Integration Platform As A Service

Forrester renamed this category in 2025 by removing an s: Integration Platforms As A Service became Integration Platform As A Service. The edition under the singular name is out, published in Q3 2025, and the vendor that was a Strong Performer under the plural name is now a Leader under the singular one.

The report under the singular name: The Forrester Wave: Integration Platform As A Service, Q3 2025

The Q3 2025 Wave scores the ten most significant iPaaS vendors, and its own framing names the shift: "iPaaS is evolving. While integration remains at its core, AI and automation adjacencies are increasingly pushing iPaaS into business process orchestration."

The market trends in the report read like a category changing its job description. iPaaS is becoming central to AI strategies, powering event delivery, retrieval augmented generation, and agentic workflows. The market is moving toward what Forrester calls Adaptive Process Orchestration: AI agents, deterministic workflows, and human oversight combined. And integration is opening beyond central IT, which makes natural language assistance and easier build experiences newly important.

Principal analyst David Mooter, who covers this market, put the same point in a commentary after touring the vendor conferences: iPaaS is still an iPaaS, but not for long.

Three Leaders, three integration religions

IBM took a Leader placement and the top Current Offering score in the field, on the back of the webMethods acquisition. The citation is a breadth argument: API management, message brokers, B2B and EDI, managed file transfer, partner management, AI-driven automation through watsonx, and simple pricing metered by transaction volume.

Boomi took a Leader placement with the top Strategy score, the highest possible scores in ten criteria, and the only 5 of 5 in pricing flexibility and transparency among the Leaders. Forrester's verdict: "Boomi is a great choice for customers who need a well-rounded iPaaS for broad integration use cases and who see integration as foundational to implementing their AI and automation strategy." One partner quote in the report, from a global systems integrator, called Boomi "the best iPaaS vendor it works with."

Workato completed the three with maximum scores in Vision, Innovation, Roadmap, Adoption, and six other criteria, plus a halo for above-average customer feedback. The citation is the agentic argument: "top-notch tools to create and publish AI agents," AI that suggests workflow improvements for cost, security, and design quality, and early Model Context Protocol support.

IBM sells the widest integration estate. Boomi sells the best-rounded platform with the cleanest pricing. Workato sells the agentic future. The scorecard put all three on the same rung because the market genuinely needs all three.

The old plural edition

The previous edition, The Forrester Wave: Integration Platforms As A Service, Q3 2023, ran under the plural name, and Boomi sat among the Strong Performers with the highest possible scores in wizard-driven integration, vision, roadmap, partner ecosystem, and pricing flexibility and transparency.

Strong Performer in 2023, Leader in 2025, on substantially the same argument: ease of building, pricing transparency, and a partner ecosystem. The promotion is the market's own judgment on which argument won. When integration became the substrate for AI, the vendors that made integration easy for non-specialists climbed, and the rename simply recorded the market's center of gravity.

What the s did and did not change

The dropped letter is cosmetic. What changed underneath is not. Between the plural edition and the singular one, the category's center moved from connecting systems to orchestrating work.

The 2025 report's own language makes the distance explicit. iPaaS now powers retrieval augmented generation and agentic workflows. Vendors ship tools to build, test, and govern AI agents. MCP support is a scored consideration. SnapLogic, in the field, markets itself as an agentic integration company.

MCP support is the tell. A protocol for connecting models to tools was barely a year old when this edition scored it, and its presence in the criteria is the category saying the agent layer is now part of the integration layer's job. Vendors that treated MCP as a roadmap item were scored accordingly.

For a buyer, the practical meaning is that the old question, which system talks to which system, now has a second question attached: which agent decides what happens next, and who governs it. The scorecard grades both.

The honest limits of the record

Three Leader placements and one field mention are publicly confirmed. The remaining vendors in the ten-vendor field have not surfaced placements, and the report's full tier table sits behind the vendor announcements.

There is also a definitional drift the record cannot settle. As iPaaS absorbs orchestration and agents, it overlaps the platforms that already claim those markets, and the same purchase can now be argued into three different categories depending on who is selling. The scorecard is current. The category boundary is not settled. None of that makes the tier table wrong. It makes it a snapshot of a boundary mid-motion.

Three questions for the orchestration buyer

Are you buying integration or orchestration? If your use case is system-to-system, the breadth argument wins. If it is agents deciding across systems, the vision argument wins. Name the job before you weight the tier.

What does the pricing sheet look like at your volume? Only one Leader took the maximum score in pricing flexibility and transparency. Ask every shortlisted vendor for the transaction-volume math on your integration patterns, because the scorecard cannot price your workloads.

What happens when the AI agents misbehave? Agentic workflows need governance the deterministic era never had. Ask for the agent governance framework: testing, rollback, human oversight points, and what happens when an agent fails mid-process.

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

Worth reading alongside Integration Platforms As A Service: the Leader that topped this category's final scorecard under its old name sold its core product to a competitor within months of publication, so the vendor that earned the top score is not the company that owns the technology anymore.