DevOps Platforms

Forrester renamed this category before scoring it the second time, from Integrated Software Delivery Platforms to DevOps Platforms, and the evidence behind the rename is a keyword survey in which zero out of forty one vendor websites used the analyst's old name.

The evaluation is out, and has been for more than a year. The Forrester Wave: DevOps Platforms, Q2 2025 published in June 2025, and no newer edition has appeared.

The survey that settled the name

Senior analyst Andrew Cornwall announced the evaluation on June 11, 2025 with a blog post that is half announcement, half confession. The category had been known as Integrated Software Delivery Platforms, a name Cornwall admits he never liked. A LinkedIn poll and keyword research across forty one vendor websites settled it: twenty three used the word DevOps, fourteen used other terms, and zero, not one, used ISDP.

"ISDP is out, and DevOps platforms are in."

The name the market rejected was the analyst's own. The name it uses daily is the one that got printed on the scorecard. Zero out of forty one is not a result. It is a verdict.

The scorecard that is already out: The Forrester Wave: DevOps Platforms, Q2 2025

The evaluation scores eleven providers against twenty six criteria: Amazon Web Services, Atlassian, CircleCI, CloudBees, GitLab, Google Cloud, Harness, IBM, Microsoft, Octopus Deploy, and Red Hat.

Three vendors have publicly announced Leader placements, and the remaining eight placements have not surfaced publicly. This article names what is confirmed and does not assign tiers the public record does not support.

The report's own framing carries two market verdicts worth quoting exactly. First: "Despite claims that 'DevOps is dead,' the truth is that DevOps is everywhere." Second, and heavier: "Security is a mandatory part of DevOps." Security tooling was a gating requirement for inclusion. Platforms without built-in security were excluded from the field outright. Security stopped being a feature and became the door.

One Leader became three

The first edition of this market, The Forrester Wave: Integrated Software Delivery Platforms, Q2 2023, evaluated thirteen providers and named exactly one Leader: GitLab. Forrester's blog for that edition ran under the title "Say Goodbye To The DevOps Tax," and GitLab's scores were built on platform-incorporated security tools, test automation, roadmap, community, and pricing flexibility and transparency.

Two years later the podium holds three.

GitLab is still there, described as "the most all-in-one of the all-in-one solutions," suited to enterprises standardizing on a single purchase. Its maximum scores include project planning and alignment, build automation and CI, pipeline security, day-zero experience, AI infusion, and AI risk mitigation.

Harness took its first Leader placement on a different bet: modularity. Products sold separately on a common backbone service layer, with maximum scores in AI Infusion, Innovation, Vision, developer tooling, deployment automation, day-2 operations, and data, analytics, and reporting, plus above-average customer feedback.

Atlassian rounds out the three, with 5 of 5 scores in Vision, Innovation, and Roadmap, credited for unifying development and operations through Jira Service Management and for cloud platform consolidation.

Three Leaders, three answers to the same settled question. GitLab answers with breadth. Harness answers with the day-two layer. Atlassian answers with the management plane. The market got dense enough that all three answers fit on one podium.

The field that shrank

The 2023 field of thirteen included AWS, CircleCI, CloudBees, Flexagon, IBM, JFrog, Microsoft, OpenText, and VMware, with GitLab alone on top and CloudBees taking the highest Current Offering score as a Strong Performer.

The 2025 field of eleven is a different roster. Out went Flexagon, OpenText, JFrog, and VMware. In came Atlassian, Google Cloud, Harness, Octopus Deploy, and Red Hat. The criteria count held at twenty six while the field shrank by two, and the admission bar rose. The vendors that left are the vendors whose security story did not survive the gate.

That gate is the second finding of the edition. In 2023, GitLab won on having security inside the platform. In 2025, having security inside the platform is the entry requirement, not the differentiator. The market absorbed the lesson of its own scorecard in two years.

The syntax that already lost

The report's third verdict is the one vendors quote least: "GitHub Actions is becoming a de facto standard." Competitors are converging on GitHub Actions-style CI, sometimes nearly copy-paste compatible with a few extra YAML lines.

The detail worth noticing is that GitHub belongs to Microsoft, and Microsoft is scored in this very field. The market standardized on a syntax owned by one of the scored vendors, and the scorecard recorded it matter-of-factly. Standardizing on someone else's syntax is a strategic decision, not a migration detail.

For a buyer, the convergence cuts both ways. It makes switching cheaper in theory and more illusory in practice, because the YAML travels but the operations around it do not. The vendors know this. The scorecard's answer is to score the operations around the pipeline, and that is exactly the layer where the three Leaders split.

The advice buried in the blog post

Cornwall's announcement post ends with three pieces of buyer guidance that read like the outline of a second, angrier report.

Do not count features. Consider day-zero setup and day-two production operation, and interoperability with the tools you cannot retire. Ask for the second-week demo, not the first-day one.

Think beyond developers and operations. Testers, managers, and project managers all live on the platform. Score their workflows, because the scorecard does.

Go below the troposphere. Delivery is not only public cloud. Mainframes, app store publishing, and IoT devices are all delivery targets, and the platform you pick either reaches them or forces you to buy something else for the gap.

The same post warns that some vendors checked the AI checkbox rather than integrating it, forcing developers to copy and paste prompts, which adds toil instead of removing it. The AI criterion in this Wave separates the platforms that reduced work from the ones that moved it.

Three questions for the settled name

Whose syntax is your future pipeline written in? The market is converging on GitHub Actions. If your pipelines are standardizing anyway, make it a decision, not a drift.

What does day two look like, in a demo? Deployment automation, day-2 operations, and analytics decide the podium. Ask each vendor to demo the second week, with your tooling, not their greenfield.

Which personas are on the platform after year one? Testers, managers, and PMs will use it or work around it. Ask what their adoption looks like with numbers, because their workflows are scored too.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

The natural next comparison is Feature Management And Experimentation Solutions: forrester published exactly one scorecard for this category, crowned a single Leader for unifying feature flags and experimentation, and then retired the whole category eight months later because the two disciplines turned out to serve different buyers.

Buyers evaluating this should also weigh Continuous Automation And Testing Services, the closest coverage already published on this site: this is a category where the product is people, not software, and the newest scorecard is scoring how aggressively testing firms are automating the labor they used to sell by the hour.