Real-Time Interaction Management Software

The software this Wave scores is built on a two-sided promise: contextually relevant experiences for the customer, and "mutual value realization" for the brand. The newest edition, The Forrester Wave: Real-Time Interaction Management Software, Q4 2025, scores seven vendors on twenty eight criteria, and one of them took twenty five of the maximum scores.

The report under the name: The Forrester Wave: Real-Time Interaction Management Software, Q4 2025

VP, principal analyst Rusty Warner announced the evaluation on November 18, 2025, with contributors Martin Gill, Emily Doherty, and Christine Turley. The Wave scores seven vendors: Adobe, Braze, HCLSoftware, Pegasystems, Salesforce, SAS, and Teradata.

The definition deserves its full length, because it is the buying criteria in one sentence: software that "determines and orchestrates contextually relevant experiences for mutual value realization at the appropriate moment in the customer lifecycle via preferred customer touchpoints." Every word is load-bearing. The moment. The lifecycle. The preferred touchpoint. And mutual value, the word that separates this category from spray-and-pray marketing automation.

Warner's market note is the honest caveat: an RTIMS is "an ecosystem of integrated capabilities rather than a single platform," and a separate Landscape, Q2 2025, profiles thirty vendors beyond the seven scored. The market is wider than the Wave, and the Wave says so.

The Leader with twenty five of twenty eight

Pegasystems took a Leader placement with the top scores in both Current Offering and Strategy, the highest possible scores in twenty five of twenty eight criteria, and the Customer Favorite designation.

Forrester's verdict sentence is the strongest in this entire batch of evaluations: "Pegasystems dominates the RTIMS market." The citation runs on Pega Customer Decision Hub, a "centralized RTIMS platform," with maximum scores in customer journey analytics, AI workbench and governance, predictive AI, generative AI, real-time decisioning, inbound and outbound digital orchestration, contact center orchestration, customer strategy optimization, and enterprise integration.

The buyer verdict: "the top choice for enterprises ready to supercharge their customer-obsessed growth engines with NBA and NBX decisioning capabilities." NBA and NBX are the category's native vocabulary, next best action and next best experience, and Pega's dominance is the claim that it owns the decisioning engine the whole category runs on.

The vocabulary deserves a definition, because the two acronyms are the market's two eras. Next best action is the classic discipline: given this customer, this moment, this context, what single action maximizes the business outcome. Next best experience is the newer one: what orchestrated sequence of actions across channels maximizes the customer outcome as well as the business one. The category moved from NBA to NBX, from optimizing the brand's next move to orchestrating the customer's next several moves, and the scorecard grades both.

The analytical powerhouse and the rest of the field

SAS took the second confirmed Leader placement, with its Customer Intelligence 360 platform described as "an analytical powerhouse for enterprises looking to underpin customer decision-making and orchestration with a robust data science foundation." Its maximum scores run through real-time customer understanding, identity resolution and privacy, digital intelligence, AI workbench and governance, predictive AI, real-time decisioning, digitally assisted orchestration, and business performance optimization.

The remaining five vendors, Adobe, Braze, HCLSoftware, Salesforce, and Teradata, are scored in the field but have not surfaced placements publicly. The seven-vendor field sits inside a thirty-vendor landscape, and the scorecard's own framing is that most enterprises do not need the podium, they need the capability that matches their decisioning maturity.

The adoption data Warner cites closes the context: financial services firms lead, using RTIMS for AI-enabled customer recognition, identity resolution, and real-time decision-making aligned with business logic. And the sharpest finding: "few organizations currently leverage RTIMS to its full potential," with successful implementations requiring years of enterprise commitment built on a foundational decisioning engine.

The financial services leadership is structural, not accidental. A bank has the data, the regulatory incentive to treat customers contextually, and the business case for the next best offer, which is why the category's reference base clusters there. And the few-organizations finding is the honest warning: the scorecard grades engines, and the value arrives only where the enterprise commits for years. Leading users report "sustainable profitability aligned with customer lifetime value" and credit the software with accelerating their AI readiness, which is the category's real pitch in one line.

The honest limits of the two-sided promise

The mutual-value definition cuts both ways, and the report's own adoption data is the limitation. Few organizations use the software to its full potential, which means the scorecard grades capability that most buyers will underuse. The tier column measures the engine. The value arrives only after years of commitment, and the scorecard cannot supply the years.

There is also the 2024 baseline. The prior edition, Q1 2024, published February 29, 2024, also named SAS a Leader, and the two-year cadence means the Q4 2025 edition is the market's state at the agentic moment, with AI workbench and governance criteria that did not exist in the earlier edition's weighting.

Three questions for the decisioning buyer

Which question is your business actually asking: what to show, or what to do next? The category's native vocabulary is next best action and next best experience. If your use case is inbound offer selection, the field's middle may serve. If it is cross-channel orchestration on a customer journey, the criteria that made the Leader are your shortlist.

What is your decisioning maturity, honestly? The report says most enterprises underuse the software. The vendor cannot fix the maturity gap, and the scorecard cannot measure yours. Buy the engine that matches your next two years, not the one that matches the Leader's.

Where does the model's governance live? AI workbench and governance is a scored criterion, and it is the part that protects you when the models drift. Ask for the governance dashboard on the vendor's own production deployments, and treat its absence as a red flag.

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

This pairs closely with Financial Services CRM, where a specialist platform from India outranked Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce in this category twice in a row, and the report's own framing says the market has forked between vertical depth and horizontal breadth.