Jyoti Jaswani
Published on 28 May 2026
From plugins to platforms: Is orchestration the future of enterprise software?
For over a decade, enterprise app marketplaces worked like digital convenience stores. If a team needed a specific feature—better reporting, a custom workflow, or a UI improvement—they could download a plugin and move on.
Single-purpose tools worked well for a long time. Teams could quickly add the features they needed without major development work, long procurement cycles, or substantial changes to their core systems.
But that flexibility also created a new problem: disconnected systems.
Today, enterprises often manage hundreds of SaaS applications across their organisations, alongside growing numbers of integrations, plugins, and workflows. When these tools don't work together properly, data becomes siloed, security risks increase, and teams end up buried in manual processes. What began as a way to move faster has created more operational complexity than expected.
So the challenge has now become about making existing tools work together rather than simply adding more tools.
That shift is changing the role of the enterprise marketplace itself. What was once a place to download apps is becoming an ecosystem focused on connectivity, automation, and workflow integration across the enterprise.
From integrations to orchestration
Enterprise marketplaces were initially designed so that plugins could solve isolated problems, helping teams customise platforms quickly without waiting for internal development teams or expensive software projects.
But as organisations scaled, those tools became deeply embedded in business operations, often without being connected properly.
A reporting plugin became critical to leadership visibility. A workflow automation became essential to product delivery. Collaboration tools became central to how teams communicated across the business.
What started as flexibility gradually became operational complexity. That shift is driving the rise of orchestration.
Integration and orchestration are related, but they solve very different problems.
| Feature | Integration | Orchestration |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Connects two systems | Coordinates multiple systems |
| Nature | Fixed connection | Automated workflows |
| Action | Shares data between apps | Manages processes across tools |
| Example | Slack receives Jira updates | Jira, Slack, GitLab, and security tools automatically work together |
In an orchestrated ecosystem, tools move beyond information exchange to active collaboration.
For example, when a developer pushes code in GitLab, an orchestration layer could automatically trigger a security audit, update Jira, notify teams in Slack, and generate documentation in Confluence without anyone manually moving information between systems.
That kind of coordination becomes increasingly valuable at scale. As businesses grow, so does the number of systems, workflows, and dependencies. Without orchestration, teams often spend more time managing tools than actually using them effectively.
Orchestration removes the gaps where productivity is lost.
Why orchestration is becoming a business priority
Many organisations are now dealing with a fragmentation tax—the hidden cost of disconnected systems, duplicated work, and manual maintenance created by rapidly expanding tech stacks.
As highlighted in a digital transformation roundtable published by CACI, many enterprise leaders share the same frustration:
"Our digital transformation is failing because it is fragmenting."
For many enterprises, the issue is the lack of coordination between technologies, and not just access to technology. That's why orchestration is increasingly becoming a board-level discussion rather than just an IT concern.
Orchestration helps solve this across three key areas.
1. Cost and efficiency
Disconnected apps create unnecessary manual work. Teams spend hours jumping between systems, maintaining integrations, duplicating tasks, and dealing with constant context switching between tools that should already be connected.
Over time, teams spend more time maintaining systems than improving them. Productivity slows down, operational costs increase, and innovation becomes harder to prioritise.
Orchestration helps reduce this overhead by connecting workflows across systems and automating repetitive tasks.
2. Security and compliance
Fragmented systems are difficult to govern. When teams adopt tools independently, visibility decreases, and security risks increase. It becomes particularly difficult in large enterprises where departments often purchase or install applications outside central oversight. Without consistent governance, organisations can struggle to manage permissions, compliance requirements, and data security across multiple platforms.
An orchestrated approach helps centralise oversight across systems by automating governance processes and creating more consistent controls across workflows, permissions, and compliance requirements; reducing operational and security risks created by disconnected tools.
3. AI readiness
AI is only as useful as the data behind it.
Disconnected systems create fragmented data and inconsistent workflows, making it harder for AI tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate meaningful insights.
As organisations continue increasing investment in AI initiatives, many are discovering that poor system connectivity limits the value those tools can deliver.
If information is spread across isolated platforms, AI models struggle to access clean, reliable, and complete datasets.
Orchestration creates the connected data foundations modern AI systems depend on.
What The Adaptavist Group approach means for you
For many businesses, the challenge has shifted from choosing the right tools to making increasingly complex systems work together effectively. Disconnected workflows, duplicated processes, and constant context switching can slow teams down, reduce visibility, and create operational friction across the business. That's where orchestration becomes valuable.
At The Adaptavist Group, the focus is on helping you simplify complexity across the digital workplace. Whether you're looking to reduce manual effort, improve collaboration, strengthen automation, or create more connected ways of working, our family of brands—Adaptavist, ScriptRunner, and Kolekti—are designed to help teams get more value from the tools and systems they already rely on.
The road ahead
The era of the simple plugin is over. The era of the orchestrated ecosystem has begun.
As enterprise ecosystems continue growing, orchestration will become less of a competitive advantage and more of a business expectation. If you can adapt quickly, you can turn complex technology environments into connected, scalable systems that support both employees and customers.
Is your ecosystem working for you, or are you working for it?
At The Adaptavist Group, we're here to help you and your organisation embrace change, reduce complexity, and thrive in a digital world. Whether you need strategic consulting, advanced automation, or improved collaboration, our brands are designed to help you build more connected, efficient ways of working.
Explore our brands and products today to discover how your organisation can reduce friction, improve workflows, and get more value from your technology ecosystem.