Hybrid Integration Platform explained: from HIP to AI-era integration

The average enterprise now runs close to a thousand applications, spread across cloud, on-premises, edge, partner systems, and a growing layer of AI agents. Most of those systems were never designed to talk to each other. The work of connecting them securely, in real time, and at scale is the work that holds digital business together.

That is the work that has historically been described as the job of a hybrid integration platform (HIP), and that increasingly looks like the job of an AI-era enterprise control plane. The two are related, but the difference matters.

This guide walks through what a HIP is (and isn’t), how it differs from iPaaS, why the conversation has evolved beyond the original HIP framework, and what enterprises actually need from their integration layer in the AI era.

What is a hybrid integration platform (HIP)?

A hybrid integration platform is a framework of on-premises and cloud-based integration and governance capabilities that allows different kinds of users (integration specialists, line-of-business power users, and citizen integrators) to support a wide range of integration use cases across applications, data, B2B partners, events, and AI workflows.

The term was introduced by Gartner analyst Massimo Pezzini in 2016 and refined in subsequent reports.¹

Pezzini defined a HIP as “a framework of on-premises and cloud-based integration and governance capabilities that enables differently skilled personas(…) to support a wide range of integration use cases,” assembled from multiple technology building blocks and managed as a “cohesive, federated and integrated whole.”

In plain English: it is the layer that lets fast-moving cloud (and nowadays, AI) projects coexist with the systems of record that actually run the business.

A HIP is not a single product you buy off the shelf. It is a portfolio of capabilities (iPaaS, API management, managed file transfer, B2B/EDI, event streaming, AI orchestration, federated governance…) assembled and operated as one cohesive platform. Some pieces you build, some you buy, and some you inherit from existing infrastructure.

At a glance, the original HIP framework called for:

• A unified way to connect cloud, SaaS, on-premises, edge, and partner systems
• Self-service integration for non-IT users, governed centrally by IT
• Multiple integration styles (applications, data, B2B flows, business processes, events, secure file transfer, AI agents) under one operating model
• Hybrid deployment: cloud, multi-cloud, on-premises, embedded, or any mix

That list is still useful. But as we’ll see, it no longer reflects everything modern enterprises need their integration layer to do.

Hybrid integration platform vs. iPaaS: What’s the real difference?

This is one of the most-commonly muddled distinctions in the integration space. The short answer:

A HIP is more of a strategy and a capability framework. An iPaaS is a product category that sits inside it.

You can buy an iPaaS. You assemble a HIP.

Here is how the two compare across the dimensions that matter:

An iPaaS is one of the most important components of a HIP. Gartner has long described iPaaS as core HIP-enabling technology. But a HIP also pulls in API management, MFT, B2B, event streaming, and governance to cover the full range of integration patterns a real enterprise actually has. An iPaaS-only strategy almost never covers all four of Gartner’s original integration dimensions on its own.

Why the HIP conversation has evolved

When Gartner introduced the HIP concept in 2016, it was a forward-looking framework: a way to think about integration that spanned multiple personas, patterns, endpoints, and deployment models at a time when most enterprises were still treating cloud and on-premises as separate worlds.

A decade later, the framework’s underlying premise has been thoroughly validated. The challenge is that the scope of integration has expanded. The forces that made HIP necessary haven’t gone away; they’ve intensified, and they’ve been joined by a new one that changes everything.

1. Application sprawl has become the integration tax. A widely cited Connectivity Benchmark found that the average organization runs hundreds of discrete applications, with that number growing year over year. Every new SaaS subscription is another endpoint that has to integrate with something else. Unsurprisingly, half of organizations say cross-application data governance is a top integration challenge.
2. Legacy is not going away. Most large enterprises still run more than a third of their IT budget against legacy systems. They know full well that rip-and-replace is fantasy, and multi-pattern integration is not just a transition state. HIP was rightfully built on the assumption that legacy stays, and integration makes it useful in modern architectures.
3. AI is the force that changes the equation. McKinsey research found that fewer than 10% of enterprises worldwide have scaled agentic AI to deliver tangible value, even though nearly two-thirds have experimented with it. We have seen this pattern consistently: AI initiatives stall when agents can’t safely reach the governed data and workflows that live across the existing enterprise stack.

This is why the conversation has shifted from “do we have a hybrid integration platform?” to “do we have an integration layer that can govern how humans, systems, and AI agents interact across the whole enterprise?”

The capabilities that made up the original HIP — iPaaS, API management, MFT, B2B, events — are still essential. But the integration layer is becoming the enterprise control plane: where security, compliance, and operational discipline are embedded into every data flow and every AI interaction.

Gartner’s four dimensions of a HIP are still a useful litmus test

Gartner no longer maintains a dedicated HIP report. The capabilities Pezzini described have been absorbed into the broader Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), which in its March 2026 edition now evaluates vendors on AI capabilities, hybrid/on-premises support, multi-geography deployment, and low-code features — all criteria that were once distinctly “HIP.”  In a sense, the market caught up to the HIP vision.

But the original four-dimension framework remains the clearest way to distinguish platforms that are genuinely comprehensive from those that only cover part of the picture. Massimo Pezzini argued a “true” HIP must span the following:

1. Personas (constituents)

Integration is no longer the exclusive turf of central IT. The framework calls for support across four kinds of users:

• Integration specialists, the career integration developers and architects
• Ad hoc integrators, power users in lines of business who build connections as needed
• Citizen integrators, non-technical business users using low-code tools
• Digital integrators, mobile and frontend developers who consume integrations as APIs

2. Integration domains

A comprehensive integration platform must handle application integration (CRM to ERP), data integration (warehouses, lakes, real-time pipelines), B2B integration (EDI, AS2, AS4, partner onboarding), and process integration (orchestrating multi-step business workflows). At Axway, we call this multi-pattern integration: the ability to support and orchestrate diverse patterns (APIs, files, EDI, events, AI agents) within a unified framework.

3. Endpoints

Anything you might need to connect: on-premises systems, public clouds, hybrid/multi-cloud environments, mobile apps, IoT and edge devices, SaaS applications, AI agents, and partner systems.

4. Deployment models

Where the integration runtime actually executes: in the vendor’s cloud, in your private cloud, on your on-premises servers, embedded in IoT devices, or any hybrid combination of those.

A platform that only spans two or three dimensions is what Pezzini called a proto-HIP: useful, but not the full picture.

The four dimensions are still the right test of coverage. What the framework doesn’t address is the question of control: not just can these systems connect, but what do they do when they do, and who governs that behavior?

What AI-era integration actually requires

AI agents now operate as a new class of consumer in the enterprise: they invoke APIs, request and generate files, trigger partner workflows, and orchestrate long-running business exchanges, often autonomously.

That changes what an integration platform has to do. The original HIP framework focused on what integration needed to cover. The AI era focuses on how integration needs to operate.

A modern integration layer needs to function as an enterprise control plane with four core responsibilities:

Identity and access. Enterprises must control not only who can access systems, but what can. AI agents, automations, and services increasingly act alongside human users. A control plane treats human and non-human identities consistently, with clear ownership, permissions, and accountability.

Policy enforcement. Governance can no longer rely on manual reviews or per-case approvals. Security, privacy, and compliance policies must be embedded directly into integration flows, defined once and enforced everywhere, allowing innovation without bypassing regulatory or security requirements.

Observability and audit. When AI systems take action, enterprises must be able to explain what happened, why it happened, and what data was involved, particularly under regulations like the EU AI Act. End-to-end observability across APIs, file movements, and multi-step business processes is now table stakes. https://www.snaplogic.com/resources/analyst-reports/gartner-magic-quadrant-ipaas-2026

Cost and usage control. Autonomous agents can trigger excessive API calls, data transfers, and partner interactions faster than budgets can keep up. The control plane provides systematic cost and usage data so organizations can apply limits, monitor consumption, and align AI activity with business priorities.

These are the things a 2026-ready integration layer needs to do, and they go beyond what the original HIP framework was designed to describe.

See also: Reinventing Integration: How to Prepare for the New Era of Agentic AI

The core components of a hybrid integration platform still matter

Whether or not you call it a HIP, a working enterprise integration layer still pulls these capabilities together. The mix varies by organization, but the menu does not:

• API lifecycle management. Design, publish, secure, version, and govern APIs across teams and environments.
• iPaaS / application and data integration. Cloud-delivered runtime for connecting SaaS, applications, and data sources, often with low-code tooling for non-specialist users.
• Managed File Transfer (MFT). Secure, auditable movement of files and large data sets between systems and partners. Still indispensable in regulated industries.
• B2B/EDI integration. Partner onboarding, EDI/AS2/AS4 protocols, supplier and ecosystem orchestration.
• Event-driven messaging and streaming. Kafka, MQ, and event-mesh capabilities that let integrations react in real time rather than on batch schedules.
• AI orchestration and AI gateway. Governed access to enterprise data for AI agents and copilots, with policy enforcement, observability, and rate limiting at the integration layer.
• Federated governance, security, and observability. A single control plane for policies, identity, secrets, audit logs, and runtime metrics across every component above.

The newest of these is the AI orchestration layer, and it is rapidly becoming the most consequential. As Axway’s Chris Payne wrote earlier this year, the next phase of hybrid integration will likely see MFT, EDI, and API technologies absorbed as microservices inside a unified AI-aware platform.

The benefits of a hybrid integration platform

The business case for comprehensive, multi-pattern integration (what Gartner originally described as HIP) comes from compounding effects rather than any single payoff. These benefits hold whether you call it a HIP or simply call it what modern enterprises need:

• Faster innovation. Across industries, the need to innovate faster is a significant driver for rethinking integration strategy. Self-service integration patterns turn IT from a bottleneck into an enabler, which is an existential shift in a world where AI is accelerating every timeline.
• Legacy preservation without rip-and-replace. A comprehensive integration layer is designed to incorporate API gateways, MFT systems, ESBs, and B2B platforms you already run, so existing investments keep producing value. This matters more than ever: as Meetesh Patel, Axway’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, has put it, “The core plumbing still exists. It just needs to be more efficient.”
• Speed to market. Customers building integrations on a unified platform routinely move from days-and-weeks to hours: connecting Salesforce to ServiceNow, syncing SAP cloud to on-prem ERP, or onboarding a new trading partner becomes a matter of configuration rather than a project.
• Citizen-integrator empowerment. Low-code tooling lets line-of-business users build their own integrations within IT-set guardrails, which shrinks the IT backlog and improves business responsiveness simultaneously.
• Centralized governance and security. One control plane covers identity, policy, audit, and observability across every integration runtime, eliminating the security blind spots that exist between siloed tools. Our own API maturity research found that 78% of enterprise decision-makers don’t know how many APIs their organization has, and 74% report more than 20% of their APIs are unmanaged. This governance gap only widens as AI agents begin generating and consuming APIs at scale.
• Cost reduction. Reusable APIs, prebuilt connectors, and shared runtimes reduce the cost-per-integration over time. Faster partner onboarding compounds the savings. And in the AI era, centralized usage monitoring prevents autonomous agents from running up unpredictable cloud and token costs.
• AI-readiness. This is the benefit that didn’t exist in the original HIP framework, and it’s now the most consequential. A unified integration layer is the practical answer to the “AI can’t reach our data” problem. By centralizing connectivity and governance, it gives AI agents a safe, observable interface to enterprise systems: the very difference between AI that stays in pilot and AI that operates in production.

Hybrid integration platform examples and use cases

The original HIP framework described integration patterns in the abstract. Here’s what those patterns actually look like in practice, at organizations that operate across APIs, files, EDI, events, and increasingly AI agents, often all at once.

1. Replacing brittle batch scripts between MFT/EDI and cloud ERP. A file lands at the MFT gateway from a partner; the integration layer orchestrates conversion to API calls into SAP or another cloud system; downstream events fan out to the rest of the business. Reliable, observable, and infinitely easier to change than the script-and-cron pipeline it replaced.

Bovemij, a Dutch mobility insurer running hundreds of applications across several business units, faced exactly this pattern when a regulatory deadline from RDW (the Dutch vehicle authority) required them to bridge SFTP-based file flows to modern API calls in four months.

They successfully reproduced the solution using Amplify Fusion as an orchestration layer. As Arjan van Hienen, System Architect and Integration Specialist at Bovemij Group, described it:

“That was basically our buy or no-buy use case for adopting Fusion. We knew that if it could handle this complex task, it could support everything that we needed for the coming years.”

2. API-led integration of SaaS to legacy systems. Salesforce-to-SAP, ServiceNow-to-mainframe, Workday-to-on-prem-HRIS. The integration layer exposes the legacy system as a managed API surface so SaaS and modern apps can consume it without bespoke point-to-point connections.

3. Real-time IoT and event ingestion into systems of record. Manufacturing and logistics use cases where edge devices generate events that need to land in ERP, warehouse management, or analytics platforms in seconds, not hours.

4. Trading-partner onboarding at speed. Onboarding a new B2B partner via traditional methods can take weeks. A platform with self-service partner portals and reusable EDI/AS2/AS4 templates collapses that to days or hours.

5. AI agents accessing governed enterprise data. A copilot or agent calls into an AI gateway at the integration layer; the gateway enforces policy, scopes data access, observes the call, and routes to the appropriate system of record. The agent never touches raw infrastructure. This is the emerging pattern that turns the integration layer into a control plane.

6. B2B and API integration in a single ecosystem. A retailer with EDI-based suppliers, API-enabled digital partners, and smaller browser-based vendors orchestrates all three patterns via a unified control plane, instead of operating three separate integration silos.

Bosch is a real-world example of this evolution. The engineering and technology innovator has partnered with Axway for more than 25 years, and a significant share of global Bosch revenue relies on Axway B2B Integration for mission-critical EDI. But the relationship has expanded well beyond EDI: Bosch now manages 200 million API calls monthly and offers 2,000 secured APIs to developers, migrating daily file transfers alongside their long-running B2B flows.

As David Geiger, Head of API Management at Bosch Digital notes:

“The open and active collaboration between Axway and Bosch will help us deliver new, data-driven solutions to customers all over the world.”

7. Cloud migration without big-bang risk. Workloads move to the cloud incrementally; the integration layer keeps integrations stable while endpoints shift behind it, no rip-and-replace needed.

IATA is a case in point. The International Air Transport Association processes around 200,000 settlement files daily across 350 airlines in 120+ countries. They migrated their MFT infrastructure from on-premises to AWS in six months with zero downtime, while maintaining PCI DSS compliance and consolidating HA/DR.

Bomi Philip, Head of Platform Management and Support Services at IATA, puts it this way:

“Moving from on-premises to the cloud is not an easy journey. But for us, from an MFT perspective, [Axway] made our life easy.”

Read more: How IATA Transformed Global Aviation Data Transfer with Axway MFT

What these stories have in common isn’t a “HIP.” It’s the fact that real enterprises operate across multiple integration patterns simultaneously — and increasingly need a layer that governs how all of those patterns behave, not just how they connect.

How to evaluate integration platform vendors

Because comprehensive enterprise integration is assembled rather than purchased off the shelf, vendor evaluation is less about checking a feature list and more about asking the right structural questions. A few principles:

Beware HIP-washing. Pezzini coined the term to describe vendors who portray a collection of architecturally inconsistent products as a single out-of-the-box platform. The tell: the components don’t share a control plane, a security model, or a runtime. They just share a marketing page. The same warning applies perhaps even more so today, as vendors rush to add “AI-ready” to products that aren’t architecturally prepared for it.

Use the four dimensions as your scoring rubric, and add control as the fifth test. A vendor that claims comprehensive integration capability should be able to show, concretely, how they cover personas, integration domains, endpoints, and deployment models, as well as how they govern behavior across all of them.

A practical seven-point checklist:

1. Hybrid deployment depth. Can the runtime actually execute on-prem, in any cloud, at the edge, or embedded?
2. API management depth. Full lifecycle (design, security, governance, monetization), not just a gateway.
3. B2B / EDI / MFT coverage. These are non-optional in any regulated or partner-heavy industry.
4. Federated governance. A single control plane for identity, policy, audit, and observability across every component.
5. Low-code experience. Usable by line-of-business power users, not just specialists.
6. AI-readiness. Explicit support for AI gateways, agent orchestration, and AI-driven integration patterns like MCP.
7. Connector and partner ecosystem. Breadth of prebuilt integrations and the availability of solution partners who can help you assemble the platform.

How Axway delivers integration for the AI era

Where the original HIP framework focused on what an integration platform needed to cover, Axway’s approach focuses on how integration needs to operate in the AI era: as a governed control plane for every interaction, human or autonomous.

That approach is centered on Amplify Fusion, our AI-ready integration and orchestration layer, alongside the surrounding portfolio that customers assemble around it.

Fusion brings APIs, events, MFT, EDI, and data pipelines together in one execution layer. It is built to extend the integration stack you already have, rather than replace it. Around Fusion sit:

• Amplify API Management. Full-lifecycle API governance across environments.
• Amplify Engage. API marketplace and developer experience.
• Amplify AI Gateway. Governed access for AI agents and copilots.
• Axway Managed File Transfer (SecureTransport, Transfer CFT). Enterprise-grade secure file movement.
• Axway B2B Integration. EDI, AS2/AS4, and partner ecosystem orchestration.
• Axway Financial Accounting Hub (AFAH). Finance-specific integration patterns.

Together they cover the four HIP dimensions Pezzini originally defined (personas, integration domains, endpoints, and deployment models) as well as AI-era control plane capabilities — without forcing you to rip out the systems already running your business.

As Mourad Jaakou, General Manager of the Amplify Platform, has written, an API-only approach will not fully solve today’s challenge. Rather, governance at scale requires a multi‑pattern approach.

Reinvent Integration for the AI Era

The hybrid integration platform was the right idea at the right time. It gave enterprises a framework for thinking about integration comprehensively — across personas, patterns, endpoints, and deployment models — when most of the industry was still thinking in silos.

But the conversation has evolved. Integration is no longer about connecting systems. It is about giving humans and AI agents secure, governed, observable access to every data flow in the enterprise, without ripping out the infrastructure that already runs the business.

That’s what Amplify Fusion is built for.

Frequently Asked Questions

¹ Gartner, Innovation Insight for Hybrid Integration Platforms, Massimo Pezzini, 15 October 2018. The most recent edition of the report that originally defined the HIP framework. Gartner has not published a dedicated HIP report since; the capabilities described have been incorporated into the iPaaS evaluation framework.