.svg)
"Platforms are adapting to new customer requirements and emerging technologies, primarily AI agents. In five years time, the iPaaS market will look different — and may not even be called iPaaS anymore."
The publication of the “Forrester Wave: Integration Platform as a Service, 3Q 2025” at the end of August, which followed the “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integration as a Service” at the end of May, gave me the opportunity to ponder a bit about what’s going on in a market I’ve been looking after since inception.
I started tracking iPaaS almost 15 years ago and back then it was just a fledgling, and relatively tiny, segment in the much bigger integration software technology market, then dominated by the enterprise service bus (ESB) generation of technology. Fast forward to 2025: iPaaS is now the largest segment in this market (according to most analysts, expected to reach approximately $10 billion at the end of the year) and expected to grow by more than 50% over the next five years. Moreover, iPaaS is increasingly playing a pivotal role in both large and midsize organizations’ integration strategy. The key reasons for iPaaS current and future success include: affinity with cloud architectures, functional versatility, short learning curve and ability to support a wide range of personas (integration engineers, developers, application and data administrators, and business technologists).
A Dynamic Market
iPaaS providers are a myriad, but about a dozen vendors are fighting for leadership and significant market share. Mega-vendors, such as AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP, grab significant revenues in their captive business applications and technology markets. These providers typically have achieved this position in the market by leveraging the established business relationships with their customers, the commercial synergies with the other products in their portfolio, and usually a “good enough”, especially for their most loyal clients, iPaaS offering. However, most mega-vendors are not particularly effective at, nor interested in, proposing their iPaaS outside of their captive ecosystem. In this respect, pure-play iPaaS providers (for example, Boomi, Celigo, Jitterbit, Snaplogic and Workato) feel much more comfortable in playing in the open market because they have the technology capabilities (for example, hundreds, if not thousands, of adapters) and the commercial focus needed to compete across multivendors and multi-cloud ecosystems.
Simply put: for mega-vendors iPaaS is one of the dozens of markets they compete in; for pure-play providers, succeeding in the iPaaS market is the only way to survive and thrive. Consequently, although iPaaS provider acquisitions are commonplace, the market is still relatively fragmented and quite dynamic. The result is a market where both megavendors and pure-play providers have been coexisting and growing for many years. iPaaS appeals to both midsize and large organizations.
In the wake of midsize organizations’ SaaS and cloud architectures adoption, initially iPaaS providers focused on that segment of the market, which traditionally had not invested that much in integration technology because of the cost and complexity of the previous generation of technologies. iPaaS, instead, caters to these organizations’ needs in terms of short learning-curve, operational simplicity, average skills requirements, and affordable and predictable pricing.
iPaaS still maintains its dominance among these organizations. However, it is now a fully endorsed and widely adopted option by large organizations as well, with no significant distinction across geographies and vertical markets. Large organizations’ support stems from iPaaS rather dramatic technology evolution over the past five years:
- iPaaS can now support a much wider set of scenarios than the original SaaS integration requirement, including: hybrid integration, data integration, process automation, API publishing and B2B integration.
- A modern iPaaS can now address even the most demanding enterprise requirements in terms of availability, reliability, scalability, throughput, manageability, observability, security and governance.
- iPaaS pricing models have become more flexible and more suitable for large organizations’ needs for predictability.
In large organizations' strategy these modern, “iPaaS++” products do not play just the complementary role the original iPaaS used to. On the contrary: for a wider and wider set of organizations an “iPaaS++” is, by default, their strategic foundation, at times complemented by other products (for example, event brokers, B2B gateway software products or RPA tools) to support specific requirements.
