Enterprise integration has always been foundational work. But in the age of agentic AI — where autonomous software agents are being deployed to orchestrate business processes across sprawling, multi-vendor application landscapes — the stakes of getting integration right have never been higher.

For most enterprises, the integration environment they built over the last decade was never designed for what’s being asked of it now. Point-to-point connections, legacy middleware, fragmented tooling across dozens of systems: these were manageable constraints when the work was batch processing and scheduled dataflows.

Agentic AI changes the equation entirely. Autonomous agents need real-time access to data across the full application estate, consistent governance, and an integration layer that can scale without becoming a bottleneck. The organizations that have already modernized their integration foundation are finding that they have a meaningful head start.

SAP commissioned IDC to conduct an in-depth analysis of organizations using SAP Integration Suite, including its advanced event mesh capability. SAP Integration Suite is SAP’s flagship integration platform as a service, delivered on SAP Business AI Platform, the unified foundation for SAP’s AI, data, and integration capabilities.

For this Business Value White Paper, IDC conducted in-depth interviews with eight organizations across manufacturing, consumer products, energy, fintech, healthcare, retail, and transportation — enterprises with an average of 48,529 employees and $14.53 billion in annual revenue, operating across the U.S., Germany, Denmark, India, and the UK. The results were quantified from actual outcomes, not a modeled composite.

What the IDC Business Value White Paper found: SAP Integration Suite customers are achieving a 368% three-year return on investment with an eight-month payback, generating an average of $47,900 in annual benefits per integrated application, or $9.36 million per organization.

Numbers that matter

The IDC Business Value White Paper documents measurable impact across the full breadth of what integration touches in a modern enterprise:

• Integration speed and scale
  • 78% more application integrations
  • 41% less time to complete per application integration
  • 99% more application messages processed
• Operational reliability
  • 58% fewer unplanned outages
  • 35% faster to resolve integration errors
  • 19% fewer integration errors
• Business process automation
  • 49% more business processes automated
  • 21% efficiency gains for business process teams
  • 32% less time to onboard a business partner
• Developer and team productivity
  • 29% improvement in development team productivity
  • 31% faster development life cycle for new applications
  • 32% more efficient application integration teams

These aren’t projections. They are the average outcomes across eight real enterprises, documented through in-depth interviews by IDC analysts Shari Lava, group vice president for AI, Data, and Automation, and Matthew Marden, research vice president for Business Value Strategy.

More than an SAP platform

One finding in this study deserves particular attention for customers and partners evaluating SAP Integration Suite in mixed-vendor environments: on average, 64% of integrated applications in the study are non-SAP, and 82% of integrations touch at least one non-SAP application.

SAP Integration Suite is not an SAP-only platform. It is the integration backbone for the full, heterogeneous application environment that modern enterprises actually operate, one where SAP and non-SAP systems must work together reliably at scale.

One study participant described what that means in practice: “SAP Integration Suite is our main connection to the outside world. Every time anyone needs to connect to our SAP systems, it goes through [SAP] Integration Suite. It’s our main front door for API access, for data access, for collaborating with us, and for transferring data in and outbound into our SAP systems.”

Built for the AI era

The timing of this study matters. Organizations are moving fast on agentic AI, deploying autonomous agents that need to orchestrate, monitor, and act across their entire application estate in real time. Integration is no longer a back-office concern; it is the operational layer on which AI-driven automation either succeeds or stalls.

As part of SAP Business AI Platform, SAP Integration Suite brings together API management, event-driven architecture through advanced event mesh, and AI-native capabilities — giving organizations the governance, observability, and real-time connectivity that agentic AI workloads require. That includes native support for MCP, LLM connectivity, and agent-to-agent orchestration, making it a ready foundation for autonomous enterprise processes.

Study participants described this directly. One said: “The real value of [SAP] Integration Suite is the combination of its different capabilities: cloud platform integration, API management, and advanced event mesh. It’s the full set of these capabilities that makes it so important for us.”

Another captured the business case for reliability in AI-driven environments: “What we’re starting to see with SAP Integration Suite is a level of reliability and standardization in the integrations we’re building, which enables positive levels of further scalability. We no longer have that kind of point-to-point integration, which had been a risk and a source of technical debt for us.”

Business case is clear

A 368% three-year ROI and eight-month payback is a compelling headline. But what sits behind those numbers is equally significant: enterprises can connect more of their application estate, automate more of their business processes, resolve failures faster, and onboard partners more quickly — all on a platform that is ready for the AI workloads they are investing in right now.

“We can innovate more with SAP Integration Suite because it’s easier and the developers are happier working with the tool. It gives good results, so we continue to build on the foundations we have already created.”

That is the right foundation for what comes next.