Order Management Systems And A Story Of Augmented Evolution
Findings From The Forrester Wave™: Order Management Systems, Q1 2025
Digital leaders know that order management systems (OMSes) are true workhorses at the heart of the commerce tech ecosystem, providing inventory, order, logistic, and operational tools.
But the current OMS market shakes off all the basics. It is a story of evolution — on the part of both the vendors and the users of these systems. Our latest Forrester Wave™ evaluation of the market uncovered this new evolutionary tale.
The majority of digital leaders with an OMS are happy enough to keep it (though not nearly as many as those sticking with their B2C commerce solution). But many also aren’t just blindly relying on their vendor to keep them ahead of the innovation curve.
The state of the enterprise OMS market in 2025 is about:
- More businesses augmenting their current solution with individual modules of another — usually more modern — solution. We saw certain vendors used this way in the previous evaluation. In 2025, the rip-and-replace is less common than ever as businesses avoid (or at least delay) a replacement in favor of an incremental evolution. (Stay tuned for our fascinating Forrester Total Economic Impact™ [TEI]-based report on exactly this topic!)
- Broader business impacts from OMSes. Beyond expected — though matured — functionality such as AI-driven routing logic to the less expected, these solutions are going further than their traditional remit. Vendors find competitive differentiation in their solutions’ support for in-store processes (like servicing pickup orders), how they enable end customers to self-serve, and even how they deploy their solutions, creating easier on-ramps for digital businesses.
- Servicing different users in different ways. Although we know that unified commerce is not a thing, unification matters. Specifically, it matters that any given user has a consistent, unified, nonfrustrating experience. The market is out of patience with juggling multiple, disparate, integrated (but not unified) experiences from a single vendor. But when users are truly unique (e.g., technical users, nontechnical practitioners, and in-store associates), some OMS vendors serve uniquely appropriate experiences for each.
Digital businesses selecting replacement OMS solutions — or adding pieces on top of their existing one — have a new set of decisions to make. The functionality is broader, the tooling more specialized, and the delivery more modular.
Forrester clients, get in touch so I can walk you through the results of our brand-new evaluation, The Forrester Wave™: Order Management Systems, Q1 2025, the new Wave model, and Forrester’s interactive digital experience for the Wave.