Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Application Integration: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research. Data-driven enterprises rely on a complex web of applications to operate efficiently. Individually, these applications serve a specific purpose—such as human capital management, supply chain management and enterprise resource planning—but these functions do not operate independently. To operate efficiently, enterprises need to ensure that their chosen applications are interoperable. ISG Research defines Application Integration as the enablement and management of direct communication between applications, supporting the fulfilment of business processes and workflows that rely on multiple applications operating in concert. While application integration has traditionally relied on point-to-point integration between individual applications, modern application integration is increasingly dependent on application programming interfaces and API management. Although standalone application integration and API management tools are available, most application integration and API management vendors have adopted a cloud-based integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) approach to delivering a combination of application integration, API management and data integration. By adopting managed iPaaS rather than developing and managing their own integrations, enterprises can reduce the complexity and cost of integration initiatives. Cloud-based iPaaS offerings also facilitate the integration of applications regardless of their deployment location, enabling enterprises to integrate applications running in the public cloud, private cloud and on-premises from a single location, avoiding the need to migrate workloads until they are ready to do so. Application integration relies on several core concepts. The first is connectivity between applications. While this would historically have been performed through complex coding, today application software vendors provide APIs to facilitate integration between applications. APIs provide a set of functions and procedures that define the interaction between applications, providing consistency and predictability and lowering the cost and complexity of creating and maintaining integrations. In addition to taking advantage of these APIs an enterprise application integration strategy will rely on API management functionality that enables the enterprise to discover, manage, secure, monitor and govern APIs, along with an environment for the development of APIs and API gateway functionality to streamline API-based communication between multiple applications. Communication between applications using APIs is driven by events that trigger actions. As such it is critical that application integration occurs in real-time to ensure that integrations occur at the speed of business events and facilitate responsiveness to evolving business requirements. By 2026, more than three-quarters of enterprises will rely on information architectures enabled by API-led application integration to support operational efficiency and real-time responsiveness. Other key capabilities delivered by application integration products include functionality to configure connections between applications, business process development, testing and automation, and an environment for developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring and managing integration processes. Application integration products are rapidly being transformed by artificial intelligence functionality that enables enterprises to automate time-consuming and repeatable application integration tasks. Based on a corpus of existing application integration projects and best practices, GenAI can be used to automate the development of integration processes using natural language prompts, provide automated suggestions to improve integration process development and automatically generate documentation of integration processes. Other potential use-cases for AI-driven integration include the automatic classification and tracking of sensitive data, automated endpoint discovery and configuration, and integration process debugging. Since many application integration providers have adopted the iPaaS approach to delivering a combination of application integration, API management and data integration, there is significant overlap between application integration and data integration software providers. In fact, all software providers included in the Application Integration Buyers Guide also provide data integration capabilities. However, not all data integration providers support application integration, and application and data integration continue to have distinct functional requirements. Specifically, application integration facilitates direct integration between enterprise applications at a functional level in order to fulfil an operational business objective. In comparison, data integration products enable enterprises to extract data from applications, databases and other sources and combine it for analysis in a data warehouse or data lakehouse with the intention of generating business insights. To provide an example, the fulfilment of orders at an enterprise operating a just-in-time manufacturing approach will rely on business processes that require real-time integration between resource planning, supply chain and customer relationship applications. This is the realm of application integration. The same organization might seek to combine historical data from the resource planning, supply chain and customer relationship applications to track performance over time using analytics software with a view to identify potential opportunities for improving efficiencies. This is the realm of data integration. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Application Integration evaluates products based on key capabilities including application integration process development, application integration process deployment and application integration process management. To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include real-time application integration, B2B integration and API management, and were also evaluated for the use of AI to automate and enhance application integration and API management. Our assessment also considered whether the functionality in question was available from a software provider in a single offering or as a suite of products or cloud services. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of application integration as we define it: Adeptia, AWS, Boomi, Celigo, Cleo, Cloud Software Group, Frends, Google Cloud, Huawei Cloud, IBM, Informatica, Jitterbit, Microsoft, Oracle, Qlik, Safe Software, Salesforce, SAP, SnapLogic, Solace, Tray.ai and Workato. This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of application integration software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool. We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating application integration offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI. The Buyers Guide for Application Integration in 2025 finds Oracle first on the list, followed by Informatica and SAP. Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader. The Leaders in Product Experience are: SAP. Oracle. Informatica. The Leaders in Customer Experience are: Informatica. Oracle. Boomi. Solace. The Leaders across any of the seven categories are: Informatica and Oracle, which have achieved this rating in five of the seven categories. Boomi, Google, Cloud, SAP and SnapLogic in two categories. AWS, Microsoft and Solace in one category. The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating. Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle application integration, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another. ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our application integration blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects. You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.

ISG Buyers Guide for Application Integration in 2025 Classifies and Rates Software Providers

ISG Buyers Guide for Application Integration Classifies and Rates Software Providers

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