KIBO has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™:Commerce Solutions, Q3 2026. Now KIBO is the only Leader in the Commerce Solutions Wave to also be named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Order Management Systems, Q1 2025. I am very proud of this achievement and our team.
These analyst evaluations are an arduous process, and they evaluate not only product capabilities, but also how the organization is positioned to execute against a rapidly shifting market. Analysts dig into product depth and roadmap, yes, but also company strategy and vision, go-to-market execution, partner ecosystem strength, customer support and services delivery, and the real-world adoption and experiences of reference customers. It’s not enough to have strong technology — you have to demonstrate that the strategy behind it is coherent, that the organization has the resources and discipline to deliver on its roadmap, and that customers actually experience the value you claim to deliver.
We want to share our journey and the path we walked to get here. None of the vendors in the report have an easy path. It is hard work for all of us, and we deeply respect our competition.
Whenever an individual or a company accomplishes an achievement the the part that is in the focus is the achievement itself. The journey, the hard work, the missteps, the challenges are most of the time left behind the scenes. Like with every “overnight success” it took us 6+ years of hard work to get to where we are today.
Here is what our path to Leader in The Forrester Wave: Commerce Solutions, Q3 2026 actually looked like.
The Journey: A Lesson in Company DNA
KIBO was founded in 2016 and we did not walk a straight line to the Leader position over the years. The numbers tell an honest story about knowing who you are.
- 2020 (Strong Performer): A solid, credible positioning for a company of our size and structure.
- 2022 (Solo Leader): We were the only Leader that year, which raised eyebrows. Systems integrators and market influencers largely did not know us because we were doing most implementations in house, lacking the giant footprint of legacy players. But Forrester evaluates product and strategy, not brand equity. Our core B2C commerce capabilities, native content management, and Monetate personalization gave us real depth in the evaluation that year.
- 2024 (Contender): On paper, it looked like we lost a step. In reality, we made two bold strategic moves, and one was an overcorrection.
- Spinning off Monetate: Personalization and core commerce are different businesses with distinct go to market motions. Personalization belongs inside a marketing cloud or as a standalone platform integrated via APIs, not bolted onto commerce. We would make that call again.
- Overcorrecting on Headless: We went all in on headless commerce, relying entirely on partner CMS platforms. While MACH principles are sound, abandoning our own front end left us unable to serve clients who wanted us to manage that experience for them.
The Course Correction
Starting in 2024, we executed three deliberate adjustments to close those gaps. All three of the adjustments reflected KIBO’s DNA.
1. Content Management & Storefronts
We reinvested in our native CMS capability and rolled it back out in 2025. Today, clients get the freedom to choose whether they bring their own front end stack or let us manage it for them. KIBO’s CMS enables non-technical practitioners to build and manage page layouts, editorial content, banners and dynamic pages using a visual page builder with drag-&-drop components. Full author management, collaboration, approvals, content scheduling, versioning, and multi-channel publishing are available without developer dependency. In addition, KIBO provides production-ready headless storefront starter kits with pre-built components for PDP, PLP, cart, checkout, account management, etc. These are designed for rapid customization rather than build-from-scratch. KIBO also provides a Component Library & design system to accelerate UI development.
2. Partner First Model
In house implementations are not scalable long term. We pivoted to a partner first delivery model. Today, roughly 90 percent of implementations are partner led. We backed this with investments in Connect Hub integration framework, and our KIBO Expert Services consulting team provides directional oversight on every client and SI implementation to ensure successful delivery.
3. Commerce and Order Management
Most order management platforms come from supply chain heritage with commerce tacked on. We built our OMS from a commerce perspective. When Commerce and OMS share one platform and one data model, you unlock powerful use cases without multi system lag, such as:
- Front end filtering by real time local store inventory.
- Combining subscriptions and one time purchases in a single cart.
- Service reps managing, modifying, or substituting items on unified orders in one UI.
This shift propelled Kibo to Leader in The Forrester Wave: Order Management Systems, Q2 2025.
KIBO DNA: Culture and Product Strategy
For every company success is a function of culture and product strategy. Culture comes first as this is the foundation everything else including the product strategy rests on.
Driven by Culture
- Trust: Trust is the foundation of every relationship we build, with our teams, our clients, and our partners. For KIBO trust means honest sales cycles, transparent expectations, and backing our team.
- Growth Mindset: We’re committed to learning, adapting, and improving every day, as individuals and as a company. We are constantly adapting based on client and partner feedback, with direction being a key input of future roadmap.
- Client Obsession: We’re obsessed with delivering exceptional experiences for our clients, because when they thrive, we thrive. Our success is tied directly to customer outcomes, reflected in our high client retention rate and our NPS scores.
Three Product Pillars
- One Platform: B2C, B2B, D2C, and B2B2C running across multiple geographies, channels and currencies from a single instance. That shared foundation eliminates the integration tax, lowers total cost of ownership and derisks implementation.
- Complete and Composable: MACH certified architecture paired with robust functionality out of the box, ending the false choice between suite lock in and do-it-yourself headless chaos.
- Structural AI Advantage: Agentic AI embedded across both commerce and fulfillment.
Where We Stand Today
Kibo’s vision is to be the AI-forward platform that powers clients’ experiences from pre-purchase to post-purchase, with a unified foundation built to adapt as fast as commerce changes. As commerce gets more complex — more channels, more business models, more customer expectations — the businesses that win won’t be the ones bolting together point solutions to keep pace. They’ll be the ones built on a foundation designed for where commerce is headed, not where it’s been. That’s why we built KIBO – one AI-forward platform for commerce and order management, that’s built for every business model, whether you’re B2C, B2B, or running both at once. It’s unified by design, so your data, your operations, and your customer experience all work from the same source of truth. It’s composable by choice, so you can configure and extend the platform to fit your business instead of reshaping your business to fit the platform. At the core, it’s intelligent — with AI built in to improve business operations, and agents continuously working in the background to surface insight, make decisions faster, and act.. And because it’s engineered to launch fast and scale further, you’re not choosing between speed today and growth tomorrow. You get both.
Today we are the only vendor named as the leader both in commerce and order management. We recognize that it will take even more effort and commitment to stay at the top than was required to get there.
We remain committed to commerce and order management together on one unified, composable platform. Thank you to our clients and partners for walking this path with us. We are far from done.
