Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration

Platform as a Service
Published: 21 September 2020 ID: G00397953

Analyst(s): Eric Thoo, Massimo Pezzini, Keith Guttridge, Bindi Bhullar, Shameen Pillai, Abhishek Singh

Enterprise iPaaS providers continue to broaden their go-to-market

strategies to cover an increasing range of enterprise integration scenarios.
This Magic Quadrant assesses 17 vendors to help application leaders meet
the needs of their organizations.

Market Definition/Description
An enterprise iPaaS (EiPaaS) is a suite of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) technologies. An
iPaaS provides capabilities to enable subscribers (also known as “tenants”) to implement integration
projects involving any combination of cloud-resident and on-premises endpoints, including APIs,
mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is achieved by developing, deploying,
executing, managing and monitoring integration processes and flows that connect multiple
endpoints, so that they can work together (see Note 1).

An iPaaS is typically used for cloud service integration, application integration, data integration, B2B
ecosystem integration, and increasingly API publishing, multiexperience support and IoT scenarios.

Gartner considers an iPaaS an EiPaaS if it:

■ Is designed to support enterprise-class integration initiatives — that is, initiatives that require
high availability, disaster recovery, security, SLAs and technical support from the provider.
■ Provides user experiences that enable end users to develop and manage integrations
independent of the EiPaaS provider’s professional services. These experiences must support
multiple integration personas, particularly integration specialists and ad hoc integrators.
■ Offers capabilities for executing multiple integration scenarios, including real-time application
integration, batch data integration and B2B integration.
■ Provides API management capabilities to support integration.
■ Is fully managed by the vendor for patching and upgrades.
■ Is supported by a broad go-to-market strategy that targets buyers of a strategic integration
platform, rather than focusing on specific integration scenarios, industries or geographic areas.
 Customers must be able to purchase these capabilities directly from the EiPaaS vendor, without
engaging with third parties, and the vendor must provide at least first-line support for these
capabilities.

This market includes only companies that provide public EiPaaS offerings for use by subscribers in
integrating applications, data sources and APIs. Vendors that sell only iPaaS-enabling software,
merely provide iPaaS capability embedded in other “xPaaS” solutions (such as application platform
as a service [aPaaS] solutions), or embed their iPaaS capabilities within SaaS applications, are not
considered EiPaaS vendors by Gartner.

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 Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service

Source: Gartner (August 2020)

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 Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Adaptris
Adaptris, is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was a
Visionary. Founded in 1998 and based in Sutton, Surrey, U.K., Adaptris was acquired by RELX
Group in 2015, but operates independently. Adaptris has a long history in the field of integration,
mostly in the agriculture and food industry, based on the evolution of its Interlok technology.
Adaptris formerly marketed its enterprise iPaaS as Cirrus, but reverted to the name Interlok in 2018.

Strengths

■ Targeted industry traction: Adaptris has a reputation for supporting agriculture-related

solutions, by offering iPaaS and integration brokerage together, along with APIs for the IoT and
support for data standardization.
■ Use case coverage: Adaptris supports a variety of usage scenarios, including core application-
to-application, B2B and cloud service integration, for the agrifood industry. Several IoT
implementations connect machinery, sensors and weather stations, and provide integration for
blockchain requirements, as well as big data and analytics features for platform insights.
■ Customer relationship and growth: Adaptris’ partnering approach with clients results in
positive customer engagements throughout the relationship. Adaptris has a strong iPaaS
customer base, with over 8,700 paying customers, which continues to grow, boosted by global
enterprises adopting Interlok for their cloud, on-premises and hybrid integration needs.

Cautions

■ Sales execution: Despite growth in its direct customer base and expanded adoption among
RELX customers, Adaptris’ iPaaS revenue grew by less than the market average in 2019.
Although this excludes revenue from other RELX businesses that deliver services to customers,
there could be cause for concern about Adaptris’ traction relative to other providers in the
EiPaaS market.
■ Market coverage: Approximately 70% of Adaptris’ direct customers are in the agrifood
industry, with the rest specializing in finance, risk management and travel. Outside its core
adoption sectors, Adaptris’ mind share is limited in this market.
■ Support for nonspecialist integrators: The developer experience of Adaptris Interlok is
tailored to integration specialists. This is, however, natural, given the company’s industry focus
and the complexity of some of its solutions. Adaptris has started to address the needs of ad
hoc and citizen integrators through templates and wizards.

Boomi
Boomi is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, as Dell Boomi, it was
also a Leader. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dell Technologies and based in

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 Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania, U.S. Its Boomi AtomSphere platform has evolved over 15 years into a
suite of separately packaged components for application, data and B2B/electronic data interchange
(EDI) integration; API management; low-code application development and master data
management (MDM). The acquisition of Unifi Software, completed in January 2020, extended this
suite with data catalog, data preparation and additional artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Boomi
provides a variety of complementary managed services and professional services.

Strengths

■ Market understanding: Boomi has been able to closely track, and often anticipate, EiPaaS
market trends and build up a functionally rich platform that appeals to both large and midsize
organizations. Boomi’s low-code application development and data catalog/data preparation
capabilities put it in a good position to capitalize on the industry’s evolution toward fulfillment of
the “composable enterprise” vision.
■ Product strategy: Boomi has an ambitious roadmap. Its primary goals are to provide a unified
user experience and a common data catalog across all AtomSphere platform components. AI
technology will be extensively used to enable smart scheduling, chatbots, developer assistance,
data preparation, platform self-healing and other use cases. Continuous integration/continuous
delivery (CI/CD) support, API management improvements and a new consumption-based
pricing model are other notable roadmap items.
■ Market traction: Boomi is one of the most recognized brands in the EiPaaS market, and is
highly respected by both users and competitors. Customers perceive Boomi as a visionary and
innovative, yet reliable and trusted provider. Boomi’s initiatives focus on clients’ challenges
relating to the IoT, employee and customer onboarding, event-driven architecture and enabling
of the integration strategy empowerment team, along with industry-specific programs for
government, retail, higher education, manufacturing and healthcare.

Cautions

■ Pricing: One of the reasons why Boomi is rethinking its pricing model is users’ feedback that its
current pricing structure is challenging for large configurations. Users have also mentioned
contract flexibility as an area in which Boomi could improve.
■ Citizen integrator support: Boomi is very popular with integration specialists and ad hoc
integrators. However, despite the release of the Connect Now self-service integration tool and
an associated marketplace for packaged integration processes, feedback from reference
customers indicates a need for increased support for citizen integrators.
■ Functionality and third-party support: Although customers’ feedback about Boomi’s
functionality is generally positive, it also indicates that there is room for improvement in terms of
data quality, auditability and API management. They also expect Boom to work to enhance the
availability of third-party resources.

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 Celigo
Celigo is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a
Niche Player. Based in San Mateo, California, U.S., Celigo entered the EiPaaS market in August
2008 with a focus on integrating Salesforce with NetSuite. The original Celigo Integrator offering
was replaced in 2016 by Integrator.io, an EiPaaS for business users, integration specialists and
developers. Celigo’s EiPaaS provides a wide range of prepackaged integrations and connectors
(using Celigo Integration Apps and Flow Builder), and abilities to build custom integrations.

Strengths

■ Support for nonspecialist integrators: Celigo is well-versed in supporting ad hoc/line-of-

business (LOB) and citizen integrator requirements, due to its focus on enabling SaaS
integration. Customers are attracted to its product’s low total cost of ownership (TCO), speed of
implementation and enablement of third-party developers to build custom integration functions.
■ Sales execution: Celigo has increased its investment in sales and marketing, which resulted in
revenue growth above the market average in 2019 and a significant expansion of its customer
base to almost 3,000 paying customers. This enables confidence in Celigo’s commitment to this
market. The free edition of Integrator.io enables easy evaluation and has helped support
continued customer growth.
■ Sales strategy: Celigo is extending its strategic sales and marketing focus by broadening its
go-to-market approach and positioning Integrator.io as a unified platform. It now includes
Integration Apps as functional extensions, targets business processes such as cash
management, and provides unified pricing based on the number of endpoints and flows. Celigo
plans to broaden its API management capabilities, reduce the TCO of integration flows by using
the error management capabilities of its Autopilot offering, and provide enhanced visual
dashboards and custom forms.

Cautions

■ Market reach: Awareness of Celigo in the EiPaaS market remains limited, which often limits
prospective customers’ confidence about this vendor’s market traction. Celigo aims to increase
its market reach through an expansion of connectivity to SaaS providers, and by expanding its
direct presence in EMEA. These aims are supported by the recent opening of its new EU data
center and of its first office in Asia/Pacific.
■ Customer experience: Customer feedback about Celigo’s platform indicates concerns relating
to, among other things, the quality of end-user training, life cycle management of integration
artifacts, and the quality and reliability of its sales teams. Customer feedback about Celigo’s
EiPaaS functionality is not as positive as it is for some competitors.
■ Range of buyers: Although Celigo’s platform can support a wide range of use cases, its focus
on SMBs and LOBs means that buyers often do not consider it for more strategic, complex
deployments.

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 Cloud Elements
Cloud Elements is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was
also a Niche Player. Founded in 2012, Cloud Elements is based in Denver, Colorado, U.S. The Cloud
Elements API Integration Platform contains the Elements Catalog, with over 200 services, API hubs
that provide a virtual API in front of certain application domains and Virtual Data Resources (VDRs)
to normalize data types. It provides three different developer experiences — Formula Builder,
Conductor and Elements Connect — for creating integrations. Cloud Elements’ operations are
global, and its clients tend to be independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs) and,
more recently, digital product teams, looking to embed its technology in their solutions.

Strengths

■ Multipersona support: During 2019, Cloud Elements released Conductor, which offers a low-
code user experience for ad hoc integrators. This joined Elements Connect, which offers a
citizen integrator experience for prepackaged integration processes, and the developer-centric
Formula Builder user experience.
■ Innovation: Cloud Elements has innovated in the areas of service virtualization by introducing
API Hubs, data entities in the form of VDRs, and security by creating a single access method
based on OAuth for all elements. It is also investing in AI and machine learning (ML) to enable
automated mapping for VDRs and Elements Connect.
■ Strategy for enterprise-grade operations: Cloud Elements’ product currently runs in the
company’s own data centers and client-provided virtual private clouds (on both Amazon Web
Services [AWS] and Google Cloud Platform infrastructure). It plans to add more data centers
during 2020, as well as to enable Google Anthos, AWS Outposts and Microsoft Azure Arc
deployments to extend its reach further into clients’ data centers.

Cautions

■ Marketing execution: Cloud Elements has all the features required to compete in the EiPaaS
market, yet its focus on embedding integration for ISVs and SIs means that many end-user
organizations are unaware of Cloud Elements and its different approach. This is reflected in
Cloud Elements being one of the least evaluated vendors in this Magic Quadrant, judging from
surveyed reference customers.
■ Market focus: Although Cloud Elements achieved above-average customer growth of 60% in
2019, Gartner estimates that its revenue growth was below the market average and that this
resulted in a reduction of market share. Potential customers take account of Cloud Elements’
relatively narrow focus on ISVs, resellers and SIs.
■ Geographic strategy: Cloud Elements currently operates from only four data centers, split
across North America (two), EMEA (one), and Asia/Pacific (1). Its sales and partner network are
focused on North America, although it has a growing European footprint and relationships with
the major SIs. By comparison, several market leaders in this Magic Quadrant operate from more
than 20 centers across every major region of the world and have thousands of partners.

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 IBM
IBM is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a Visionary.
Founded in 1911 and based in Armonk, New York, U.S., IBM provides a modular suite of EiPaaS
capabilities named IBM Cloud Integration. This suite includes IBM App Connect for application
integration; IBM API Connect, IBM Secure Gateway Service and IBM DataPower Gateway for API
management; IBM MQ and IBM Event Streams for event brokering; and IBM Aspera for managed
file transfer (MFT). Separately from IBM Cloud Integration, IBM provides data integration and B2B
integration cloud services, which are not considered in this Magic Quadrant.

Strengths

■ Market understanding: With almost three decades in the integration technology market, IBM
fully understands the complexity of the integration challenges that the largest organizations are
facing. These include hybrid/multicloud integration, cloud-native architectures, multipersona
support, and the key role played by AI in facilitating integration development and operations.
■ Product strategy: IBM plans to extend its EiPaaS with a single-tenant offering, featuring
advanced quality of service and SLA, based on its IBM Cloud Pak for Integration. This is a Red
Hat OpenShift/Kubernetes-enabled platform that provides the same functionality as IBM Cloud
Integration. IBM’s roadmap also includes a new web-based, AI-assisted development tool
enabling improved collaboration across integration personas; new testing capabilities; an asset
repository for CI/CD support; and improved management and operations.
■ Market responsiveness: In 2019, IBM added many new features in every component of its
EiPaaS offering (for example, new adapters, support for OpenAPI 3.0 and GraphQL, blockchain
integration and support for Istio service mesh). At the same time, the release of the IBM Cloud
Pak for Integration showed how IBM was able to quickly capitalize on the Red Hat acquisition.

Cautions

■ Sales execution: Gartner estimates that, in 2019, IBM’s EiPaaS revenue grew by about 40%,
which was less than the overall market’s 48% expansion. Although IBM Cloud Integration has a
solid presence among the company’s loyal customers, IBM is growing its installed base at a
slower pace than the competition. This might indicate that IBM’s sales organization has limited
focus on the EiPaaS opportunity.
■ Mind share: Although IBM has a strong brand and a good reputation as an integration
technology provider, generally it is not recognized as an EiPaaS vendor, especially by
organizations that don’t have an established business relationship with the company.
■ Fragmented offering: IBM Cloud Integration, along with IBM’s cloud services for data
integration (InfoSphere Information Server on Cloud) and B2B integration (IBM Sterling B2B
Integrator), has a formidable range of EiPaaS capabilities, which however, come from three
distinct business units. Despite IBM’s progress in homogenizing operating models and user
experiences, these units’ diverse priorities and goals might complicate adoption by customers
needing a combination of application, data and B2B integration capabilities.

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 Informatica
Informatica is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a
Leader. Founded in 1993 and based in Redwood City, California, U.S., Informatica is a privately held
company. Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) is a microservices-based offering with
coverage spanning application, data and B2B integration, API management, a digital integration
hub, MDM (“Customer 360”), data quality, governance and privacy. IICS and its software
counterparts can be managed on a common platform environment based on a hybrid integration
platform (HIP) model.

Strengths

■ Enterprise offering and adoption: That Informatica’s EiPaaS has a leading market share
reflects its enterprisewide use and HIP approaches for integrating data, applications and APIs in
diverse use cases including digital integration hubs, data lakes, data warehousing, application
modernization and process automation. Enhanced governance, achieved with data cataloging,
metadata management, data quality, data privacy and MDM capabilities, capitalizes on
increasingly complex integration demands.
■ Innovation: Resonating well with buyers seeking hybrid and augmented integration strategies,
Informatica’s focus on intelligence and automation within cloud-native integration capabilities is
driven by CLAIRE, Informatica’s ML-powered engine. It positions IICS for multicloud, distributed
deployments to support diverse types of user, data and use case.
■ Extensibility: The use of AI for intelligence and automation in metadata-activated integration
flows positions IICS for augmented, platform-agnostic integration capabilities to support many
established and emergent applications, data management and analytics platforms. With a
balanced focus on business and technical roles, and the use of microservices-based
composable building blocks, Informatica resonates with diverse integrator personas,
organizations undertaking vast initiatives for modernizing integration infrastructure, and those
looking for a broad ecosystem (Informatica’s includes Microsoft Azure, AWS, Databricks,
DataRobot, Google, MongoDB, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake and Tableau).

Cautions

■ Mind share for non-data-focused scenarios: Although Informatica IICS has the capabilities
for B2B, API and mobile-app-oriented integration, it is more often considered for data-focused
scenarios.
■ Guidance for complex implementations: Informatica IICS is increasingly used for complex
scenarios and enterprisewide deployments, but some customers expect proactive guidance
about reference architectures and best practices. Informatica has built reference architectures
and practice methodologies for cloud data warehouses, data lakes, application modernization
and Customer 360, but it needs to make these available more broadly.
■ Pricing: Although deployments reflect a reasonable connection between the pricing of
Informatica’s EiPaaS and its anticipated value, some customers perceive IICS to be more

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 expensive than competing offerings, which is a disadvantage during competitive evaluations.
Procurement models offered by Informatica to offer buyers more choice include consumption-
based, freemium, midmarket and use-driven packages.

Jitterbit
Jitterbit is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a Leader.
Founded in 2003, Jitterbit is a private company based in Alameda, California, U.S. It began as an
integration software provider focused on SMBs and has been evolving its EiPaaS offerings for a
decade. Its Harmony API Integration Platform integrates diverse cloud, interenterprise and on-
premises environments, and provides API autocreation and management. Jitterbit offers solutions
for ISVs and SaaS providers, including embedded integration capabilities.

Strengths

■ Market traction: With increased mind share and presence in competitive situations, Harmony
sales generated revenue growth above the market average in 2019. With a paying customer
base of more than 3,000 companies and the potential to capitalize on more than 65,000
freemium iPaaS users, prospective customers can have confidence in Jitterbit’s commitment to,
and traction in, this market.
■ Resonance of offering: Rapid time-to-deployment is indicated by reference users’ ability to
develop, deploy and share APIs that support integration with packaged applications, diverse
DBMSs and a wide range of popular SaaS applications. Jitterbit provides a set of predefined
templates, with over 100 “recipes” across applications in the domains of CRM, marketing
automation, e-commerce/payment processing, human capital management (HCM) and IT
service management automation. Jitterbit’s plans for voice-based user interactions aim to
support mobile collaboration in integration activities.
■ Customer relationships: Customers often choose Jitterbit’s EiPaaS because they have a
positive view of their business relationship with Jitterbit and its approach to partnering with
customers to drive digital business transformation through an incremental, iterative approach.
This enables an evolving focus on the integration of ecosystems and API orchestration
(spanning the life cycles of products, customers, services and employees).

Cautions

■ Implementation and skills coverage: Although Jitterbit’s capabilities resonate with the
growing interest in the EiPaaS market, prospective buyers are often unaware of the vendor’s
applicability to enterprisewide capabilities. While the number of certified partners has grown,
prospective Jitterbit customers have expressed concerns about the extent of access to skilled
resources in certain geographies, integration with incumbent technical environments and
multicloud support, among other things.
■ Operational and deployment support: Although Jitterbit has improved its diagnostic
capabilities and product documentation, some customers who have implemented its EiPaaS
have identified the diagnosis of error messages as challenging and therefore want improved

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 diagnostic support, as well as easy-to-use documentation. Customers have also expressed a
desire for easier access to knowledge and assistance from the user community, and for
improved access to implementation guidance and practices.
■ Geographic strategy: Although Jitterbit has continued to expand its customer base, it still has
a relatively limited market presence in large enterprises globally, compared with its major
competitors. Jitterbit is, however, continuing to increase its international coverage by expanding
its sales and services teams in Europe and Asia/Pacific and by engaging in partnerships.

Microsoft
Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a
Leader. Founded in 1975 and based in Redmond, Washington, U.S., Microsoft offers Azure
Integration Services (AIS), which combines Azure Logic Apps with Azure API Management, Azure
Service Bus (a message queuing and publish-subscribe service) and Azure Event Grid (a massive-
event ingestion service). Additional integration-related services include Azure Data Factory, a
serverless data integration service, and Power Automate, a citizen integrator tool built on top of
Azure Logic Apps.

Strengths

■ Breadth of portfolio: Microsoft’s EiPaaS offering provides a combination of application

integration, data integration, business task automation, API and event stream processing
support in a synergistic portfolio. AIS offers a versatile platform catering for diverse integrator
personas, serverless function apps and integration patterns, which aligns Microsoft with
demand for modernizing integration capabilities.
■ Market traction: Microsoft’s EiPaaS customer base gives the vendor a large presence in this
market, driven by accelerating usage of Azure Logic Apps and Azure Data Factory. This traction
stems from Microsoft Azure’s market momentum, widely available skill pool and large partner
network.
■ Global coverage: AIS is available worldwide, with support from the global Microsoft
organization and about 1,000 AIS-enabled partners. Most AIS components are available in over
50 Azure data centers spread across every major region of the world. This, along with Azure’s
support for a range of international, regional and industry standards, vastly extends the global
footprint of AIS.

Cautions

■ Versatility of offering: Microsoft’s EiPaaS is predominantly used in Microsoft-centric

environments. However, with the introduction of Azure Arc, Microsoft aims to make its
integration capabilities accessible in more places and in more ways, and to satisfy demands for
multicloud and hybrid deployment models.
■ Product implementation and documentation: Some reference customers for Microsoft’s
EiPaaS identified complexity and insufficient technical documentation as deployment

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 challenges that resulted in a longer time to value than is associated with its major competitors.
Development efforts comprising Azure Logic Apps components and Azure Data Factory —
“lifting and shifting” workloads from BizTalk or SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), for
example — would reportedly benefit from an easier-to-navigate portfolio of tools and clearer
guidance on implementation. Microsoft’s plan to introduce a utility tool for migration from
BizTalk to AIS could potentially make some implementation efforts easier.
■ Pricing model: Reference customers highlighted how Microsoft’s pricing method makes it
difficult to estimate costs without a detailed understanding of implementation scenarios.
Microsoft has, however, begun to address this concern by introducing a simpler way of
estimating costs and workloads in relation to the required toolset and likely usage.

MuleSoft
MuleSoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a
Leader. Founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco, California, U.S., MuleSoft became a
Salesforce company through acquisition in May 2018 but operates as an independent unit.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform combines iPaaS, API management and its classic enterprise service
bus (ESB). It is complemented by Anypoint Exchange, Anypoint MQ, and Anypoint Design Center’s
flow designer that serves ad hoc integrators. MuleSoft’s operations are geographically diversified,
and it has clients across all industries.

Strengths

■ Go-to-market strategy and traction: MuleSoft’s iPaaS business grew three times faster than
the market in 2019, to become the second-largest iPaaS provider by revenue. Its ability to go to
market both independently and jointly with Salesforce has helped it gain mind share and
competitive advantage while investing in capabilities that are of paramount importance to
enterprises across several industries globally.
■ Innovation: MuleSoft’s technology-ecosystem-agnostic Anypoint Platform supports a broad
range of application and data infrastructures. Application network graph functionality advances
MuleSoft’s metadata-rich capabilities in conjunction with ML. The platform provides an
environment for obtaining, discovering and collaborating on reusable artifacts such as APIs,
integration flows, connectors, data stores and security patterns.
■ Platform versatility: MuleSoft has continued to expand its wide range of capabilities, which
include full life cycle API management, security, multicloud deployment and an open-core ESB.
In 2019, it also added features such as Anypoint Service Mesh for microservices, Anypoint API
Community Manager for API programs and Anypoint Partner Manager for B2B and EDI.

Cautions

■ Appeal to nonspecialist integrators: Despite MuleSoft’s established use by integration

specialists and its broad positioning as vendor with a single platform for a wide range of use
cases, buyers generally do not associate MuleSoft with support for nontechnical integrator
personas.

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 ■ Pricing and negotiation flexibility: Prospective customers point to MuleSoft’s pricing method
and negotiation flexibility as areas in which there is room for improvement. Although many
MuleSoft customers see a reasonable connection between its prices and the value offered, they
nevertheless express concerns about high cost relative to alternatives in this market.
■ Complexity and suitability: During interactions with Gartner, some small and midsize
organizations express concerns about the complex nature of the Anypoint Platform, and they
question MuleSoft’s suitability for their use cases. Underutilization of MuleSoft’s powerful
platform can lead to dissatisfaction with the ROI.

Oracle
Oracle is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a Leader.
Founded in 1977 and based in Redwood Shores, California, U.S., Oracle provides EiPaaS
capabilities within its overarching Oracle Cloud proposition, which includes infrastructure as a
service (IaaS), PaaS and SaaS offerings. Oracle’s EiPaaS comprises Oracle Integration Cloud
Service, Oracle API Platform Cloud Service, Oracle SOA Cloud Service (for backward compatibility
with Oracle SOA Suite), Oracle Managed File Transfer Cloud Service, Oracle Process Cloud Service,
Oracle Data Integration Platform Cloud and Oracle Self-Service Integration Cloud Service.

Strengths

■ Offering coverage: Oracle’s EiPaaS is among the most functionally rich in the market. It
provides application, data and B2B integration; API management; process integration; IoT
support; business insights and analytics for integration processes; a no-code application
development tool; and hybrid, multicloud deployment support via a distributed execution
engine. Notably, it also offers MFT, a feature neglected by most EiPaaS providers.
■ Marketing strategy: Oracle has articulated a marketing strategy that targets both large and
midsize organizations, focuses on ERP, HCM and customer experience integration processes,
and encompasses both Oracle and popular third-party SaaS applications. To support these use
cases, Oracle supplies, on top of its platform, an expanding range of adapters, packaged
integration processes, and business-oriented integration process insights and analytics.
■ Product strategy: Oracle plans extensive use of AI to assist a wide range of integration
development and operation activities. Planned AI-powered functionalities include self-defining
integrations, metadata identification, automatching/mapping, standard conformance, prediction
of SLA violations, automatic data masking and self-healing.

Cautions

■ Enterprise-grade operations: Reference customers usually appreciate the enterprise

characteristics of Oracle EiPaaS. However, they also indicate that there is room for improvement
in terms of performance/throughput, high availability, disaster recovery, public key infrastructure
(PKI) management, standard compliance, business activity monitoring and the lack of cloud
data centers in Asia/Pacific.

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 ■ Partnerships: Oracle’s EiPaaS supports third-party applications such as those of Workday,
ServiceNow, Marketo and SAP (including SuccessFactors), and its distributed execution agent
can run on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. However, unlike other EiPaaS
providers, Oracle does not have significant joint activities with these companies, because
Oracle is a strong competitor against all of them. This tension might limit Oracle’s growth
prospects and could potentially impair its support for users.
■ Customer satisfaction: In general, Oracle’s EiPaaS customers are pleased by the overall
service they receive. However, they identify room for improvement in terms of support for ad
hoc and citizen integrators, the quality and availability of end-user training, pricing and
commercial flexibility.

SAP
SAP is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration it was a Visionary. Founded in 1972 and
based in Walldorf, Germany, SAP offers the SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite, which provides
the full range of integration capabilities, as well as stream analytics, robotic process automation
(RPA) and master data services. Additionally, SAP’s API Business Hub provides access to
integration packs, APIs and events that target specific business processes. Its operations are
geographically diversified, and it has clients in all industries.

Strengths

■ Offering coverage: Aided by its large installed base of business applications and long history in
integration software, SAP has created one of the most comprehensive EiPaaS offerings. SAP
focuses not just on the technical features of integration technology, but also on providing
solutions — built on its platform — that address customers’ biggest SAP integration challenges.
■ Sales execution: With an estimated 55% growth bringing its total of EiPaaS customers to
11,300, and a 59% increase in revenue, SAP comfortably outperformed the iPaaS market in
2019. Also, with an adoption rate of less than 10% among its own vast customer base, and
planned improvements to its sales strategy, SAP is likely to capture a greater share of the
market in 2020. This should give potential customers confidence in SAP’s commitment to its
EiPaaS offerings.
■ Customer experience: Reviews from surveyed reference customers have improved
significantly for most aspects of SAP and its offering. This is largely due to SAP’s huge shift of
focus to customer success during 2019.

Cautions

■ Marketing strategy: Although changes to SAP’s marketing strategy have increased awareness
of its integration capabilities among its substantial customer base, SAP was one of the least
considered vendors in competitive evaluations, according to reference customers surveyed for
this Magic Quadrant. This indicates that SAP’s messaging about its ability to integrate with any
application and data source is still not widely heard or accepted.

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 ■ Platform deployment: SAP has one of the most widely deployed platforms on all major cloud
providers, but customers who require an on-premises integration runtime have to install SAP
NetWeaver Process Orchestration 7.5. This is of little concern to existing Process Orchestration
users, but it will deter potential customers who do not want to install multiple products. SAP
plans to address this limitation in 2021.
■ Platform technology: For several features within its platform, SAP has adopted a best-of-breed
approach, drawing on vendors such as Cloud Elements, Google (Apigee) and Solace. Potential
customers should ensure they are comfortable with the levels of influence and control that SAP
can provide over those aspects of its platform.

SnapLogic
SnapLogic is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a
Leader. Founded in 2006 and based in San Mateo, California, U.S., SnapLogic offers the Intelligent
Integration Platform (IIP). Its standard edition provides all the core capabilities required for limited
consumption. Its enterprise edition offers core capabilities and options to add API management,
B2B integration, big data support (SnapLogic eXtreme) and data science capabilities. Developers
can use IIP’s many connectors (over 500 “Snaps”), build integration pipelines, automate process
flows and maintain reusable patterns.

Strengths

■ Adaptable platform and customer focus: SnapLogic supports the core requirements for
automating the integration pipelines of application and data sharing. IIP facilitates a mix of
patterns for integrating applications, data and APIs on an integrated platform, which results in
favorable TCO, productivity and time to value. Additionally, SnapLogic’s strategic partnering
approach with customers results in positive relationships with them.
■ Balance of high performance and simplification: SnapLogic’s focus on empowering less-
technical integration roles reduces reliance on specialist integrators when creating integration
pipelines of low to moderate complexity and makes it easier to scale up deployments for
complex integration flows. SnapLogic is a pioneer of AI-enabled integration and continues to
differentiate its use of embedded ML to provide automation and guidance, which enables faster
development of integration flows and simpler implementations.
■ Composable business capabilities: SnapLogic plans an evolution of IIP toward automation of
the composition of application services, so that business users can build integration flows
without needing a detailed understanding of surrounding endpoints, data and process
transformation. The envisaged “Flows” capability encompasses AI-guided advice, use of natural
language processing (NLP), community sharing and the creation of templates and automation
patterns, with a view to easing process automation across customer, partner and employee
domains.

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 Cautions

■ Operations and administration: Service interruptions during upgrades and inconsistency in

the quality of technical support were issues identified by SnapLogic’s reference customers. As
implementation complexity is growing, they want improved support for diagnostics and
monitoring, simpler transaction logging and tracking, and the operationalizing of integration
components for continuous delivery. SnapLogic has moved to address this issue by adding
automated regression testing, so that customers can perform tests by using infrastructure
environments within their control.
■ API management functionality: Although SnapLogic has strengthened its focus on API
enablement, users identified this as an area of relative immaturity for IIP when it comes to
comprehensive use for requirements like composing, reusing and making APIs available with
policy management and enforcement.
■ Access to solutions: Reference customers seeking to broaden their use of IIP want wider
access to, and availability of, business solutions that have been proven in the marketplace,
including those from third-party SIs and members of the peer user community that use IIP. They
also want guidance about implementation best practices. SnapLogic has been addressing this
issue by working with SIs to develop solutions for popular application integration use cases,
and with ISVs to develop joint solutions for cloud data warehouse, HCM and spend
management requirements.

Software AG
Software AG is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a
Visionary. Founded in 1969, Software AG is based in Darmstadt, Germany. Software AG’s EiPaaS
offering is webMethods.io, which includes B2B and API capabilities. There is also a headless
version that can be embedded within software components. The same offering also provides the
integration capabilities for this vendor’s Cumulocity IoT platform. Software AG’s operations are
geographically diversified, and it has clients in all industries.

Strengths

■ Product coverage: Software AG’s EiPaaS platform offers application integration, data
integration, B2B integration and API management capabilities. The vendor also has a very
strong IoT-focused offering in the form of Cumulocity. With a data hub, a data catalog, support
for MFT and increasing use of AI on its roadmap, Software AG looks to be building a very
capable platform.
■ Geographic strategy: 2019 was a good year for Software AG and its global expansion of
presence to serve customers, as it opened data centers in China and Australia and extended its
partner network. Consequently, one-fifth of its clients now come from Asia/Pacific and Japan.
■ Market understanding: Software AG has a strong track record of solving complex integration
challenges for some of the world’s largest organizations. Although the company faced
challenges in shifting focus from integration platform software to EiPaaS, its product roadmap
and go-to-market strategy look to capitalize on its integration expertise.

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 Cautions

■ Sales execution: Gartner estimates that Software AG grew its customer base by 42% and its
revenue by approximately 35% in 2019. Both these figures were below the market average.
Prospective customers may be concerned about Software AG’s ability to execute effectively
across all sales channels.
■ Market responsiveness: Software AG has been playing catch up with the rest of the market.
As a result, many of the features it added in 2019 focused on building a more cohesive platform
and laying the foundation for a robust roadmap. Although the vendor provides updates every
two weeks and major releases every three months, this is less frequently than the competition,
with some leading vendors having a daily release schedule. This could result in customers
having to wait longer for enhancements.
■ Marketing execution: Our survey of reference customers found that Software AG was one of
the least considered vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Buyers might question how seriously
Software AG is about increasing awareness of its presence in the EiPaaS market, given its
historical strength in the integration sector.

Talend
Talend is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Talend is headquartered in Redwood City, California,
U.S. Founded in 2005 as a provider of data integration software, Talend has since gained an EiPaaS
portfolio by means of product enhancements and acquisitions (of Stitch in 2018 and Restlet in
2017). Its portfolio comprises Cloud Data Integration, Cloud Data Management, Cloud Data Loader,
Cloud Real Time Big Data Integration, Cloud Data Catalog and Cloud API Services (which has ESB
and EDI support). These stand-alone tools are also offered within Talend Data Fabric, an
overarching platform for Talend’s cloud-based and on-premises products.

Strengths

■ Sales execution: Talend doubled its iPaaS-associated revenue in 2019, which was more than
twice the market’s rate of growth (albeit from a small base in the iPaaS market). This should give
customers confidence in Talend’s commitment to this market.
■ Product evolution: Talend’s EiPaaS uses established on-premises data integration technology,
broadened for cloud and on-premises integration and hybrid deployments, and reusable
artifacts, along with APIs to extend and embed it. The addition of Cloud API Services, which
has been available for over a year, has extended applicability to cloud service integration B2B
and API-oriented iPaaS requirements.
■ Business model extension: Capitalizing on the company’s data management experience,
Talend’s expanding market focus reflects demand for data preparation, metadata support,
ingestion and manipulation of data involving big data sources. This creates synergy between
Talend’s EiPaaS and its well-established data-driven strategies.

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 Cautions

■ Market and mind share: Talend’s various EiPaaS offerings and functional capabilities appear
infrequently in competitive situations seen by Gartner. Many prospective customers have yet to
learn of Talend’s evolving coverage in the iPaaS market.
■ Geographic and skills coverage: Although Talend is expanding its customer base, its traction
is largely in the U.S. and Europe — it has a relatively small footprint in other regions, and no
presence in Latin America. Prospective customers have expressed concerns about a lack of
skilled implementers to support Talend’s EiPaaS.
■ Resonance and versatility of offering: During Gartner inquiry sessions, user organizations
generally do not look to Talend’s EiPaaS for the integration needs of application composition,
on-premises application-to-application integration and process optimization. This is because
organizations are largely drawn to familiar uses of Talend’s technologies for data integration.

TIBCO Software
TIBCO Software is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was
also a Challenger. Founded in 1997 and based in Palo Alto, California, U.S., it introduced TIBCO
Cloud Integration in May 2016. TIBCO’s acquisition of Scribe Software in June 2018 added the data
integration capabilities of the Scribe Online platform to TIBCO’s EiPaaS. TIBCO has made further
acquisitions since then — of Orchestra Networks in December 2018 (for MDM) and of SnappyData
in March 2019 (for an in-memory data platform) — to expand its portfolio. TIBCO operates in
diverse geographies and industries.

Strengths

■ Sales execution: TIBCO gained more than 2,000 EiPaaS customers in 2019, a 65% increase
from the previous year, with its focus on SMBs, value-based selling and partnerships.
Prospective customers could benefit from TIBCO’s growing focus on multicloud, geographical
and other partnerships.
■ Product versatility: TIBCO’s EiPaaS offers the functional breadth and use-case versatility
required for modern HIPs to support enterprise-grade operations. It aims to help organizations
looking to define, operate and govern data and application integration capabilities and MDM
solutions, and to tap into emerging trends involving ML-powered data science scenarios.
■ Presence and experience: TIBCO has been an active participant in the integration technology
market for decades in all major regions of the world. It has a large partner ecosystem of over
1,100 SIs and value-added resellers. Buyers can benefit from TIBCO’s long tenure in this market
and its experience of providing support to customers.

Cautions

■ Market mind share: Although recognized as an established middleware vendor, TIBCO

appears infrequently in competitive situations known to Gartner in this market. There is a risk
that prospective customers might overlook the capabilities of its EiPaaS offering.

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 ■ Solution strategy and implementation: TIBCO has a broad range of capabilities relevant to
this market, but increasingly complex implementations require faster access to, and better
understanding of, solutions and practices demonstrated in the market. Packaged integration
templates and recipes and the quality of its peer user groups and peer user content are among
the aspects that need improvement.
■ Integrator productivity: As TIBCO’s portfolio expands, issues arise for some user organizations
that identify a need for improved integrator productivity and ease of use across different EiPaaS
components (for example, application integration and API management). Improvements in this
regard would enable smoother adoption for different use cases.

Tray.io
Tray.io is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San
Francisco, California, U.S., Tray.io is a privately held company with investors including Meritech,
Spark, GGV Capital and True. With an emphasis on ease of use and flexibility, Tray.io offers the
Tray.io Platform and Tray.io Embedded. Tray.io’s EiPaaS provides a wide range of prepackaged
integrations and connectors, and the ability to build custom integrations. Tray.io’s operations are
North America-centric. Recently, ISVs that embed Tray.io’s solution to provide integration to their
customers have accounted for a significant percentage of Tray.io’s customers.

Strengths

■ Sales execution: From a small base, Tray.io’s customer count grew significantly in 2019, to
around 2,000 customers, and the company’s revenue tripled. This should give prospective
customers confidence about Tray.io’s commitment to its EiPaaS offerings and their traction.
■ Sales strategy: Tray.io’s go-to-market approach primarily targets business users and processes
in midsize and large enterprises, and, more recently, integration specialists and developers.
These users are seeking to automate their business applications and processes, and are
attracted to Tray.io’s ease of use and prepackaged integration recipes.
■ Customer experience: Customers praise Tray.io’s scalability, service and support, including the
responsiveness of its staff, its platform’s overall capability, its compliance with standards and
the citizen integrator user experience.

Cautions

■ Geographic strategy: Although Tray.io uses AWS’s global infrastructure, its platform is
deployed only in North America, which may limit its ability to serve customers that operate
internationally. The lack of direct operations beyond the U.S. and the U.K. may also deter
organizations outside those countries that prefer local sales and support. Tray.io does, however,
plan to open dedicated EMEA data centers in 2020.
■ Breadth of offering: Tray.io does not yet provide packaged EDI B2B integration capabilities, AI,
RPA or multicloud support, and it focuses on business users, although it plans to address some
of these shortcomings in its 2020 roadmap. During Gartner inquiry sessions, Tray.io is not often

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 considered for strategic and complex deployments by large and global organizations with
demanding ground-to-ground integration needs.
■ Market reach: Despite a substantial number of Tray.io’s staff being based in the U.K. — mostly
in R&D and support functions — the vast majority of its customers are based in North America,
and awareness of Tray.io outside this region remains low. Consequently, Tray.io is one of the
least evaluated providers in this Magic Quadrant. The vast majority of Tray.io’s customers are
indirect (that is, they are end customers of ISVs), with LOB/business users representing a
substantial percentage.

Workato
Workato is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research it was also a Leader.
Founded in 2013, Workato is based in Cupertino, California, U.S. The Workato Workspace offering
targets departmental or SMB development, whereas Workato Enterprise Suite targets enterprise-
level adoption. Automation editions target business functions and industries. Options for embedding
OEM capabilities target ISVs. Workato’s operations are mostly in North America, but it also has a
presence in Asia and Europe. It has clients in all industries.

Strengths

■ Customer experience: Workato has scored consistently highly for customer satisfaction in our
surveys of reference customers. This year, reference customers praised Workato’s platform for
its ease of use, citizen integrator experience and breadth of features. They also praised Workato
for its approach to evaluations and contract negotiations.
■ Innovation: Workato was an early proponent of AI with Recipe IQ (computer-generated
integration flows), OpsIQ (a self-healing production platform to reduce downtime) and various
Workbot features to ease use of the platform. Workato’s roadmap continues to feature such
capabilities, with a view to enabling customers to be more productive and gain greater insight
from a more intelligent platform.
■ Sales execution: 2019 was a strong year for Workato, with estimated revenue growth three
times that of the market average and a 72% rise in customer numbers. Although there is still
some way to go before Workato captures a significant share of the market (it climbed just one
place), its trajectory looks promising. This will reassure prospective customers that Workato is
committed to customer success.

Cautions

■ Geographic strategy: Although Workato has invested substantially in sales and marketing in
Asia/Pacific and EMEA (markets that account for 27% and 22% of its customers, respectively),
it has yet to deploy in a data center outside the U.S. Workato plans to support data centers in
EMEA and Asia/Pacific and Japan in 2020.
■ Product offering: Although Workato’s pursuit of a cloud-native approach to iPaaS is admirable,
it has been late to provide the ability to deploy the runtime execution engine remotely in a

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 client’s data center or public cloud. As a result, clients looking to run large-scale integrations
within their data centers and clouds rarely shortlist Workato.
■ Market reach: Although awareness of Workato is growing and customers appreciate its ease of
use and messaging about intelligent automation, large enterprises rarely consider Workato as
an option to replace existing platforms, judging by our reference customer survey and client
inquiry sessions.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor’s
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added
■ Talend
■ Tray.io

Dropped
■ Azuqua
■ Moskitos

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, vendors had to deliver a service with the following
characteristics:

■ It had to be a cloud service:

■ Available by subscription and accessible over internet technologies.
■ Available uniformly to all qualified subscribers.
■ It had to include:
■ Some sharing of physical resources between logically isolated tenants (subscribers or
applications).
■ Some self-service provisioning and management by subscribers.
■ Bidirectional scaling without interruption of activities and with some automation.
■ Some instrumentation for resource use tracking.

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 ■ It had to be a PaaS solution that:
■ Encapsulates the underlying virtual or physical machines, their procurement, management
and direct costs, and does not require tenants to be aware of them.
■ Delegates to the providers the patching, versioning and health of the platform stack.
■ It had to provide the following iPaaS capabilities:
■ Features targeting application integration — that is, the ability for different applications to
exchange messages, call each other’s business functions and automate business
processes. This integration generally needs to be at the transaction level. It must support
use cases such as data consistency/synchronization between applications, composition of
new services from aggregations of existing applications or services (typically published as
APIs or events), and delivery of a multistep process that touches many systems.
■ Features targeting data integration — that is, the ability for different data stores to
synchronize, to move data from one store to another, and to combine, deduplicate and
aggregate data from different stores. This integration generally involves a bulk/batch,
federated/virtualized or replication/synchronization mode of data delivery. It supports
requirements for extracting, transforming, combining and provisioning data to support
diverse use cases, such as analytics and data management, as well as integration.
■ Features targeting API management — that is, the ability to create, deploy, secure and
monitor APIs. These capabilities must include an API gateway and administration portal;
they may optionally include a developer portal.
■ Connectivity to different endpoints that are on-premises and cloud-based, including:
■ Application connectors (for example, for Salesforce, Workday, NetSuite, Oracle E-
Business Suite, SAP S/4HANA, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo).
■ Data source connectors (for example, for file systems and SQL and NoSQL databases).
■ Technology connectors (for example, for FTP, HTTP, Java Message Service [JMS] and
Open Database Connectivity [ODBC]).
■ Multiple data/message delivery styles, including:
■ API-based.
■ Messaging/event-based.
■ Batch.
■ Data and message validation.
■ Data and message mapping and transformation.
■ Data and message routing and orchestration.

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 ■ End-user tools to develop, test, deploy, execute, administer, monitor and manage
integration flows, and to manage the life cycle of the relevant artifacts (transformation maps,
routing rules, orchestration flows, adapter configurations and others).
■ It had to be enterprise-grade and aimed at enterprise-class projects, by providing:
■ Support for high availability/disaster recovery.
■ Secure access to endpoints and to the platform’s functionality.
■ Technical support to paying subscribers.
■ It had to be marketed as a versatile offering able to address a broad range of use cases and
industries.
■ It had to be provided as a “stand-alone” service directly usable by the subscriber. To use the
platform, clients can subscribe to the EiPaaS capability only, not just to some other cloud
service — a SaaS application or another form of PaaS, such as aPaaS — of which the iPaaS
capabilities are an “embedded” subset.
■ All capabilities had to be provided directly by the EiPaaS vendor. The customer must be able to
purchase all these capabilities directly from the vendor of the enterprise iPaaS without engaging
with third parties, and the vendor must provide at least first-line support for these capabilities.
■ All the functionality listed above had to be generally available as of 15 February 2020, and had
to have at least 900 paying customer organizations, of which at least 200 were direct
customers, by the same date. Please note that we took into account the number of paying
organizations and not individual users. We considered both “direct” clients and “indirect”
customers (organizations that bought a provider’s EiPaaS solution via a reseller or an OEM
partner).

Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers on the quality and efficacy of the processes,
systems, methods or procedures that enable their performance to be competitive, efficient and
effective, and to positively affect revenue, retention and reputation.

We evaluate vendors’ Ability to Execute in the enterprise iPaaS market using the following criteria:

Product or Service: This criterion assesses core goods and services offered by the vendor for the
defined market. It evaluates current product or service capabilities, qualities, feature sets, skills and
so on, whether they are offered natively or through OEM agreements and partnerships. This criterion
covers diverse capabilities used to achieve, for example, features for enterprise-grade operations,
functional capabilities, platform versatility for use cases, integration specialist productivity, ad hoc

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 integrator productivity, citizen integrator support, multicloud support, and hybrid (cloud/on-
premises) deployment.

Overall Viability: This criterion assesses the overall organization’s financial health, and the financial
and practical success of the business unit. Also considered is the likelihood that the individual
business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will
advance the state of the art within the organization’s portfolio of products. Indicative business
results include company and product revenue, direct and indirect customer base, profitability,
research-and-development investment ratios, and the balance of direct and indirect revenue.

Sales Execution/Pricing: This criterion assesses the vendor’s capabilities in all presales activities
and the structure that supports them. Included are deal management, pricing and negotiation,
presales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. Important characteristics
include transparency in pricing, pricing models that support various customer segments, ease of
access for evaluation and client growth rates.

Market Responsiveness/Record: This criterion assesses the vendor’s ability to respond, change
direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act,
customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. It also considers the vendor’s history of
responsiveness, frequency of release schedule, adjustment of platform features based on customer
demand, anticipation of market direction, and new features introduced over the past 12 months.

Marketing Execution: This criterion concerns the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs
designed to deliver the organization’s message. This message should be designed to influence the
market, promote the brand and the business, increase awareness of products, and establish a
positive view of the products, the brand and the organization in the minds of buyers. This “mind
share” can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word
of mouth and sales activities. Of specific interest are differentiation of buyer journeys, market
presence, frequency of appearance in competitions and customer perception.

Customer Experience: This criterion considers relationships, products and services/programs that
enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, it considers the ways in
which customers receive technical support or account support. It also covers ancillary tools,
customer support programs (and the quality thereof), the availability of user groups and SLAs.
Buyers’ scrutiny is particularly emphasized, including customers’ satisfaction with products and
with the vendor, and their willingness to recommend its offering(s) to others.

Operations: This criterion assesses the ability of the organization to meet its goals and
commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including the skills,
experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate
effectively and efficiently. Evaluated characteristics include staffing and organizational design,
disaster recovery, ability to make new releases available to clients with minimal disruption, support
structure and partner network.

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 Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing High

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Medium

Customer Experience High

Operations Medium

Source: Gartner (August 2020)

Completeness of Vision
Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers on their ability to convincingly articulate logical
statements about the market’s current and future direction, innovation, customer needs and
competitive forces, as well as how well they correspond to Gartner’s view of the market.

We assess vendors’ Completeness of Vision for the EiPaaS market using the following criteria:

Market Understanding: This criterion assesses the ability to understand buyers’ wants and needs
and to translate that understanding into products and services. Vendors with the highest degree of
vision listen to and understand buyers’ wants and needs, and can shape or enhance them with their
vision. Key for the EiPaaS market is an understanding of the different integration personas and their
buyer journeys, the breadth of evolving integration use cases, the growing complexity of
deployment models, and the ability to recognize, set and capitalize on trends.

Marketing Strategy: This criterion looks for a clear, differentiated set of messages consistently
communicated throughout the organization and externalized through a website, advertising,
customer programs and positioning statements. Important features include clear articulation of
differentiators and marketing initiatives that support a differentiated industry understanding.

Sales Strategy: This criterion looks for a sound strategy using an appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates to extend the scope and depth of the
organization’s reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and customer base. Of special interest
are different approaches for inside sales, marketplaces, direct sales, ISV/OEM sales and SI sales.

Offering (Product) Strategy: This criterion assesses the vendor’s approach to product
development and delivery, especially differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets,
with a view to fulfilling current and future requirements. These requirements include enterprise-

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 worthiness, openness, integration developer productivity, ease of operations, multiple integrator
persona support, platform versatility to support multiple use cases, core integration features,
ecosystem/community support features, and policy management and enforcement. Key
considerations include features for enterprise-grade operations, platform versatility, integration
specialist productivity, ad hoc integrator productivity and citizen integrator support. Also key are the
use of AI (such as ML and NLP) to assist and facilitate development and operations, prepackaged
integration processes and templates, and metadata management.

Business Model: This criterion considers the design, logic and execution of the organization’s
business proposition for achieving continued success.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: This criterion evaluates the vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills
and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Subcriteria consider platform ecosystems for application domains such as ERP, CRM, HCM, supply
chain management (SCM) and product life cycle management (PLM); industry focus, such as on
healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, higher education, the public sector or retail; LOB
processes, such as marketing, sales, HCM, production, customer support, finance and
procurement; cloud platforms, such as those of Alibaba, AWS, Google and Microsoft (Azure); and
application vendor ecosystems, such as those of Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow.

Innovation: This criterion looks for direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of
resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, or defensive or preemptive purposes. It
focuses on the application of AI to ease integration challenges, facilities to enable collaboration
across integrator personas and emerging use cases (such as RPA, digital integration hub and event
stream analytics). Also considered are other innovations that align with emerging market or
technology trends, as well as innovations in areas such as pricing, go-to-market approach and sales
models.

Geographic Strategy: This criterion evaluates the vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills and
offerings to meet the specific needs of geographic areas outside its “home” or native area, either
directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries (as appropriate for the area and market). It
considers the vendor’s direct commercial and support presence in regions and countries, the data
center locations of the iPaaS control plane (for development, governance and operations) and the
runtime plane (for execution of integration processes). It also considers those of its partners.

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 Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding Medium

Marketing Strategy High

Sales Strategy High

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Medium

Source: Gartner (August 2020)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders
Leaders have an insightful understanding of the realities of the market, a reliable record, an ability to
influence the market’s direction, an ability to attract and keep a following, and a capacity to lead.

They establish market trends by identifying new types of business problem to which they can bring
significant value by providing new functional capabilities. Having enabled multiple integration use
cases — often supported by the large global networks of partners — their platforms are cohesive
and functionally rich, and there are regular releases to rapidly address the needs of this fast-
evolving market.

Leaders are well-positioned to remain dominant as the market evolves to provide further capabilities
over the coming months and years. Leadership cannot be taken for granted, however — in the fast-
moving EiPaaS market, one misstep could have catastrophic consequences. In a rapidly evolving
market featuring constant innovation, Leaders do not focus solely on current execution. Each also
ensures it has a robust roadmap to solidify its position as a market leader and thus help protect
buyers’ investments.

Challengers
Challengers have been in the market for several years and have notable installed bases of
thousands of clients, along with mature or evolving offerings that have proven their worth in multiple
integration scenarios. Challengers also have the financial strength and commitment to compete

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 aggressively in the EiPaaS market. Consequently, they often offer a competitive platform, at least for
certain industries and use cases.

Challengers are well-positioned to succeed in this market. However, they have a somewhat limited
perspective on how the market will evolve, who the buyers are (and will be), what the use cases are,
and how users’ expectations will evolve. This results in their offerings being more narrowly focused
than those of Leaders. Their vision may be restricted by a lack of a coordinated strategy across
various products in their platform portfolio or by a functionally more limited platform roadmap.
Alternatively, they may fall short of the Leaders in terms of effective marketing, sales channels,
geographic presence, industry-specific content and innovation..

Visionaries
Visionaries demonstrate a strong understanding of emerging technology and business trends, or a
position well-aligned with current demand, but they may lack recognition or credibility beyond their
customer base or particular domain. They understand the specific requirements of this market and
are innovating by means of a combination of technologies, delivery models and go-to-market
strategies. Visionaries see their EiPaaS offering as a key element of a broader integration strategy,
and may, where applicable, combine software licensing, software subscriptions and as-a-service
subscriptions, with EiPaaS being one of many channels used for underlying integration capabilities.

Visionaries may have a background in traditional on-premises integration middleware; as such, they
have a good understanding of enterprise integration challenges. However, they may not have the
sales and marketing expertise required to sell beyond their traditional IT client base.

Visionaries may enter this market by acquiring another vendor, by significantly reengineering their
on-premises products for the cloud or, in some cases, by developing a new EiPaaS technology.

Niche Players
Niche Players typically specialize in a vertical, geographical or functional area, and therefore
address only a segment of the market. They may be startups or small companies just starting to
succeed, or vendors focused on a specific subset of use cases.

However, their technology is often excellent and their customers express a high degree of
satisfaction. Niche Players’ offerings can therefore often be the appropriate choice for user
organizations that, for example, require local presence and support, want a close relationship with a
provider, or seek a platform that focuses on specific requirements. Niche Players’ provision of these
requirements can often offset risks in other respects.

Niche Players potentially compete with companies from the domain-specific iPaaS market that are
targeting this sector. They are also more likely to be targets for acquisition, because they are often
specialized EiPaaS players, focused on a relatively narrow function or market segment, that could
easily complement a broader integration strategy and platform.

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 Context
The EiPaaS market is highly fragmented, fast-evolving and overcrowded, which makes choosing a
vendor difficult.

Vendors with leading market shares continue to extend the functional footprint of their EiPaaS
offerings, often merging them with their classic integration platform software technologies.
Accordingly, they go to market with a suite of capabilities packaged in multiple versions to target
different use cases, integration personas and market segments.

More and more organizations are adopting EiPaaS offerings as strategic alternatives to classic
integration platform software for a growing number of scenarios.

EiPaaS providers typically target application leaders and other buyers looking for a strategic
integration platform to use for multiple, often business-critical integration projects, using a range of
go-to-market approaches. As such, in a growing number of cases, organizations purchase an
EiPaaS to support an integration strategy modernization initiative, as a pivotal component of their
HIP strategy.

Given the market’s fragmentation, when selecting an EiPaaS vendor it is important to consider:

■ Whether the platform is for short-term tactical or long-term strategic use.

■ The type and number of endpoints to be connected: SaaS, packaged applications, internally
developed applications, mobile apps, social media, file systems, databases and so on.
■ Providers’ familiarity with, and track record of delivering to, the relevant industry.
■ The integration skills of the expected users of the platform.
■ The ability to federate the EiPaaS with the established on-premises integration platform,
whether in support of specific requirements or in the context of HIP initiatives.
■ SLAs and quality-of-service requirements.
■ Security and regulatory compliance needs.
■ The geographic location of the EiPaaS data centers and support centers.
■ The ability to deploy the EiPaaS platform in a hybrid mode, including multicloud options across
the EiPaaS public cloud and IaaS public clouds, as well as within the client’s data centers.
■ The availability and cost of iPaaS skills from the provider and external service providers.
■ The long-term cost expectations and available budget.

Gartner recommends starting the selection process after developing a thorough understanding of
your requirements and priorities. Be pragmatic and tactical, and evaluate domain-specific iPaaS
solutions, where appropriate, for quick wins. Expect disruption in the EiPaaS market as market
consolidation continues.

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 Market Overview
Gartner estimates that the iPaaS market approached $2.5 billion in revenue during 2019 and grew
by approximately 48%, compared with 2018. We estimate that the iPaaS market will reach over $5.6
billion in revenue by 2024 (see Forecast: Enterprise Infrastructure Software, Worldwide, 2018-2024,
2Q20 Update).

Organizations recognize that traditional integration approaches and on-premises integration

technologies cannot fully support the complexity and pervasiveness of integration, or the agility and
time to value, required to overcome the digital era’s challenges.

Vendors in the EiPaaS market include pure-play providers, established application, data and B2B
integration software vendors, and megavendors. These providers built their EiPaaS offerings in
different ways.

Buyers can procure many of today’s EiPaaS offerings as suites of capabilities, some in a single
package and some comprising individual subsuites. The different packaging targets different use
cases, different intended audiences and different target markets.

Even during the global recession caused by COVID-19, adoption of EiPaaS offerings continues,
although likely at a slower pace. There is emphasis on the need to automate processes, accelerate
digital transformation, respond to drastic business changes, and accelerate plans to adopt the
cloud in order to contain costs and increase flexibility. Providers will strive to further improve EiPaaS
developers’ productivity, reduce the time to value and shorten the learning curve to ease
deployments and expand their reach to potential buyers. Enhanced product development, with a
focus on the use of AI, such as ML and NLP, to assist development and operation, will enrich
packaged integration process portfolios, enable CI/CD and DevOps, and extend the range of
supported use cases (including in hybrid, multicloud scenarios).

Over time, application leaders will try hard to standardize on a single, strategic EiPaaS to minimize
complexity and keep costs under control. However, the fitness for purpose and high productivity of
lightweight iPaaS offerings may prove beneficial for LOBs and application teams working on
severely time- and budget-constrained projects, which could lead to further iPaaS proliferation.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

How Markets and Vendors Are Evaluated in Gartner Magic Quadrants

How to Deliver a Truly Hybrid Integration Platform in Steps

Market Guide for Application Integration Platforms

Create a Future-Proof Integration Strategy for Your ERP

Reshape the Data Design of Your APIs to Align With Your Integration Strategy

Page 30 of 34 Gartner, Inc. | G00397953

 Innovation Insight: Turbocharge Your API Platform With a Digital Integration Hub

Note 1 The Core Technology Functionality of iPaaS

Common iPaaS functions include:

■ Communication protocol connectors, such as FTP, HTTP, Advanced Message Queueing

Protocol (AMQP) and Applicability Statement 1 (AS1)/2/3/4.
■ Application connectors/adapters for SaaS and on-premises packaged applications.
■ Data formats, such as XML, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and Abstract Syntax Notation
One (ASN1).
■ Data standards, such as Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and
Transportation (EDIFACT), Health Level Seven (HL7) and SWIFT.
■ Data mapping and transformation.
■ Data quality.
■ Routing and orchestration.
■ Integration flow development and life cycle management tools.
■ Integration flow operational monitoring and management.
■ API management.
■ Support for various integration scenarios, such as application integration, data integration, B2B
ecosystem integration, process integration, IoT integration and RPA.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined
market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills
and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as
defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial

health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that
the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering
the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of
products.

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 Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the
structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation,
presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and

achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer
needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's
history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed
to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and
business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification
with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can
be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership,
word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable

clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways
customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary
tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups,
service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors
include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences,
programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate
effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs
and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest
degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or
enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated

throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising,
customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of
direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend
the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the
customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and

delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as
they map to current and future requirements.

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 Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business
proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and

offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical
markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources,

expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to
meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either
directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that
geography and market.

Gartner, Inc. | G00397953 Page 33 of 34

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Page 34 of 34 Gartner, Inc. | G00397953