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Gartner 2022 - The growth opportunities of cloud integration services

By
Saad Merchant
Published on
October 3, 2022
Updated on
June 24, 2026
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Business innovation obstacles an iPaaS helps overcome

The popular information IT research and consulting firm Gartner presents a ‘Hype Cycle', as a tool to identify overlapping stages in any technology’s life cycle. The fifth stage of this Hype Cycle is called ‘Plateaus of Productivity’ and it is reached when a new technology is widely implemented, accepted, and understood.

When it comes to Cloud Integration Services, Gartner predicts that the Plateau of Productivity will fully hit within the next two years. This involves businesses integrating their business systems with cloud applications, software solutions, or data sources, to digitize their business processes. However, to create these integrations, modern businesses are now looking past traditional custom-code methods and are utilizing low-code integration platforms, also known as iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service).

“The increasing business appetite for technology self-service results in the rapid growth and increasing maturity of low-code platform technologies.”

Gartner, August 2022

Discover two common obstacles to business innovation that the Alumio iPaaS helps overcome by supporting businesses with their cloud integration services.

Balancing budget and process automation need

Nowadays, modern digital enterprises focus not only on improving customer acquisition and customer satisfaction but also on cost reductions. Amplified by the Corona crisis, more and more organizations find their department budgets cut. Moreover, up-and-coming hybrid workforce models are pushing businesses to facilitate the required technologies. Then there are business process automation technologies that organizations wish to use to increase overall productivity.

“The realities of a disrupted workplace, business model transformations, operating model changes and IT delivery model changes, all force fundamental shifts in the activities and responsibilities of the given role of a CIO.” (Gartner, August 30 2022)

The reality is that digital transformation and business process automation have become the new norm, and the business benefits they entail speak for themselves. However, many organizations and departments face shortened budgets, which is an obstacle modern digital enterprises need to overcome in order to add or integrate emerging technologies. As predicted by Gartner, the rise of automation and digital transformation tools is not stagnating, but rather rising.

Increased technological demands meet IT talent shortage

As more and more organizations find themselves on their journey to digital transformation, they discover the need to integrate cloud applications or SaaS solutions. This commonly requires integrating legacy applications and old-school ERPs to modern, cloud-based, customer-facing applications. However, the traditional way to integrate these applications and software solutions involves creating point-to-point custom code connections. Creating or managing these custom-coded connections requires highly specialized IT personnel. Thus, many digital enterprises find themselves in a need to bolster their IT capacity to reach their digital transformation goals. At the same time, a shortage of IT talents comes to light, making IT capacity management increasingly important.

“Twenty-eight percent of respondents cited IT talent shortage as a major challenge, inhibiting adoption among major technology domains such as platform services, security, digital workplace and IT automation.” (Gartner, March 2022)

Combining the obstacles of rising needs for new technology integrations with the decreased availability of IT personnel and cut budgets, modern digital enterprises are facing serious obstacles with no end in sight. This once again leads us to the iPaaS. As a self-service, cloud-based integration technology, the iPaaS allows organizations to connect SaaS enterprise systems with newer applications swiftly, while also empowering quick business process automation.

The iPaaS - a perfect fit for swiftly integrating multiple applications

As a low-code solution, the Alumio iPaaS connects two or more systems, software, or data sources rapidly. Thanks to its user-friendliness, the Alumio iPaaS can be operated by non-developers such as data experts and business users, and thus allows organizations to use their domestic IT resources optimally.

While other new IT initiatives take between 6 and 12 months to set up, the Alumio iPaaS is implemented in 1 to 6 weeks, depending on the complexity of the integration. Not only does that mean that integration projects can be implemented quicker than before, but it also means that little IT workforce is required to develop and govern these integrations. Thus, using the Alumio iPaaS helps businesses reduce hiring costs and optimize how they use existing IT resources.

“Organizations choose iPaaS to support rapid integration and automation of SaaS applications with other SaaS and on-premise applications and data sources. More recently organizations are increasingly replacing classic integration platforms, that are now considered too expensive and complex for modern integration delivery practices.”(Gartner, August 2022)

In addition, the Alumio iPaaS serves as a future-proof IT landscape, that accommodates both current and future integration needs. Unlike traditional integration solutions that involve custom-coding integrations, the Alumio iPaaS unlocks data silos and ensures unentangled, up 'n' running application connectivity. The platform also offers a wide selection of connector packages that are essentially templates of popular software integrations. Using these, businesses can configure working integrations even more rapidly and effortlessly.

This makes the iPaaS the perfect integration solution for modern, future-oriented enterprises. It offers the technological capabilities required for digital transformation and business process automation, empowers virtually limitless software integrations, requires less technically skilled staff to operate it, and by expediting integrations it helps businesses achieve faster time to market.

“By 2024, 40% of CIOs will fail to effectively evolve IT’s capability to deliver modern digital infrastructures, provide ecosystem tech governance, and support architecture-driven business outcomes. “ (Forbes)

Don’t allow for your business to become part of this statistic, book a demo of the Alumio iPaaS and experience first-hand how it helps make your software integrations simple.

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FAQ

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What does Gartner's Hype Cycle reveal about integration platform adoption?

Gartner's Hype Cycle describes five stages in a technology's lifecycle: Technology Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment, and Plateau of Productivity. Integration platforms as a service (iPaaS) have reached Gartner's Plateau of Productivity, meaning the technology is widely implemented, understood, and delivering consistent, realized value for organizations. This signals that iPaaS is no longer an emerging technology requiring pioneering conviction to adopt: it is proven infrastructure with a clear ROI model and a mature vendor ecosystem.

Integration Platform-ipaas-slider-right
What innovation obstacles does an iPaaS help businesses overcome?

An iPaaS helps businesses overcome innovation obstacles including: the inability to quickly connect new digital capabilities to existing systems (slowing time-to-market), the technical debt of accumulated custom integrations that consume IT capacity and resist change, the data silos that prevent AI, analytics, and personalization tools from working effectively, and the organizational friction between business teams who want to adopt new tools and IT teams who cannot build and maintain connections fast enough. Each of these obstacles is a form of integration constraint that a governed iPaaS backbone resolves structurally.

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How do cloud integration services create growth opportunities for businesses?

Cloud integration services create growth opportunities by making it faster and cheaper to connect new digital capabilities to the existing business landscape. A new AI personalization tool, a new marketplace channel, a new ERP module: each connects to the integration backbone rather than requiring a custom build from scratch. This speed and cost reduction turns integration from a constraint on digital investment to an enabler: organizations can test and adopt new capabilities more frequently, with shorter time-to-value, because the integration infrastructure they need is already in place.

Integration Platform-ipaas-slider-right
What does reaching the Plateau of Productivity mean for businesses evaluating iPaaS?

For businesses evaluating iPaaS, reaching the Plateau of Productivity means: the technology is proven at scale across many industries and use cases, the ROI model is understood and predictable (cost savings, speed improvements, error reduction), the vendor ecosystem is mature with certified implementation partners available, and the risk of adoption is lower than in earlier Hype Cycle stages. It also means that organizations still relying on custom code or point-to-point integrations are now measurably behind peers who have adopted iPaaS, particularly in speed of digital capability adoption and integration operational cost.

Integration Platform-ipaas-slider-right
How has the iPaaS market evolved since Gartner first recognized it?

The iPaaS market has evolved from a niche middleware category serving large enterprises to a mainstream integration approach adopted across mid-market and enterprise organizations in e-commerce, manufacturing, wholesale, and retail. The evolution has been driven by: the explosion of SaaS adoption (more systems to connect), the shift to cloud from on-premise (making cloud-native iPaaS the natural fit), the rise of composable commerce (increasing the integration surface area), and the dependency of AI tools on governed data flows (making integration governance a strategic priority rather than a technical concern). Alumio's growth tracks this market evolution directly.

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What guidance does Gartner's research provide for businesses investing in cloud integration services?

Gartner's research on cloud integration services consistently highlights the importance of: choosing platforms with broad connector coverage for the systems the organization actually runs (not just what is popular in analyst reports), prioritizing governance and monitoring capabilities over raw feature breadth, evaluating the vendor's ecosystem of implementation partners (which determines how quickly the platform delivers value in practice), and treating integration as a long-term infrastructure investment rather than a per-project tool selection. Organizations that follow this guidance build integration capabilities that compound in value over time rather than accumulating maintenance debt.

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