B2B gateway software is integration middleware that supports information exchange between your organization and its ecosystem trading partners, applications and endpoints. BGS consolidates and centralizes data and process integration and interoperability between a company's internal applications and external endpoints, such as business partners, SaaS or ecosystems. The BGS market is a composite market that includes pure-play BGS solutions and BGS that is embedded or combined with other IT solutions (for example, ESB suites that support BGS features as services connected to the ESB suite, integration brokerage services, e-invoicing software and networks, application platform suites, electronic data interchange [EDI] translators, and managed file transfer [MFT] technology).
Gartner defines integration platform as a service (iPaaS) as a vendor-managed cloud service that enables end users to implement integrations between a variety of applications, services and data sources, both internal and external to their organization. iPaaS enables end users of the platform to integrate a variety of internal and external applications, services and data sources for at least one of the three main uses of integration technology: Data consistency: The ability to monitor for or be notified by applications, services and data sources about changes, and to propagate those changes to the appropriate applications and data destinations (for example, “synchronize customer data” or “ingest into data lake”). Multistep process: The ability to implement multistep processes between applications, services and data sources (for example, to “onboard employee” or “process insurance claim”). Composite service: The ability to create composite services exposed as APIs or events and composed from existing applications, services and data sources (for example, to create a “credit check” service or to create a “generate fraud score” service). These integration processes, data pipelines, workflows, automations and composite services are most commonly created via intuitive low-code or no-code developer environments, though some vendors provide more-complex developer tooling.