A break-out year for Workato: Biggest move in 4 years as a Gartner Leader

On September 30, Gartner released the latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service. Workato has been part of this MQ since 2018 and a Leader in all 4 years. We are honored to be recognized again, as this adds yet another great milestone in a break-out year for Workato.

It was big news in 2018 when Workato entered as a Leader. According to a Gartner analyst, entering as a Leader had not happened in any tech platform MQ for 20 years. Gartner was early to spot Workato’s potential as a modern integration and automation platform. 4 years later, it is now clear that Gartner was a thought leader long before other vendors understood what was happening to them.

This year, Workato has made another statement, registering its biggest year to year upward movement yet. Several vendors couldn’t keep up with the market’s immense growth, and dropped out of the Leader’s quadrant. Others at the top have uncertainty ahead after being acquired by private equity. At the same time, Workato improved significantly both in its ability to execute as well as its completeness of vision and ended up as the clear number 3; closer than anyone has ever come to the top 2.?

Much of this is due to the fact that, according to Gartner: “interest in Workato from Gartner clients has significantly increased over the past year, bringing its mind share in line with other major brands in the Leaders’ quadrant”.

Over the past 4 years, Workato has experienced unprecedented growth in mindshare, and caught up to the top leaders in the space. At Workato, we’ve seen the signs in the form of awards (such as the Cloud 100) and growth. In May, 12,000 people participated in Workato’s recent Automate conference. Our annual Partner summit attracted 1,200 people, and we doubled our employee base within the last 6 months.

What’s underlying the success

Workato’s growth is more than analyst rankings and awards. It’s grounded in solid fundamentals.

Core to this movement is the response of our customers. Workato’s ratings on sites like Gartner Peer Reviews and G2 showcase many happy and passionate customers. That’s why Workato was crowned as the only customer satisfaction Leader in North America for 2021 in the Gartner “Voice of the Customer” report. Gartner states that "the majority of Workato customers are exceptionally happy."

Such a result can only be achieved with a top product experience as well as a top customer support experience, as argued vehemently by both our consultants and customers. For us at Workato, it was always about creating a much better experience for builders. The market is now validating what we set out to accomplish.

Success isn’t limited to North America. Workato has internationalized early and is seeing significant revenue growth globally. Earlier this year, Workato launched a datacenter in Frankfurt, Germany and will be rolling out a datacenter in APAC shortly. We’re further accelerating this international growth with key hires from market leading companies.

What we’ve seen over the last 18 months is an especially impressive growth rate with large enterprises around the world implementing major projects with Workato. Companies are using Workato for a broad set of use cases as highlighted in the 2021 Workato Automation Index. Workato is being used for large, mission critical projects such as Enterprise Data Hubs. Large scale successes such as at TFG, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn Cargo, uses Workato for its enterprise wide automation and transformation.

Making the 2013 vision become a reality

Back in 2013 when we founded Workato, we set out to change what we saw as major flaws that held back the integration market. Back then, integration had a myopic definition of moving data. Integration was only for highly technical experts and remained bottlenecked. Process experts and integration specialists couldn’t collaborate. We set out to change that and unlock the under-realized potential of integration and automation.

8 years later, both Gartner and the market recognize these earlier flaws and rewards Workato for advancing the space. In 2021, you cannot be a strong iPaaS Leader without having strong citizen developer capabilities. You cannot keep up with the breath-taking speed of the iPaaS market if you fail to recognize yesterday’s flaws. Workato’s strong customer satisfaction and hence strong MQ Leadership position are testament that customers are no longer satisfied with the old, over-complex platforms of the past. IT organizations today are reaching out to collaborate with their business counterparts. So, they’re looking for better alternatives and finding them in Workato.?

After 18 months of a pandemic that has accelerated digital transformations and the movement to cloud and SaaS, Workato’s serverless, cloud-native architecture doesn’t look like the “odd ball” anymore, but like the oasis destination everyone wants to get to. If a growing number of large Enterprises put their data into Snowflake in the cloud, why would they use an integration and automation platform that runs behind the firewall??

Integration isn’t a means to an end; automating business processes that connect to existing system and data is. Workato is best positioned to provide the integration-led Enterprise Automation platform of the future.

Net, net, we’ve experienced a tremendous acceleration of market changes that favor a platform like Workato among traditional iPaaS vendors. Workato’s position on the 2021 Gartner EiPaaS MQ is a reflection of this undeniable change in the market, which the Workato founding team anticipated back in 2013.

This is just the very beginning

We’re incredibly proud of Workato’s excellent Leadership position on the 2021 Gartner EiPaaS MQ and thankful to Gartner for their confidence in Workato since 2018. But we aren’t stopping there. Workato stands for “Work Automation.” We never set out to only build another iPaaS platform. Fundamentally, we believe in the convergence of integration and automation. Automation needs integration capabilities.?

Let’s briefly step away from the iPaaS space: Did you notice that 2021 is also the year in which Workato, for the first time, is also mentioned in the Gartner MQ for Robotic Process Automation? Gartner states that “Workato’s RPA strategy is to deliver end-to-end automation with an orchestration layer powered by its core iPaaS platform.” Big changes are afoot in our industry.

The iPaaS market is very fast growing. Workato is a clear modern iPaaS Leader. The RPA market is equally fast growing. Beyond iPaaS, Workato is an important part of Enterprise Automation frameworks. Workato belongs into what Gartner calls “Hyperautomation”, Forrester calls “Automation Fabric” and HFS Research calls “One Office”. Workato has also been named an important part of what Cognizant just announced as their all-encompassing “Neuro” Automation framework.?

iPaaS Leadership is really just the beginning. Workato’s market, Enterprise Automation, is much bigger. It’s exciting to watch Workato remain the thought leader for where the journey is going, which is the convergence of integration and automation, the two fastest growing markets in IT.

What do you think? Please comment below and let us know.?