MCP Gateway products provide centralized routing, authentication, and governance infrastructure for managing connections between LLM applications and Model Context Protocol servers, solving the enterprise challenge of securely controlling AI agent access to tools and data sources at scale. These gateways enable organizations to register and discover MCP servers across their infrastructure, enforce authentication and authorization policies, implement rate limiting and quota controls, audit tool-calling activities, and expose legacy REST APIs as MCP-compliant endpoints. The market spans three deployment models: open-source self-hosted gateways for developer environments, commercial managed registries that provide turnkey MCP infrastructure, and enterprise control planes emphasizing security and policy enforcement. The category emerged in late 2024 following Anthropic's introduction of the Model Context Protocol and is rapidly evolving as enterprises shift from direct MCP connections to gateway-mediated architectures.