Postman Named a Visionary in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management

Kin Lane

October 11, 2021

We are excited to share that Gartner has just named Postman a Visionary in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management, citing both Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. The announcement comes right on the heels of Postman v9, providing us with a cornerstone to buttress the Postman API Platform vision for how organizations define, optimize, and evolve their operations in an API-first world.

While the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ announcement celebrates our platform vision for the future of the API lifecycle, Gartner’s recent Hype Cycle for APIs and Business Ecosystems further supports the initiatives we are taking across multiple areas of the API lifecycle to ensure that enterprise organizations have what they need to deliver the infrastructure necessary to meet future business demands.

Our vision for the future of the API industry is rooted in an API-first world where all teams are applying a consistent, well-known, but also evolvable development model for conceptualizing and building out their operations, while ensuring they are also seamlessly interconnected across the services and tools already in use within the enterprise. API-first isn’t just about prioritizing APIs for use across a handful of web or mobile applications; it is about knowing where all of your digital resources and capabilities are.

An API-first world is one in which you are able to efficiently and effectively design, develop, deliver, test, and iterate upon hundreds or thousands of APIs across internal teams, partner source, and an increasing number of SaaS solutions. Operating your organization in an API-first way means you are able to move fast enough to stay ahead of the competition and view regulatory policy as an opportunity, all while iterating and innovating on your products to meet the growing demand of your customers and partners.

While our API platform vision encompasses everything entailed in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management, it also taps into Postman’s industry-leading view of the API landscape to ensure our vision reflects the reality on the ground within enterprise organizations—as seen by both API providers and consumers. Postman has made inroads into enterprise organizations through the rapid adoption of developers over the last eight years, first by solving the problems faced by API consumers as an API client and testing solution, but then also by addressing the needs of API producers as a design, mocking, documentation, testing, and discovery tool.

As word gets out to business leaders regarding the scope of Postman usage within the enterprise, we always see an acceleration in the adoption of the platform due to collaboration, discovery, and communication. This exclusive view of the internal-microservices evolution—as well as the rapid external-partner expansion and public API growth over the last decade—has enabled us to have both the Completeness of Vision and the top placement for internal API management as cited by Gartner®. That vision is something that serves both API producers and consumers equally—which is an essential, game-changing aspect of the next wave of API growth and expansion.

The last eight years of Postman platform releases have been all about providing API producers and API consumers with the tools they need to be successful while introducing the communication, collaboration, and discovery needed to accelerate operations without compromising quality. With Postman v9 now available—and as we passionately build towards v10—we recognize that the API lifecycle (as well as the automation, orchestration, and governance across the API lifecycle) is dependent on a seamless integration with the tools, services, and infrastructure already in place across the enterprise.

Optimizing the full API lifecycle and the effective management of APIs across producers and consumers means complementing the existing software development lifecycle via source control, CI/CD, and APM, while also increasingly embracing the multi-API-gateway reality that has emerged during the last decade. Postman is focused on providing teams with the tools they need across the full API lifecycle while establishing the platform that API operations need to go from doing an acceptable job of operating hundreds of APIs to doing an exceptional job of operating and managing the forward motion of thousands of APIs.

While we believe the acknowledgment in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management validates the Postman API Platform vision, we are also pleased that the 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle for APIs and Business Ecosystems reflects investments we’ve been making this year and will continue to make in coming years. Almost the full spectrum of the hype cycle reflects what the Postman platform enables, including areas like partner API ecosystem management, business API ecosystem management, event-driven API, API security testing, API standards, API testing, API access control, and API marketplaces—all essential aspects of how we are building, iterating, and planning around the Postman API Platform vision. We believe the hype cycle further validates what we have been seeing across conversations with our customers, our increased investment in open specifications, standards, and tooling, providing us with even more confidence that we are headed in the right direction. As each of these technological trends matures from innovation towards meaningful productivity, you will continue to see the value that the Postman API Platform provides to enterprises across the API lifecycle exponentially increase.

At Postman, we remain sharply focused on empowering our customers to have high productivity, great quality, and airtight governance across their API operations. And when you take what Gartner®  declared as our strengths, we can’t help but feel that the future looks pretty bright.

We’re thankful that Gartner® has celebrated our leadership in essential areas of API management, and we are more confident than ever of the significant role that Postman Collections play across the API lifecycle, serving as the essential unit of executable value for API documentation, mocking, testing, security, governance, and every other key stop along the API lifecycle. We believe the collection format will continue to be the building block of the API economy, and that when collections are defined, validated, and kept in alignment with a proven OpenAPI– or AsyncAPI-defined lifecycle, you end up with a powerful platform that will support the multi-protocol API future we are seeing rapidly expand today.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management, Shameen Pillai, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark O’Neill, John Santoro, Akash Jain, Fintan Ryan.

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