Beyond the dot: A strategist’s guide to the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP

Each year, the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) becomes a focal point of enterprise IT strategy. It’s widely shared, often cited and used as a north star for vendor selection and investment decisions. For good reason: it offers a concise, research-backed view of how the market is evolving and which vendors are leading that evolution. But its real value is unlocked only when viewed with strategic discipline.

In my view, the Magic Quadrant™ isn’t a scoreboard. It’s a strategic map that reflects thousands of product decisions, customer outcomes and architectural bets. Reading it strategically can help you make smarter investments in automation, extensibility and long-term innovation.

This year’s report reinforces something we’ve known for some time: not all Leaders are interchangeable. The quadrant tells you where vendors are positioned. Interpreting why they are there — and how that aligns with your own transformation priorities — is where the real insight lies.

Two axes, one strategy lens

The two dimensions Gartner evaluates — Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision — each reveal a different layer of vendor maturity. Together, they create a framework for interpreting platform relevance not just in the present, but across the lifecycle of enterprise automation strategy.

Ability to Execute: A test of operational resilience

I believe high placement here reflects sustained operational performance under enterprise conditions.

Leaders on this axis tend to demonstrate:

• Scalable performance across hybrid and multi-cloud systems
• Deep integrations with complex applications like SAP, mainframe and proprietary tools
• Operational simplicity that reduces total cost of ownership, not just task count
• Clear expansion momentum across customer accounts

As Gartner notes, Leaders “execute strongly at scale and offer deep capabilities across a breadth of use cases.”

Execution strength is, essentially, a measure of enterprise trust. It answers the questions: Can this vendor reliably orchestrate critical business processes at scale? 

Completeness of Vision: A proxy for architectural longevity

A forward-leaning position on the Vision axis, in my opinion, speaks to how well a provider anticipates market direction and whether its platform investments are aligned with that trajectory.

Strong positioning here suggests:

• Future-ready architecture — cloud-native, API-first, event-driven by design
• Flexible, extensible capabilities that allow teams to adapt without vendor lock-in
• Alignment with ecosystem shifts, including AI, data fabric and digital ops strategies
• Strategic investment discipline, not reactive product expansion

Vision matters because today’s innovation is tomorrow’s technical debt. A platform that lacks architectural foresight may soon be outpaced by your organization’s needs.

Interpreting quadrant dynamics

In my experience, reading quadrant by quadrant makes it easier to identify tradeoffs and risks. Here’s the breakdown of each quadrant position according to Gartner methodology — and my interpretation of these positions.

Extract maximum value by connecting quadrant insights to tangible outcomes: reduced cycle time, improved SLA performance or lower integration overhead, for example. Ask vendors to demonstrate how their execution and vision translate into business impact, not just platform metrics. By tying evaluation to outcomes, you transform an analyst framework into an instrument for performance accountability.

SOAP Leaders today

Leaders who share space in the top right quadrant may take fundamentally different approaches to orchestration, extensibility and AI integration. I feel a strong Leader in 2025 is defined not only by breadth of capability but by the ability to remain competitive through:

• AI-driven operations
• Composable, event-driven architectures
• Autonomous remediation and continuous optimization 

The most important question isn’t “Who leads today?” but “Who is building for what’s next?”

Enduring leadership depends on both continuous architectural evolution and current market momentum.

How to use the Magic Quadrant™ in your vendor evaluation

Position within the Leaders quadrant should not be viewed as a stamp of parity. Vendors may share a quadrant, but not a philosophy, architecture or roadmap. 

The most strategic organizations treat the Magic Quadrant™ not just as validation, but as an input in a broader due diligence process. Map vendor placement to your operating model maturity to turn the quadrant from a static chart into a living framework for modernization. Over time, this mindset shifts the focus from comparing vendors to clarifying enterprise priorities.

Ask questions like:

• How does the platform align with our current tech stack, business model and operating environment?
• Will this vendor support our transformation roadmap — or limit it?
• What aspects of execution or vision earned the placement? Are those priorities aligned with our needs?
• Do case studies and references indicate expansion, innovation and long-term value?

Use the quadrant to inform your next questions, not to answer them outright. Read our guide to choosing the right SOAP solution for a more detailed analysis.

Strategy, not symmetry

We’re all searching for simplicity in a fast-changing world of automation tech, so it’s tempting to view proximity on the Magic Quadrant™ as a sign of equivalence. It’s not.

Go beyond the dot — use this year’s Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP as your starting point. Consider the rationale behind each placement. Investigate the executional proof points and architectural investments. And above all, choose partners who will not only deliver results in the current environment, but evolve with you as strategy, scale and complexity accelerate.

The quadrant gives you a map. The next move is yours. Download the full Gartner report to examine the landscape and learn why Redwood Software was named a Leader for the second consecutive year.