Why 2026 is turning into a record Year for System Integrators

At, among others, Boomi World (London, June 2026), Kong API Tour, at API-days (o.a. Netherlands, Germany), in the hallways between sessions at half a dozen smaller events across Europe this year, I have asked system integrators how business is going. Over and over, I hear a version of the same answer, this is one of the best years they have had. Not because of some flashy new product line. Because Integration and API work, the stuff they have always done, is suddenly in enormous demand.

That is the part worth writing down, because it is not the story getting told. Most of the headlines this year are about AI. But when I actually talk to the people doing the delivery work in the field, in Europe specifically, what they describe is a boom in integration platform projects, API management engagements, and connecting systems together properly. The AI push is the trigger. The revenue is landing somewhere else entirely.

The demand is real, and it is landing on integration budgets

I am not the only one seeing it. MuleSoft’s own 2026 benchmark, based on over a thousand IT leaders, found that APIs and API related work now make up 40% of company revenue, up from 25% back in 2022. That is a huge jump, and it lines up with what I am hearing on the ground. Companies that want to move fast on new initiatives are discovering their systems simply are not wired together well enough to support it. Data sits in silos, APIs are inconsistent or missing, and nobody has a clean, governed way to expose what is happening across the business in real time.

Boomi’s own 2026 research with analyst firm Omdia, surveying more than 1,100 senior technology and business leaders, found that 92% of organizations are actively consolidating their technology around integration, API management, and automation, and that 90% want a unified, AI-ready integration platform even though only 46% currently have one (Boomi/Omdia, 2026). Gartner sees the same forces pulling from the other direction, predicting that more than 30% of the increase in demand for APIs through 2026 will come directly from AI and large language model tools. Independent market sizing backs up the scale of it: Markets-and-Markets projects the global iPaaS market to grow from $3.7 billion in 2021 to $13.9 billion by 2026, a 30.3% compound annual growth rate.

Fixing that is not glamorous. It is the same integration and API work SIs have been doing for fifteen or twenty years. What has changed in 2026 is the urgency and the budget behind it. Boards want to move on AI, and IT leaders keep discovering the blocker is not the AI part, it is the plumbing underneath it. So, the money approved under an “AI initiative” heading often ends up, quietly, funding integration and API projects.

I think of it like renovating a house. Everyone wants the new kitchen, but the contractor keeps finding the wiring behind the walls needs to be replaced first. The AI is the kitchen. The event driven, API connected foundation is the wiring. You cannot skip it, and this year, finally, budgets agree.

See my previous article: Building the Agentic AI Landscape, which exactly position each vendor within the Agentic AI landscape.

Specialization is paying off

What stands out to me talking to these SIs is how clearly specialization is winning right now. The firms doing best are not generalists, they are the ones with real depth in a specific platform, Boomi, MuleSoft, or WSO2 on the integration side, Kong or Gravitee for API management, and increasingly Solace for the event driven layer that gets data moving in real time instead of in batches. That depth shows up in the analyst and research data too. Boomi has now been named a Leader for the twelfth consecutive time in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPaaS, positioned highest for Ability to Execute (Gartner, 2026), and Kong’s own 2026 research found that 65% of organizations using APIs are already generating direct revenue from them, proof that this infrastructure has become a business line in its own right rather than a cost center (Kong, 2026).

At Boomi World this year, that shift showed up in the partnerships being announced, deeper ties with ServiceNow, all aimed at making data available and trustworthy at the moment it is needed. Kong and Gravitee have both been building out governance and security features for the growing volume of automated, machine driven API traffic. And Solace keeps coming up in conversations as the missing piece that makes the rest of the stack actually work in real time rather than on a schedule. That is exactly the role Solace’s two connected layers play, Solace event mesh moving data continuously across every application, cloud, and edge, and Solace Agent Mesh giving the agents built on top of that data the identity, governance, and observability enterprises now demand.

None of these vendors are selling AI so much as they are selling the infrastructure everything else depends on. And the SIs who have built genuine expertise around one or two of these platforms, rather than spreading themselves thin, are the ones landing the bigger, longer engagements.

Local and regional SIs are doing something right too

Here is the part I did not expect going in. It is not just the big global integrators cashing in. Some of the strongest stories I have heard this year come from local and regional system integrators, smaller firms, often country or region specific, that are quietly winning significant work against much larger competitors.

The reason, when I dig into it, keeps coming back to the same thing. They know the customer. A regional SI that has worked with a mid sized manufacturer or bank for ten years already understands the legacy landscape, the internal politics, who actually makes the decisions, and where the last three integration projects went wrong. That kind of trust and institutional knowledge is hard for a large global player to replicate, no matter how big their partner ecosystem is. When a company needs to move fast on integration and API work, which is exactly what is happening right now, that head start matters enormously. Regional SIs are not winning on scale. They are winning on relationship and context, and in a year where speed and trust matter more than usual, that is turning out to be a real competitive edge.

I have spent enough years on the SI side of the table myself, as CEO & Founder with deep knowledge of the underlying technology and solution, to know how rare that kind of trust is to build and how much of an unfair advantage it becomes once you have it.

What I take from this

If you are running or working at a system integrator right now, the lesson I keep drawing from these conversations is not “go build an AI practice.” It is that the integration and API work you already know how to do is having a genuine, measurable moment, especially here in Europe, and the firms capitalizing on it are the ones going deeper into their chosen platforms rather than chasing every new trend. Whether you are a large integrator with a broad partner network or a regional firm that simply knows your customers better than anyone else, 2026 seems to be rewarding depth and trust.

I will keep tracking this through the rest of the year. If what I am hearing at events holds up in the numbers, this could be one of the strongest years for integration and API work in a long time.

Interested in discussing this further? I’d be happy to connect.