The Forrester Wave™: DevOps Platforms, Q2 2025, is live.
Hey, Weren’t These Called ISDPs?
When I took over the Wave from Chris Condo, I admit that I looked for an excuse to change the name. “Integrated software delivery platforms” didn’t have the word DevOps in the title, which made searching harder for clients. I didn’t hear people using it. And, well, I’ve got a long-held bias against acronyms longer than three letters.
It’s Forrester, so we didn’t want to change the name without doing some research. A quick poll on LinkedIn justified my intuition, so we did a further search of vendor websites based on our landscape report admission criteria. What do the vendors that sell the products call them? We focused on keywords and learned that, of 41 samples, four vendors had “deploy” or “deliver” in their product category name and 14 had something else (“lifecycle,” “CI,” “IaC,” or another term), while 23 of 41 used DevOps. Nobody was using “ISDP.”
It’s clear: ISDP is out, and DevOps platforms are in.
Narrowing down the field led to some careful choices. In the end, we had 11 participants that we felt everyone should know about: Amazon Web Services, Atlassian, CircleCI, CloudBees, GitLab, Google Cloud, Harness, IBM, Microsoft, Octopus Deploy, and Red Hat. They were each ranked on 26 criteria.
What Are The Trends?
Despite claims that “DevOps is dead,” the truth is that DevOps is everywhere. Platform teams use DevOps principles to ensure that application teams deliver reliable and high-quality software. The idea of a single DevOps platform, rather than a collection of best-of-breed tools stitched together by individual application teams, has grown with the concept of platform as product. Platform engineers today seek to solve the problems that application developers face, and the average application developer doesn’t want to set up a pipeline or maintain tool integrations. It doesn’t hurt that consolidating can also bring quantity discounts to an organization. As enterprises in particular look to standardize, we see a few trends:
DevOps is DevSecOps. Security is a mandatory part of DevOps. In fact, it’s just as fundamental as CI and CD. So we excluded any platform that didn’t provide some forms of security tooling. Leaders had security out of the box and had already thought about artifact management, secrets scanning, SAST, root cause analysis, and automatic remediation.
AI is booming — but it’s not all well integrated. Pretty much every vendor has AI features, either now or on their roadmap. The standout vendors integrate AI throughout their product in thoughtful ways that reduce contributor effort and make the routine seem magical. Others checked the AI checkbox but required significant copying and pasting of prompts and results — adding to developer toil rather than relieving it.
GitHub Actions is becoming a de facto standard. For continuous integration in particular, competitors seem to be converging toward a slightly modified version of GitHub Actions. It’s not a select-all/copy/paste, but in some cases, it’s close — a copy/paste with a few extra lines in the YAML.
What Should You Look For?
Forrester’s transparent methodology, where we detail the process behind the full criteria, scale explanations, and scores, allows us to offer an interactive experience to help inform the choices that our clients make about their providers. Forrester clients can visit this page when logged in and select “Help me find a vendor” to select what you and your organization value most in a DevOps platform. We then provide a ranked list aligned to your priorities. As you compile a shortlist or consider a renewal:
Don’t just count features. A checklist is a good place to start, but don’t stop there. The point of a DevOps platform is to make your SDLC run easier. Does it do that on day zero, when you first need to get the platform up and running? Does it do it on day two, after you’re live and in production? Does the platform play nicely with its competitors? Odds are good that you have build systems that you’re not going to throw out tomorrow, so working well with frenemies is critical for a DevOps platform.
Think about multiple personas. DevOps platforms need to satisfy developers and operations people, but there are others who end up using them. Is the DevOps platform easy to use for testers? What about managers and PMs wanting to keep an eye on project status? Does the platform build alignment between individual contributors and the business initiatives that are the reasons why they do the work?
Go below the troposphere. You’re probably pushing a lot of software to public clouds, but you’ve got other software to deliver, as well. How well does a DevOps platform work if you’re bringing changes to a mainframe, publishing to an app store, or testing a brand-new IoT device? With this Wave, we investigated how the platforms help those who don’t have their heads completely in the cloud.
Forrester clients can check out the full report here for more detail: The Forrester Wave™: DevOps Platforms, Q2 2025. And clients seeking to implement — or replace — a DevOps platform can schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me for additional insights.
