Gartner defines the application programming interface (API) management market as the market for software to manage, govern and secure APIs. Organizations use APIs to modernize their architectures; APIs provide access to systems, services, partners and data services. API management software enables organizations to plan, deploy, secure, operate, version control and retire APIs, regardless of their size, region or industry.
Gartner defines access management (AM) as platforms that include an identity provider (IdP) and establish, manage and enforce runtime access controls to at least cloud, modern standards-based web and classic web applications. AM’s purpose is to enable single sign-on (SSO) access for people (workforce, consumer and other users) and machines into protected applications in a streamlined and consistent way that enhances user experience. AM is also responsible for providing security controls to protect the user session in runtime, enforcing authentication (with multifactor authentication [MFA]) and authorization using adaptive access. Lastly, AM can provide identity context for other cybersecurity tools to enable identity-first security.
Reviews for 'Application Development, Integration and Management - Others'
Application platforms provide runtime environments for application logic. They manage the life cycle of an application or application component, and ensure the availability, reliability, scalability, security and monitoring of application logic. They typically support distributed application deployments across multiple nodes. Some also support cloud-style operations (elasticity, multitenancy and self-service).
Gartner defines business process automation (BPA) tools as software that automates business processes by enabling orchestration and choreography of diverse sets of actors (humans, systems and bots) involved in the execution of the process. BPA tools provide an environment for developing and running applications that incorporate process models (and optionally other business, decision and data models) enabling digitization of business operations
Gartner defines business processes as the coordination of the behavior of people, systems and things to produce specific business outcomes. 'Things' in this context refers to devices that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT). A BPM platform minimally includes: a graphical business process and/or rule modeling capability, a process registry/repository to handle the modeling metadata, a process execution engine and a state management engine or rule engine (or both). The three types of BPM platforms — basic BPM platforms, business process management suites (BPMSs), and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMSs) — can help solution architects and business outcome owners accelerate application development, transform business processes, and digitalize business processes to exploit business moments by providing capabilities that manage different aspects of the business process life cycle.
Cloud management tooling enables organizations to manage hybrid and multicloud (that is, on-premises, public cloud and edge) services and resources. This includes providing governance, life cycle management, brokering and automation for managed cloud infrastructure resources across multiple functional areas. The tooling can be procured and operated by central IT organizations, such as I&O, cloud center of excellence (CCOE) and platform engineering/operations, or within specific lines of business. It can be deployed on-premises, in a customer’s public cloud account or purchased as a SaaS.
Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) are a unified and tightly integrated set of security and compliance capabilities, designed to protect cloud-native infrastructure and applications. CNAPPs incorporate an integrated set of proactive and reactive security capabilities, including artifact scanning, security guardrails, configuration and compliance management, risk detection and prioritization, and behavioral analytics, providing visibility, governance and control from code creation to production runtime. CNAPP solutions use a combination of API integrations with leading cloud platform providers, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline integrations, and agent and agentless workload integration to offer combined development and runtime security coverage.
Gartner defines container management as offerings that enable the deployment and operation of containerized workloads. Delivery methods include stand-alone software or as a service. Delivery methods include cloud, managed service and software for containers running on-premises, in the public cloud and/or at the edge. Container management automates the provisioning, operation and life cycle management of containerized workloads at scale. Centralized governance and security policies are used to manage container workloads and associated resources. Container management supports the requirements of modern applications (also refactoring legacy applications), including platform engineering, cloud management and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Benefits include improved agility, elasticity and access to innovation.
Continuous configuration automation (CCA) tools enable the description of configuration states, customization of settings, software binaries deployment, and configuration state reporting. These tools are a programmable framework on which configuration and provisioning tasks can be codified, versioned and managed like any other piece of application code — frequently known as 'infrastructure as code.' Many of the tools in the market provide a repository to store and manage configuration content but can be integrated with or use (code) revision control systems in use by application development teams. System administrators and application developers use CCA tools to programmatically manage the configurations of applications, servers, middleware, databases and other IT infrastructure for both on-premises and cloud data centre environments. Most CCA tools have both an open-source and commercial offering.
Data virtualization technology is based on the execution of distributed data management processing, primarily for queries, against multiple heterogeneous data sources, and federation of query results into virtual views. This is followed by the consumption of these virtual views by applications, query/reporting tools, message-oriented middleware or other data management infrastructure components. Data virtualization can be used to create virtualized and integrated views of data in-memory, rather than executing data movement and physically storing integrated views in a target data structure. It provides a layer of abstraction above the physical implementation of data, to simplify querying logic.
Gartner defines DevOps platforms as those that provide fully integrated capabilities to enable continuous delivery of software using Agile and DevOps practices. The capabilities span the development and delivery life cycle built around the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and include aspects such as versioning, testing, security, documentation and compliance. DevOps platforms support team collaboration, consistency, tool simplification and measurement of software delivery metrics. DevOps platforms simplify the creation, maintenance and management of the components required for the delivery of modern software applications. Platforms create common workflows and data models, simplify user access, and provide a consistent user experience (UX) to reduce cognitive load. They lead to improved visibility, auditability and traceability into the software development value stream. This end-to-end view encourages a systems-thinking mindset and accelerates feedback loops.
A digital integration hub (DIH) is an architectural pattern that centralizes data from various sources to provide a scalable, and real-time layer for modern digital applications, especially beneficial for enterprises looking to transform to digitized sales processes. It aggregates data from multiple systems of record into a low-latency, high-performance data store (the data management layer) which is then accessed by sales force automation (SFA), sales enablement and other tools via APIs or events. It also provides a central layer of abstraction that decouples applications from underlying systems, making it easier to integrate and manage new data sources and applications without disrupting existing systems. DIH provides sales teams with rich and responsive access to massive data sources, limits the fees paid to API providers and helps enable 24/7 operations enhancing customer experience through self service, digital commerce and loyalty.
Gartner defines file and object storage platforms as software and/or hardware platforms that offer object and distributed file system technologies for storing and managing unstructured data over NFS, SMB and Amazon S3 access protocols. File and object storage platforms store, secure, protect and scale an organization’s unstructured data with access over the network using protocols such as NFS, SMB and Amazon S3. Use cases include analytics, workload consolidation, backup and archiving, hybrid cloud, object-native applications, cloud IT operations, and high-performance files.
Reviews for 'Enterprise Networking and Communications - Others'
The market for ESP platforms consists of software subsystems that perform real-time computation on streaming event data. They execute calculations on unbounded input data continuously as it arrives, enabling immediate responses to current situations and/or storing results in files, object stores or other databases for later use. Examples of input data include clickstreams; copies of business transactions or database updates; social media posts; market data feeds; images; and sensor data from physical assets, such as mobile devices, machines and vehicles.
Full-stack HCI software provides a complete software solution that includes virtualized compute, storage and networking from a single instantiation designed to run on-premises or in a colocation environment. This market consists of those vendors that develop and sell hyperconverged infrastructure software that comprises the vendor’s own server virtualization, software-defined storage and network management tools. The full-stack software solution may also be integrated with a hardware stack as a complete offering spanning both software and hardware. In the last year, the full-stack HCI market has been heavily influenced by the positioning of storage virtualization and private cloud infrastructure looking to revirtualize compute, as well as considering alternatives to incumbent vendors.
Reviews for 'IT Infrastructure and Operations Management - Others'
IMDGs provide a lightweight, distributed, scale-out in-memory object store — the data grid. Multiple applications can concurrently perform transactional and/or analytical operations in the low-latency data grid, thus minimizing access to high-latency, hard-disk-drive-based or solid-state-drive-based data storage. IMDGs maintain data grid durability across physical or virtual servers via replication, partitioning and on-disk persistence. Objects in the data grid are uniquely identified through a primary key, but can also be retrieved via other attributes. The most typical use of IMDGs is for web-scale transaction processing applications. However, adoption for analytics, often in combination with Apache Spark and Hadoop or stream analytics platforms, is growing fast — for example, for fraud detection, risk management, operation monitoring, dynamic pricing and real-time recommendation management.
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.
Mobile back-end services deliver capabilities to mobile apps via APIs and/or software development kits (SDKs) that can be incorporated into mobile apps, and, increasingly, web apps and other digital channels. MBSs are commonly cloud-hosted services, but they can also be deployed in a virtual private cloud or even on-premises. The services are delivered as middleware between the client resident mobile apps and the enterprise systems of record, whether on-premises or in the cloud, along with any public or third-party data sources. In addition, many MBS providers also offer hosted databases for both structured and unstructured data. These hosted solutions can be independent of back-end data repositories, or they can be a buffer for the systems of record and provide a cached data source to isolate back ends from high transaction rates, which are often seen in conjunction with mobile apps.
Network automation platforms are products that automate and orchestrate multiple vendors’ network functionality. These platforms support a broad range of capabilities including provisioning, deprovisioning, orchestration, troubleshooting, operations, workflow, configuration management, event-driven automation, validation and reporting. These platforms are well-suited to add value on top of existing point network automation tools by orchestrating end-to-end network workflows across existing automation tools. Network automation platforms interact directly with network devices, other automation and orchestration tools, network management systems/controllers, and/or network services. These platforms increase agility and efficiency of network infrastructure while lowering costs, reducing the amount of manual human errors, and improving compliance with required rules, regulations and laws.
Reviews for 'Office Productivity Solutions - Others'
Reviews for 'Security Solutions - Others'
Server virtualization includes a range of technologies that abstract an underlying infrastructure layer (networking, storage and compute [including memory]). In doing so, it improves hardware utilization, workload portability, automation and availability. Server virtualization is most often associated with hypervisor-based server workloads running in data center environments on industry-standard servers. In reality, server virtualization incorporates multiple technologies, spans locations from public cloud to edge, and supports initiatives for both cloud-native transformation and infrastructure modernization. It includes hardware-, cloud- and software-based technologies.
Gartner defines the service mesh market as the market for distributed computing middleware that enables, secures and optimizes communications between services running primarily in container management systems. A service mesh provides lightweight mediation, dynamic service discovery, request routing, observability, traceability and communication security. The service mesh is a technology that provides software infrastructure for communications between distributed application components deployed mainly in container management systems such as Kubernetes. This type of middleware helps manage and monitor service-to-service (east-west) communications, especially among microservices within an application domain. It also provides visibility into service interactions, enabling proactive operations and faster diagnostics. It automates complex communication concerns, thereby improving security, developer productivity and ensuring that standards and policies are enforced consistently across applications.