Automation Fabric Services

Forrester stopped evaluating digital process automation service providers in 2023 and replaced that Wave with Automation Fabric Services. The replacement's name was borrowed from a software report the firm published two years earlier, and the first Wave under the borrowed name scores no software at all.

In June 2021 Forrester published Automation Is The New Fabric For Digital Business and defined the automation fabric as "a system for whole-of-business automation that integrates multiple adjacent and complementary automation technologies, process architectures, organizational behaviors and partner co-innovation models." It predicted five percent of Fortune 500 companies would have one by 2022.

The Forrester Wave: Automation Fabric Services, Q4 2024 published in November 2024. It evaluates the firms an organization hires to weave the fabric it already bought: global systems integrators, consultancies, and generalist service providers whose engagement turns a stack of automation tools into an operating model. The word changed sides.

What a fabric services engagement actually is

This is not bot building. A fabric services engagement starts where the license ends. Forrester's own description of the segment, from the February 2023 blog post that announced the new Wave, lists six components: strategy, process transformation, operations, data strategy, automation risk management, and talent transformation.

A fabric is woven, not installed. The tool vendors sell the thread: RPA licenses, workflow platforms, process mining, AI models. These firms sell the weave. The real work product is a redesigned exception queue in a bank, an insurance claims flow that no longer touches three systems by hand, a quarterly close that closes. The scorecard does not measure how many bots a firm has built. It measures whether the automation survives contact with the organization.

The word that started in software

The fabric term began as architecture research. The June 2021 report argued that enterprises were combining multiple automation technologies into whole-of-business systems, and that the interesting problem had moved from individual tools to the layer connecting them. A year and a half later the term moved across the aisle into services.

On February 16, 2023, principal analyst Leslie Joseph posted the announcement that restructured Forrester's automation services evaluations. The series of Waves covering digital process automation service providers would be deprecated in favor of a new research stream called automation fabric services, aimed at the generalist segment: the global systems integrators and consultancies that integrate siloed automation competencies into cross-cutting offerings. The robotic process automation services Wave would be narrowed to specialists only, firms deriving a majority of revenue from RPA services. A Landscape was planned for early Q1 2024, with the Wave to follow later that year.

The sequence is worth reading closely. An analyst firm coined a software term, watched its clients struggle with the integration the term described, and then renamed its services research to match the problem. The scorecard followed the word.

Four silent years

The scorecard the new name replaced last ran under the old name in Q3 2020: The Forrester Wave: Digital Process Automation Service Providers, Q3 2020. That edition scored 13 providers on 22 criteria. Six Leaders: Infosys, Virtusa, KPMG, Cognizant, BP3, and Wipro. Five Strong Performers: HCL Technologies, Coforge, Accenture, Princeton Blue, and Persistent. Two Contenders: Perficient and EPAM. Infosys, one of the Leaders, still hosts its announcement.

Then nothing under that name for four years. The software scorecards kept running in the meantime. Digital Process Automation Software published new editions in Q4 2021 and Q4 2023. Task-Centric Automation Software and Infrastructure Automation Platforms both landed in Q4 2024. The services side went quiet while its category definition was being rebuilt.

The gap is the finding. Forrester did not stop researching the segment. It stopped believing the old name described the engagement. The 2020 field is a roster of the category the new name replaced.

The first scorecard under the new name: The Forrester Wave: Automation Fabric Services, Q4 2024

The evaluation was written by Leslie Joseph, Frederic Giron, Min Say, and Kara Hartig and published in November 2024. Fourteen providers were assessed against 18 criteria grouped under Current Offering, Strategy, and Market Presence. The report has been live since November 2024, and the Landscape that was meant to precede it has not been widely republished.

The report's own framing is a definition of the shift: the automation landscape is moving "from isolated task-specific technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and digital process automation (DPA) to integrated automation fabrics" that "weave together AI, workflow, and process intelligence tools to automate complex end-to-end processes."

It also hands buyers a three-point priority list for choosing a provider. The first two are delivery and scale: "Support impactful and sustainable autonomy across business operations," and "Develop, integrate, and scale complex automations." The third is different: "Transform workforce, skills, and organizational culture for automation."

The report's own priority list ends in culture, which is the part of automation no tool vendor sells.

Two Leaders, two halves of the promise

Only two of the fourteen scored firms have publicly announced their placements. Both are Leaders, and their citations describe different engagements.

EY announced its placement in February 2025, citing the highest possible scores in 15 of the 18 criteria across all three dimensions, with Forrester noting a "compelling vision and comprehensive offering."

KPMG's citation reads differently. Forrester credits "differentiated business transformation and change management," "a strong vision for business-focused automation," strength in "process transformation and architecting of a North Star blueprint," and "a significant three-year investment in AI and AI-enabled technologies." Forrester concludes that KPMG "is a strong option to help clients with the systematic transformation of departmental workflows or large, complex, and end-to-end value streams."

Fifteen of eighteen maximum scores is a breadth claim. A North Star blueprint is a change claim. The two Leaders are not selling the same engagement, and the scorecard rewarded both.

The twelve who said nothing

Fourteen providers were scored in November 2024. Two have said so publicly. The remaining twelve placements have not surfaced, and the full tier structure has not been widely republished.

This article names what is confirmed and does not invent the rest. That is not a weakness of the reporting. It is a property of the market. Services firms announce the recognitions that fit the story they are selling. A firm that was scored and stayed quiet may be repositioning away from automation services, or may simply not want its tier in a press release. The silence is a strategy as much as a gap in the public record.

There is a practical consequence. In a services engagement, the tier is a credential, not the deliverable. A shortlisted firm will show you its placement directly if you ask, and a firm that will not show you is telling you something the scorecard cannot.

The sibling scorecards

The February 2023 restructure split the services market in two, and both halves now have live evaluations. The specialist lane belongs to the RPA services Wave, which evaluates specialist firms only. In the Q4 2023 edition the specialist firm Digital Workforce ranked highest in the Current Offering category. The generalist lane is this one.

The software side keeps its own shelf. Digital Process Automation Software published in Q4 2023, with Camunda a Strong Performer. Task-Centric Automation Software published in Q4 2024, with ServiceNow a Leader. Infrastructure Automation Platforms published in Q4 2024, with Red Hat a Leader. Integration research has noted that iPaaS sits in the "automation fabric toolbox."

The buying logic follows the split. Pick the tools from the software scorecards and the weaver from this one. The second decision lasts longer than the first.

What to ask the two firms that did talk

The tier tells you who was scored well. The questions decide who is right for you.

Which half of the promise are you buying? EY's citation is breadth. KPMG's is change management. Ask each firm for the reference where it changed the organization around the automation, not just the queue.

What happens when a fabric tool gets replaced? The entire point of a fabric services engagement is integration across vendors. Ask how the engagement survives a tool swap, and who carries the risk when it does not.

What is in year three of the blueprint? The North Star language is the first chapter. The workforce and culture priority is the last. Ask what the firm has delivered in the final chapter, and get names.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

The natural next comparison is SaaS And Software Asset Management Solutions: forrester's inaugural evaluation of this category found that over a quarter of non-IT technology spending happens with no IT oversight at all, the real reason license compliance tooling turned into spend control infrastructure.

Buyers evaluating this should also weigh Adaptive Process Orchestration Software, the closest coverage already published on this site: 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.