Gartner defines the adaptive project management and reporting (APMR) market as technologies that can support multiple delivery models to optimize project management practices and complex resource management needs across an organization. These tools promote continuous collaboration and unification of diverse and distributed teams. To support accelerating rates of change and continuous value delivery, these tools adapt to changing customer needs and governance approaches across multiple organizational designs and operating models. They provide multiple execution approaches that are grounded in value-based decision making and the time-to-value perceptions of their customers. Organizations need tools to support the integration of traditional development practices alongside agile, adaptive and hybrid ways of working while driving high levels of productivity from contributors and team members. The dynamic and complex multiple organizational operating model design of all organizations makes the correct governance approach imperative, yet difficult to achieve. To drive organizationwide outcomes, APMR tools need to support adaptive decision making without incurring additional bureaucracy.
The application portfolio management (APM) discipline monitors the business, technical and cost fitness of the application portfolio. It uses factual information and analysis, allowing objective and transparent decisions. Its main objective is to identify, prioritize and propose opportunities to improve the portfolio. Opportunities include replacements, migration, modernization, consolidation and decommissioning. APM tools support the people, processes and information of the APM IT discipline to discover, monitor, analyze and visualize the fitness of the application portfolio and provide recommendations for improvement.
Gartner defines cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) for product-centric enterprises as a market for application technology that supports the automation of operational activities for the manufacturing, distribution, delivery and servicing of goods. Cloud ERP for product-centric enterprises is delivered under a SaaS license model (with frequent mandatory updates), where application support, infrastructure provisioning and management are the responsibility of the vendor.
Gartner defines the collaborative work management (CWM) market as the market for stand-alone software tools that provide task-driven workspaces to enable end users to plan, coordinate and automate their work. These tools provide an integrated assembly of user-friendly capabilities for work planning, in-context collaboration, content collaboration, workflow and automation, reporting, analysis and dashboarding, intelligent assistance, and use-case acceleration on a platform that handles data management and administrative operations. Tools are defined by their purpose (work planning and execution), target users and breadth of functionality.
Gartner defines DevOps platforms as those that provide fully integrated and orchestrated 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, including planning, creation, artifact management, security, quality engineering, change management, compliance, environment management, deployment and monitoring. DevOps platforms support team collaboration, consistency, tool simplification and measurement of software delivery metrics. They are delivered primarily as cloud-hosted services with some options for on-premises deployment. DevOps platforms simplify the creation, maintenance and management of the components required for the delivery of various types of modern software. Platforms create common workflows and data models, simplify user access, provide production-like development and test environments, and provide a consistent user experience (UX) to reduce cognitive load. They lead to improved visibility, auditability and traceability for the software delivery value stream. This end-to-end view encourages a systems-thinking mindset and accelerates feedback loops. Organizations use DevOps platforms to minimize tool friction resulting from complex toolchains, manual handoffs and lack of consistent visibility throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). This enables product teams to deliver faster customer value without compromising quality. The DevOps platforms market reflects the consolidation of technologies across development, security, infrastructure and operations to streamline software delivery.
Gartner defines enterprise agile planning (EAP) tools as products that enable organizations to scale their agile practices to support a holistic enterprise view. These tools act as a hub for defining, planning, managing and deploying work. They also serve as an information hub for the disparate islands of metrics from the full life cycle. Just as agile is an evolution of development methodologies, EAP tools are an evolution of project-/team-centric tools. They support a business-outcome-driven approach to managing the full life cycle of agile product delivery at scale.
Gartner defines the market for enterprise architecture (EA) tools as tools that allow users to capture interrelationships and interdependencies within and across an organization’s ecosystem of applications, capabilities, processes, operating models, roles, information and technologies. EA tools provide a central repository to capture data and metadata about artifacts that describe the enterprise. Users build models and viewpoints to represent the relationships between these artifacts, helping describe and shape the future of the enterprise. EA tools enable analysis of trends, disruptions, and other drivers of enterprise change to deliver realistic roadmaps and explore potential scenarios. EA tools provide a means to model the IT and business aspects of the enterprise, in support of business outcome delivery. Doing so requires the collaboration of multiple stakeholders across the organization, with each playing a different role at a different time. The models and methods used by the stakeholders will vary depending on their role, and must be integrated and connected to other models to be useful.
Finance refers to the products and services that support the planning, management, analysis, and optimization of financial operations across enterprises and financial institutions. This category includes markets that support core accounting, financial planning, treasury, tax, audit, compliance, investment management, and digital banking—enabling organizations to maintain financial integrity and ensure regulatory compliance.
Gartner defines financial planning software as the key tool that enables better decision making and resource allocation by supporting planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. It connects relevant operational and driver data to profit and loss, balance sheet and cash-flow financial statements. The software offers enhanced decision support and analytics that can be customized to unique planning requirements through data integration, data modeling, workflow and reporting capabilities. These capabilities all enhance a user’s ability to effectively manage the planning process and financial performance.
Innovation management tools market help organizations manage the flow of ideas from initial concept generation to final value realization or commercial exploitation. They support diverse methods to generate ideas, both internally or externally; to prioritize and select ideas; to act on selected ideas; to observe and measure activity and impact; and to operate innovation programs at scale. Product capabilities include trendspotting, crowdsourcing, brainstorming or hackathons; stage-gate automation for idea evaluation and selection; and ways to manage a portfolio of active ideas (including idea execution to bring ideas to realization via project or product management).
Gartner defines marketing work management (MWM) platforms as a self-service system of record for marketing projects and productivity. MWM platforms provide stakeholders a holistic view into past, current and planned work that enables management of marketing initiatives and related resources. MWM platforms can offer a range of capabilities such as intake management, resource allocation, project collaboration, workflow automation, template standardization and asset approval. Native or integrated tools may enable varying degrees of strategic and financial planning, budgeting, and talent management.
PPM software providers covered under this market definition aim to support the selection, planning and execution of a variety of different work packages or containers, including, but not limited to, traditional projects. They often fold in collaboration and communication capabilities and allow work teams and project offices to report, monitor and identify course correction in resource-intensive project and work environments. Providers included in this market offer these capabilities directly through their own products, but frequently recognize that specific integration points may also be needed to connect niche tools or data sources. The PPM capabilities identified as essential or critical include: • Project demand management • Project planning and management • Time management • Resource management • Resource capacity planning • Project portfolio management • Project collaboration • Program management • Reporting services • Security and user management • Integration • Usability
Gartner defines the strategic portfolio management (SPM) market as comprising both cloud-based and on-premises applications for enterprisewide strategic planning and execution, supporting advanced portfolio management. SPM offerings integrate multiple portfolios with interdependent structures, creating a dynamic model of the path to realize strategic outcomes. These products are ideally suited for organizations pursuing digital strategies, which demand extensive stakeholder collaboration to continually adapt to changing conditions. Organizations use SPM to align portfolios with strategy and apply value-based decision making for ongoing flexibility in the midst of progress, disruptions and opportunities. Digital strategies combine portfolios representing different contexts, such as business capabilities, investments, applications, services, assets, programs, products and projects. Strategists, business leaders, IT leaders and PMOs cooperatively align the utilization of these diverse portfolios to progressively achieve strategic objectives.
Value stream management platforms enable organizations to optimize end-to-end product delivery and improve business outcomes. VSMPs are tool-agnostic; they connect to existing tools and ingest data from all phases of software product delivery all the way from customer need to value delivery. They help software engineering leaders identify and quantify opportunities to improve software product performance by optimizing cost, operating models, technology and processes. VSMPs use AI-/machine learning (ML)-powered analytics and insights to surface constraints, detect bottlenecks and improve flow. This enables stakeholders to take actions that improve throughput and align to business priorities and objectives.