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Being named as a Niche Player in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™: What it means to me...

July 29, 2026
Brian Wenngatz
9 Mins
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In 2010, a small group of founders looked at the IT service management market and saw something everyone else seemed to be missing. The dominant platforms of that era were built for a world of servers under desks and change requests routed by hand. They were sold as a blank canvas, and then it took an army of consultants and a small fortune in services work to bend and shape that canvas into something a business could actually run on. Our founders bet that the future belonged to something cloud-native from day one, built to change as fast as the businesses running on it, and configured by the customer instead of requiring consultants to stand it up. That bet became Xurrent.

I think a lot about that bet becoming much more real now, watching this market being forced to shift yet again as a new technology curve is upon us. Two decades ago, BMC owned IT service management the way legacy platforms always do, until ServiceNow proved that a cloud based approach could serve the enterprise better than anything built for an on-premises world. That was not a small correction. It was a changing of the guard. I believe we are watching the early chapters of the next one, and I believe Xurrent is positioned to write it, because our founders made a similar kind of bet a decade ago, at a moment when almost nobody else in this category was making it.

So it means something to me, and to everyone at Xurrent, that this year we were named for the first time in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for IT Service Management Platforms, positioned as a Niche Player. I want to tell you exactly why that has us excited, not just proud.

Gartner does not put every ITSM vendor in this report. From my understanding, inclusion comes down to relevance: market presence, product features, and customer interest. Vendors who do not clear that bar get mentioned in passing as a footnote, if at all. They do not get analyzed. This year, for the first time, Gartner looked at Xurrent and decided we are recognized as one of just sixteen platforms in the report. In my opinion, that is not a participation credit. To me, Gartner is telling the market that Xurrent now belongs in the same formal analysis as the incumbents we have been competing against for years.

The advantage of moving fast

Here is what actually sets the pace for us: our platform is cloud-native AND built on architecture designed to scale and change without friction, including the integration layer we recently brought to general availability.

We ship weekly, in updates that reach every customer automatically, with nobody stuck on last year’s version waiting for an upgrade project. That is not a marketing line. It is what a scalable, cloud-native foundation actually buys you, and it is the same architecture that let us bring our own iPaaS to market. Velocity is not a feature we shipped. It is the compounding advantage of a platform built to scale from day one, and refusing to slow down once it worked.

And this is the part I actually lose sleep over, in the good way: agentic AI is moving faster than almost anything I have seen in this industry, sometimes reshaping what is possible from one month to the next. Most platforms in this category cannot move at that pace. Their release cycles were built for a slower world, and a platform that takes quarters to change cannot deliver a technology that is rewriting itself every few weeks. This is exactly why our architecture matters right now, not as an abstract advantage, but as the difference between a vendor who can actually keep up with agentic AI and one who is still writing the roadmap for what we already shipped. We built our ITSM platform to move at the speed this moment demands, and that same velocity is what will let us put real agentic capability in our customers’ hands while others are still scoping the project. Our approach? Use AI and don’t look back. Feature after feature. Shipped fast. At no extra cost. Because when the ground shifts this quickly, you don’t wait for the perfect roadmap. You build.

We know exactly what David versus Goliath means

I have never believed being the biggest was the same thing as being the best fit. We are purpose-built for organizations that need enterprise capability without the operational burden that typically comes with it, or the two-plus-year implementations that legacy platforms are known for. In my opinion the vendors that dominate this category built their advantage in a different era, on a different architecture, at a different pace of change. Every year they carry that legacy forward is a year we get to build without it. To me, being a Niche Player is not a disadvantage to apologize for. It is the entire reason we can outrun platforms ten times our size, in the one dimension that matters most right now, which is how fast we can turn a customer’s actual need into working software in their hands.

That is also true of where our platform still has ground to cover. No platform this young does everything a thirty-year incumbent does, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What I will tell you is what our velocity actually buys us here: the gaps we have today are not multi-year roadmap items for us the way they would be for a slower-moving platform. They are next quarter’s release notes. That is the whole bet we are making, and it is the same bet our founders made in 2010: build the foundation right, and speed compounds in your favor for as long as you own it.

Why customers stay, not just why they switch

I hear a version of the same sentence from customers who have been with us the longest, and it is not about a feature. It is about the fact that when they need something, from us or from our team, they get it, not a ticket number and a promise. Our customer success program is not an upsell tier we save for the largest accounts. Every customer gets a real path to a real person, structured reviews of how they are actually using the platform, and training that does not stop the day the contract is signed. In a market where “customer success” often means a shared inbox, that difference shows up in renewal conversations more than in any pitch deck.

Where we go from here

To me, being named in this report for the first time is not a finish line, and I do not intend to treat it like one. I believe it is a marker on a road we have been walking since 2010, when a small group of people looked at a legacy market and decided to build something better from first principles instead of settling for something familiar. We are proud to be recognized alongside the platforms that have been recognized in this category for two decades, and we intend to spend the next several years making the case, in customer outcomes and shipped software, that the next major name in IT service management does not have to look like the last one.

If you are evaluating your ITSM platform and want to see what a cloud-native, AI-native foundation actually looks like in practice, I would love for you to see it for yourself.

[Request a demo →]

[Read the Report →]

Brian Wenngatz Chief Executive Officer, Xurrent

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms, Rich Doheny, Ankita Hundal, Jen Lichucki, 27 July 2026

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