Gartner just recognized Workato as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaas) for the fourth year.
The integration market itself is barely recognizable from four years ago. The focus then was on connecting apps and data at a higher scale and in cloudier environments. Those remain important, but there have been several fundamental changes in the market since then.
A higher premium on speed, teamwork, and adaptability
“Digital transformation” has been a buzzword for years (decades ?), but progress was too slow. The pandemic busted this inertia, accelerating years of change in months. Integration had to become simpler, faster, and more adaptable. Customers like Grab and Toast were staring into the abyss at the start of the pandemic, and had to reinvent themselves almost overnight. Today, they have become unstoppable and filed for IPO or gone public.
The role of AI/ML in enterprises
It isn’t just about integrating the apps and keeping the lights on. Successful organizations are adopting a mindset of continuous learning and process improvement through machine learning and AI. To help with this, a Github-like community of recipes and machine learning powered workflows have been a core part of the platform from the beginning.
IT – Business alignment has become critical, not just nice to have
Without IT, businesses can’t scale their automations to reach KPI goals or remain secure. Without being aligned closely with business leaders, IT will not be as relevant. They need an integration platform that both can use together and where they can use a common language of work to collaborate.
Convergence of integration tools
Historically, companies had to deploy a variety of integration and automation tools from different categories to integrate at data, process, API, and UX levels. With the need to simplify and move faster, the integration and automation markets are converging. The Blue Prism – Tibco merger last week is the most recent example.
Data security & cloud
Data is at the foundation of integrations and workflows. To most companies four years ago, secure data meant on-premise. Cloud data security has advanced to the point where the same organizations are eager to get their data into Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, or BigQuery. This shift in thinking about data security has profound implications for integration platforms.
UX and emergence of enterprise chatbots
Inundated in apps and tech, employee and customer experience and productivity has become a central issue to companies. To address this, integration platforms must go beyond data plumbing and workflows to also enable unified and cohesive UX across all of these apps.
We architected Workato ground up for this kind of future.
We believe that we received this kind of recognition entirely because of the hard work of our team and the incredible support of our customers and partners.
Thank you!
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a service, Eric Thoo, Keith Guttridge et al, 29 September, 2021.
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