B2B Research
Forrester and Gartner-defined B2B technology categories, translated into plain-English analysis for buyers, not analyst-subscription holders.
B2B research articles
Application Security Testing Platforms
Vendors in this market sell consolidated platforms. Forrester scores the components separately, static analysis and software composition analysis, because component quality varies enormously inside a single bundled product.
Agentic Development Platforms
Most analyst categories are defined by what belongs in them. This one is mostly defined by what does not, deliberately excluding both general agent building tools and the vibe coding app generators it gets confused with.
AppGen And Low-Code Platforms
Forrester's own framing is blunt: AppGen is eating low-code. Generation quality is converging across vendors, which means the enterprise platform underneath, not the creation experience, is what actually decides a purchase.
Application Modernization And Migration Services
Migration moves an application unchanged. Modernization changes it. Both were sold under one banner for a decade, and untangling the two is where most of the actual business case in this category lives.
Digital Fraud Management
Almost every fraud control answers one question: is this person who they claim to be. The uncomfortable development of the last few years is that a growing share of losses now happen when the answer is yes.
AI Platforms
Four years ago Forrester's AI platform evaluation was full of data science workbenches. The current one includes a CRM vendor, an RPA vendor, and an ITSM vendor, because agentic AI redrew what the category means.
Agentic Development Security Tools
The problem this category exists to solve is not that AI writes bad code, it writes code that works: functionally correct and exploitable by default, at machine speed and at volume.
API Management Software
API management was built around a person reading documentation before calling an endpoint. That assumption is being dismantled as AI agents become the primary consumers of enterprise APIs.
Agentic Control Plane Solutions
Ask a large enterprise how many AI agents it runs and you will not get an accurate answer, only a confidently wrong one. This is the newest category in Forrester's agentic coverage, built to make agents visible and keep them inside a boundary.
Application Modernization And Multicloud Managed Services
Forrester merged two evaluations, modernizing software and running it afterward, because customers already preferred a single supplier across both by a four to one margin. A quieter customer fear explains why some buyers still resist that combination.
Augmented Business Intelligence Platforms
The word augmented entered this category's name because only some vendors could do it. It left because every vendor could, a textbook case of a differentiator becoming a baseline.
Climate Risk Analytics Software
Line up Forrester's three vendor lists for this market and the pattern is not competition, it is absorption. Climate science startups built the models, and ratings agencies bought them for the institutional credibility a number needs to survive scrutiny.
Cloud Native Application Protection Solutions
CNAPP exists to replace a stack of overlapping cloud security tools with one integrated platform. Forrester rated only three of fourteen vendors above average on customer feedback, which says a lot about how often that promise gets kept.
Cognitive Search Platforms
Enterprise search used to be an unglamorous convenience. Now it is the layer that decides whether your AI tells employees the truth, which raised the stakes on retrieval quality considerably.
ESG Data And Analytics Providers
Ask two ESG rating providers to score the same company and they can reach opposite conclusions. That single fact explains why Forrester quietly dropped the word ratings from this category's name.
AI Platforms In China
Forrester runs two Waves for AI platforms, one global and one for China, and the vendor lists share almost nothing. Regulation, data sovereignty, and compute constraints explain why.
AI Services
By 2026 the question of who can help you do something with AI had split in two, advisory work and engineering work. Forrester dissolved this category into two successors for exactly that reason.
AI Foundation Models
In 2024 Forrester ranked the large language models themselves. Two years later the category split in two, and the split says something real about how enterprises actually buy AI.
AI Consulting Services
The firms winning the largest AI advisory engagements in 2026 are not the ones with the strongest strategic reputation. They are the ones that can carry a plan past the slide deck and into production.
AI Decisioning Platforms
The vendors leading this category are not the names most associated with artificial intelligence. They are credit scoring firms and rules engine companies, because what is being sold is accountability, not intelligence.
AIOps Platforms
Compare the 2022 and 2025 vendor lists and the interesting story is not who scored well, it is who stopped existing. AIOps is not dying, it is being absorbed by the observability platforms that already own the telemetry.
Adaptive Process Orchestration Software
Forrester and Gartner named the same emerging market within months of each other and gave it two different names. Comparing the definitions shows what each firm thinks actually matters.
All-In-One Event Management Platforms
Twenty-two percent of large enterprises run six or more separate event technology platforms. This category is the consolidation answer, and the inclusion criteria are the whole story.
B2B Customer Data Platforms
Forrester's 2023 evaluation assessed standalone B2B CDP providers. By 2025 the word standalone was gone, and two of the vendors named Leaders were Adobe and Oracle.
B2B Event Management Technology
This category has been renamed three times in five years. Read in order, the retired history is a fairly precise record of what B2B marketers were worried about at each moment.
Business Process Outsourcing Services
Business process outsourcing has an awkward structural problem. It has historically been paid by the seat, and the technology it now has to sell is technology that removes seats.
Cloud Cost Management And Optimization Solutions
Multicloud cost visibility is now commodity functionality. Differentiation has moved to optimization depth, and almost every independent vendor in this category has already been acquired by an infrastructure company.
Digital Asset Management Systems
For twenty years a DAM was a library for the creative team. It is now the place an enterprise keeps the only content its AI tooling is allowed to treat as authoritative.
Digital Customer Interaction Solutions
This category exists because omnichannel did not work. Integrating the back end said nothing about how each digital channel should actually behave.
Digital Employee Experience Management Solutions
Most technology problems inside a company never become a support ticket. This category exists to make the gap between what IT measures and what employees actually experience visible.