We’re excited to announce that Workato has been positioned as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service for the fifth time in a row.
To us, the recognition is humbling, especially considering that we’ve been a Leader in the Magic Quadrant™ ever since our first recognition. None of this would be possible without the many customers, partners, and employees who have believed in us along this journey—our sincere thanks goes out to all of you!
We believe the evaluation of this year’s Magic Quadrant™ reflects pretty fundamental shifts in the iPaaS market over the past few years. What organizations now require from iPaaS platforms is far different from when the very first Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service was published in 2014.
So what’s driven this evolution in iPaaS? Here are the trends we’ve seen based on our interactions with customers and partners:
- Data, systems, and processes are all intertwined, so separating data integration from process automation is no longer an effective approach to support today’s business operations
- Integration and automation work is no longer reserved for a few key strategic initiatives in IT. It’s an everyday need within every business function and, therefore, integration and automation projects need to be accessible to a variety of stakeholders
- The use cases and requirements for iPaaS have expanded. As a result, the capabilities these platforms must provide within a single product, interface, and runtime have also broadened
- The potential business impact iPaaS platforms can have has grown significantly. Companies are seeing exploding demand to connect and automate processes across a growing number of foundational business systems for both day-to-day functions and strategic initiatives
Let’s explore each of these areas in more detail.
Treating integration and automation as one and the same
Integration and automation are intrinsically linked: as part of connecting data across different applications and databases, companies need to orchestrate workflows that work across these systems. The advantage of designing these processes at the API level (vs. the interface or screen level) is that they’re architected to be more reliable, scalable, and adaptable to changing business requirements.
It’s clear that the worlds of data integration and process automation are converging, and we see the increased focus on automation in this year’s Magic Quadrant as further proof of this evolution.
Lowering the barrier to entry for business stakeholders
When analyzing the volume of automations that different lines of business have built on our platform over the years, all of the departments we accounted for have at least doubled the number of automations they’ve implemented.
While these growth rates aren’t an exact representation of the iPaaS market as a whole, we believe they serve as a proof point that users across the organization want/need to build more automations within their respective line of business.
To support this requirement, a modern iPaaS must enable users outside of IT to contribute to this work in a meaningful way while being aligned to the broader governance policies typically established by IT. In addition, a modern iPaaS should empower these less technical teams to leverage their domain expertise for the business process and impacted stakeholders when building integrations and automations.
IT is still central and vital to this work. They’ll play a critical role in developing/governing the integrations and automations as functional stakeholders get ramped up. But eventually, the modern iPaaS should provide the functionality IT needs to manage operations at a higher level—whether that’s setting up governance policies, building and providing assets (e.g. automation templates), etc.
Related: 3 operating models for enterprise automation
Offering a broad set of capabilities in a single platform
As an organization’s processes mature, they’ll inevitably look to adopt new and more impactful approaches to integration and automation.
Here are just a few examples of how their evolving wants can align with what a modern iPaaS provides:
- Design automated processes that require human input into customized web apps or chatbots for Slack and MS Teams so that employees can access information with ease and take the appropriate set of actions quickly (through in-message buttons and popups, as shown below)
- Design data pipelines to feed a data warehouse or data lake that can trigger automated actions when specific thresholds are reached. For instance, once a client’s level of product usage exceeds a certain level (as measured in a product usage table in your data warehouse), that information gets synced to their Salesforce account in near real-time. This automation also notifies the appropriate rep in Slack or MS Teams to take an action based on the usage threshold reached
- Lower the barrier to API development, and publish and manage APIs via a low-code/no-code interface so that different processes or users can take advantage of APIs in the broader integration and automation work across the business
Aligning iPaaS to business impact
iPaaS solutions have, at least historically, been measured and evaluated by their technical capabilities, such as the number/depth of the connections the platform supports or its processing power. Although still critically important, organizations are focused on driving more tangible business results with their iPaaS.
Given the growing need for a faster, more scalable approach to integration and automation across businesses today, iPaaS’ potential impact is massive if implemented effectively. Key business drivers, such as improving operational efficiency or improving the customer/employee experience, can be attributed to how well your company does at tying together data, systems, and processes through iPaaS. Therefore, an iPaaS platform’s measurable value moves from technical attributes to top-line/bottom line revenue impact.
The days of relying on an iPaaS solely to connect one application to another are done and dusted. Instead, organizations are increasingly relying on their iPaaS platforms for more, which is making the technology more strategic and impactful to their overall business success.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a service, Keith Guttridge, Andrew Comes, Saikat Ray, 24 January 2023.
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