Marketplace Platforms For Digital Services

No Wave exists yet under this name. What exists is the landscape that precedes one, The Marketplace Platforms For Digital Services Landscape, Q2 2026, and the scorecard of the market this category was carved from. The planned Wave would be the first Forrester ranking of a market that has spent three years being measured inside someone else's scorecard.

The market that was carved out of a bigger one

Forrester's marketplace research used to be one category. The Wave for Marketplace Development Platforms, Q4 2024, scored platforms for selling physical goods and digital services on the same scorecard, its complexity ladder running from atoms to consumers at one end to bits plus atoms to businesses at the other.

Forrester then announced that marketplace platforms are not one market anymore, and split its coverage into two landscapes for 2026: one for digital services, the bits, and one for physical goods, the atoms.

The digital-services half is the pasted category's territory. Forrester's own description of its purpose: to "expand digital service revenue through ecosystem participation, extend device revenue through service-led bundles, and scale revenue and influence as a channel partner." Three jobs, and the first two describe a business model, not a software feature.

What exists now: the Q2 2026 Landscape

The Marketplace Platforms For Digital Services Landscape, Q2 2026 profiles fifteen vendors, varying by size, offering type, geography, and use-case differentiation. It is a map, not a ranking, which is the honest current state of this category.

The Landscape's three purposes are the market's three motions. Ecosystem participation means the platform that lets a vendor sell through other vendors. Service-led bundles means hardware vendors attaching software and services to devices. Channel scaling means partners becoming the route to market.

The planned Wave, whenever it publishes, would apply tier scores to those three motions, and the fifteen names in the Landscape are the likely field. The scorecard would be Forrester's first dedicated ranking of the bits marketplace, the digital-services half of a market it has until now scored only inside the combined ladder.

The predecessor under a different name

The digital-services marketplace has been scored before, once, under a different title: The Forrester Wave: SaaS Marketplaces, Q4 2023. That evaluation recognized AWS Marketplace as a Leader for, in Forrester's phrasing, transacting and contracting with "real dollar benefits."

That prior scorecard is the best available evidence of what a Marketplace Platforms For Digital Services Wave would measure. Entitlements, contracting, and real-dollar transaction flows. The SaaS Marketplaces Wave scored the hyperscaler marketplaces that started the bits economy. The planned Wave would widen that lens to every platform that packages and sells digital services through ecosystems, including the marketplaces the hyperscalers do not own.

The hyperscaler question will shape the planned scorecard whether or not the hyperscalers appear in it. AWS Marketplace is both a competitor to the white-label platforms and a channel most of them integrate with, and the Q4 2023 verdict, real dollar benefits, set the standard any digital-services marketplace must meet. A planned Wave that keeps that standard will favor platforms where settlement, entitlement, and revenue actually flow, which is a higher bar than a polished catalog demo, and the right one for a market built on transactions rather than listings. For now, the Landscape is the map and the predecessor Waves are the evidence.

The Q4 2024 Marketplace Development Platforms Wave's two Leaders preview the field's shape. AppDirect, the bits-end Leader, with its subscription digital commerce flywheel and its customer experience front-end dominance, sits squarely in this category's territory. Mirakl, the atoms-end Leader, does not, which is precisely why the market split into two.

AppDirect's flywheel vision is the digital-services marketplace model described as strategy. Technology advisors, the partners, managed service providers, telecom sales reps, curate integrated, white-labeled stacks for their customers, and every transaction feeds the next recommendation. The platform's job is not to host a catalog. It is to make the partner's entire business run through the marketplace, and that vision, scored highest across twenty five of thirty three criteria in the combined Wave, is the benchmark any planned digital-services Wave would inherit.

What the planned Wave would have to decide

The definitional questions for a first dedicated scorecard are visible in advance. What counts as a digital services marketplace? Does the hyperscaler marketplace, with its own rules, compete in the same tier table as the white-label platform vendors and the channel platforms?

And what is the unit of value being scored: the transaction volume, the ecosystem size, or the seller experience? The Q4 2023 SaaS Marketplaces Wave chose transaction reality, "real dollar benefits," as its yardstick. A planned Wave that keeps that yardstick will favor the platforms where the money actually moves, which may not be the platforms with the best demos.

There is also the timing. Landscapes typically precede Waves by a year or two, which puts a possible Wave in 2027 or later. Until then, the category's buyers are shopping with a map and a predecessor scorecard, not a ranking of their own.

Three questions while the Wave is pending

Which of the Landscape's three purposes is yours: ecosystem participation, service-led bundles, or channel scale? The planned scorecard will rank platforms across all three. Your purchase only needs one, and the future tier table will not tell you which vendor wins your specific motion.

Does the platform transact with real dollars, or just list? The predecessor Wave's yardstick was transactional reality. Ask for the settlement, entitlement, and revenue flows demonstrated live, because a catalog without settlement is a website with pricing, and listing is not a marketplace.

Where does your marketplace sit in the split? If you also move physical goods, you are shopping two categories now, and the platform that wins the bits scorecard may not serve your atoms business at all.

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

This pairs closely with Translation Management Systems, where forrester's first ever evaluation of this category found that the same integrations vendors sell as the platform's biggest strength are also what makes switching providers prohibitively expensive once you have built on top of them.