workflows that let IT teams remediate common issues without manual intervention.

AI agents (Spark, AI Drive, Workspace): employee facing and IT facing AI agents that resolve issues, measure AI adoption, and give IT teams a central agentic cockpit.

Amplify and integrations: connects Nexthink's experience data into existing ITSM and service desk tools such as ServiceNow.

For a broader view of how these capabilities sit within the wider IT operations software market, our IT Operations Technology page covers the category in more depth.

Let Viewpoint Analysis Connect You to Nexthink!

Our Free Vendor Connector service is a great way to be introduced to Nexthink and comes with a range of free services.

• We'll arrange an initial call to talk through your requirements and check Nexthink is the best solution, and recommend other options to consider.

• We'll check your selection process and suggest the best approaches.

• We write-up your requirement in a vendor-friendly way - ensuring that you get the very best attention and promote the key requirements.

• We then connect you straight to the sales team - giving you direct access to the Nexthink team allocated to your account.

Nexthink Alternatives

Nexthink operates in a digital employee experience market that has grown considerably since it first defined the category, and several credible alternatives now exist across different price points and specialisms. Some compete directly on DEX depth, while others come at the same problem from an adjacent starting point such as unified endpoint management or application performance monitoring.

Lakeside SysTrack: one of the longest established names in the space, known for deep historical data retention and strength in regulated industries where audit trails matter. It tends to suit IT teams with a mature analytics function who want a very deep, long running data set to draw on.

ControlUp: grew out of real time virtual desktop monitoring and remains particularly strong for organisations with heavy Citrix, VMware Horizon, or Azure Virtual Desktop estates. Its pricing is often seen as more accessible than the larger enterprise platforms, and it has expanded into low-code workflow automation alongside its core monitoring.

1E (now TeamViewer DEX): pairs experience analytics with strong real time remediation and automation, and now sits within the wider TeamViewer group following its acquisition. It is often chosen by IT teams who prioritise fast, scripted fixes over exploratory analytics.

Riverbed Aternity: leans more heavily into application performance monitoring alongside experience scoring, which makes it a good fit where APM and DEX genuinely need to be considered together rather than as separate disciplines.

Ivanti Neurons for Digital Experience: combines experience monitoring with Ivanti's broader unified endpoint management ecosystem, which can appeal to organisations that want DEX to sit alongside device and patch management in a single vendor relationship.

If you are exploring the digital employee experience market and want to understand who else you should be considering alongside Nexthink, the Viewpoint Analysis Longlist Builder is a good place to start. Answer a few questions about your requirements and we will come back with a comprehensive report covering all the vendors worth considering for your shortlist.

Nexthink Customer Examples

Nexthink's customer base spans large, complex enterprises across industries including manufacturing, financial services, professional services, and consumer goods. A few verified examples from Nexthink's own published customer stories illustrate the range of organisations using the platform.

• Honeywell: the global industrial and aerospace conglomerate has used Nexthink to speed up technology integration following acquisitions, a process that often involves bringing thousands of new devices and users onto the corporate estate. By using Nexthink's proactive, data led approach, Honeywell reduced what had been a months long M&A integration timeline down to a matter of days.

• AB InBev: the world's largest brewer by volume, operating in more than 150 countries, used Nexthink's software asset management capability to identify significant unused software licence spend as part of a wider cost optimisation drive. In one example, the business found that a large batch of purchased Power BI licences were going almost entirely unused, freeing up budget that could be redirected elsewhere.

• Toyota Motor Europe: Toyota's European IT team has drawn on Nexthink's platform as part of its work to understand and improve the digital experience of its workforce, using the data to inform how the business plans and prioritises its technology roadmap across its European operations.

  
  

• EY: the global professional services firm has featured as a Nexthink customer, sharing its experience of the platform as part of Nexthink's ongoing customer community events and webinars, alongside fellow customers such as Kenvue and NRG Energy.

Suggested Next Steps

Further reading. If you want to understand the wider IT operations technology landscape before going further with any individual vendor, the Viewpoint Analysis IT Operations Technology page covers the market in detail, including the different categories, key vendors, and what to look for when evaluating your options.

Build your initial longlist. Not sure who else you should be considering alongside Nexthink? The Viewpoint Analysis Longlist Builder asks you a few questions about your organisation and requirements, and we come back with a comprehensive report covering all the vendors worth putting on your list. It is a straightforward way to make sure you are not missing a strong option before you start shortlisting.

Have your selected vendors come and pitch to you. Take a look at our Technology Matchmaker, where we will bring the leading technology vendors to pitch their ideas to you. It is a super quick way to learn what is on the market before shortlisting them.

Run a quick selection process. If you are ready to move to a formal evaluation, the Viewpoint Analysis 30-Day Technology Selection service takes you from a standing start to a preferred vendor decision in a single month. It combines the best of our Rapid RFI and Rapid RFP processes, and we run the whole thing for you, writing the brief, managing vendor engagement, and guiding your team to a scored, defensible decision.

Speak to Viewpoint Analysis. If you would like to talk through your requirement and understand how we can help, request a call and one of our team will be in touch.

If you represent Nexthink and would like to have this profile Vendor Verified, please get in touch.