The News
Recast Software has published new research drawn from surveys of more than 100 European IT professionals conducted at community and industry events between January and June 2026. The respondent base spans sysadmins, endpoint engineers, packagers, architects, and IT managers. Key findings include that 53% cite application security and compliance as a top challenge, 85% use Microsoft Intune, 44% expect VDI/SBC environment changes within the next 12 months, and 47% are open to exploring new application management solutions.
Analyst Take
The Recast data lands at a moment when endpoint and application management is quietly becoming one of the most contested layers of enterprise IT infrastructure in Europe. The headline numbers are directionally unsurprising, but the details expose something more interesting than a typical “security is hard” survey result.
Security and Compliance Pressure Is Real, but the Tooling Gap Is the Story
The 53% of respondents flagging application security and compliance as a top challenge aren’t describing a new problem. They’re describing a problem that has resisted solution despite years of investment. The adjacent finding, that 51% cite managing application updates and patches as a parallel burden, tells you why: these aren’t separate issues. Patch management failures are compliance failures. When those two pressures compound, the operational load on endpoint and application teams becomes genuinely difficult to manage with fragmented tooling.
The Intune adoption figure is the structural fact that shapes everything else here. At 85%, Intune has effectively become the default management plane for this European respondent set. That’s not surprising given Microsoft’s aggressive bundling strategy through Microsoft 365 licensing, but it does create a meaningful tension. Intune is a capable cloud-native MDM and application deployment platform, yet it was not designed to handle every application lifecycle complexity that enterprise environments require. Configuration Manager’s presence at 32% of the same respondent pool signals that a meaningful share of organizations are still running hybrid management architectures, precisely because Intune alone doesn’t close every gap. Recast’s own product strategy, which extends and enhances Intune and Configuration Manager rather than replacing them, is a direct response to that architecture reality.
The VDI/SBC Signal Deserves Attention
The finding that 44% expect VDI/SBC environment changes within 12 months, rising to 70% over a defined timeframe, is the most strategically significant data point in the report for IT decision-makers. VDI and session-based computing environments carry some of the most complex application packaging and delivery requirements in the enterprise stack. When organizations begin shifting those environments, whether toward cloud-hosted desktops, DaaS platforms, or hybrid delivery models, application management complexity doesn’t decrease. It often increases, at least during the transition. The 47% of respondents open to exploring new application management solutions likely correlates heavily with this VDI/SBC movement: organizations in transition look for tools that can bridge old and new delivery models without forcing a full re-architecture of their application packaging workflows.
For developers and endpoint engineers specifically, this matters because VDI transitions tend to expose application compatibility debt that has been quietly accumulating. Applications that ran adequately on a managed golden image for years suddenly require re-packaging, re-testing, and re-certification when the underlying delivery platform changes.
Developer Velocity as a Hidden Dimension
The Recast survey is focused on endpoint management practitioners, not developers in the modern software delivery sense. But the pressures it documents connect directly to a velocity problem that ECI Research has documented in adjacent markets. According to ECI Research’s Google GovTech Survey Results, 47.2% of respondents selected “Developer velocity and ease of integration” as the factor carrying the greatest weight in their final technical selection process (assuming baseline security and compliance requirements are met). That finding comes from a public sector context, but the underlying logic applies broadly: when security and compliance overhead consumes operational bandwidth, velocity suffers, and tool selection increasingly reflects that pain.
The Recast data also surfaces a procurement readiness signal worth watching. The 47% of respondents open to exploring new application management solutions represents a meaningful commercial opportunity, but “open to exploring” is a long way from “ready to buy.” ECI Research’s Google GovTech Survey Results found that 56.0% of respondents indicated that “Approved vendor lists lack modern developer platforms” when asked how often procurement requirements force engineering teams to use suboptimal tools. While European enterprise procurement operates under different rules than U.S. federal contracting, the structural dynamic, where approved vendor lists lag behind the pace of tooling innovation, is a recognizable pattern across markets.
Looking Ahead
Recast Software’s positioning as an Intune and Configuration Manager extension layer is well-timed. As Microsoft continues to push organizations toward cloud-native management, the practical reality for large European enterprises is that migration is incremental, hybrid architectures persist for years, and the gaps between what the platform provides natively and what complex environments actually require remain commercially exploitable. Recast is betting that the management complexity curve stays steep enough and long enough to sustain a robust extension market alongside Microsoft’s native capabilities.
The bigger question over the next 12 to 18 months is whether AI-assisted application packaging and compliance automation changes the economics of this market. Several vendors are beginning to integrate generative AI into packaging workflows, compatibility testing, and update management. If those capabilities mature, the calculus for IT teams currently absorbing manual compliance overhead will shift. Recast, and every competitor in this space, should expect that the “open to exploring” cohort in their survey will increasingly be evaluating AI-augmented alternatives alongside traditional endpoint management extensions.
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