Thanks to the folks at Tableau for publishing the latest Gartner BI Magic Quadrant. I’ve been out of the pure BI market for a couple of years and I have to say I’m a little surprised by the results.
- Microsoft on top. Really? Last I heard they blew up the core BI team and this was primarily an Excel + Sharepoint play. Guess that’s working well for them. Do they break out BI Platform revenue? Are they displacing SAP/Business Objects and Cognos/IBM in the enterprise?
- Oracle #2. This is less surprising given the Siebel and Hyperion technology they provide, but I didn’t realize their story had come together to this extent. Is there a separate BI sales organization these days or is this also mainly sold an add-on?
- IBM (Cognos) way out on vision (but seems to be overshadowed by the vendors above them). Congrats to them on their latest release. It appears to have had an impact.
- Information Builders name should have been in the top left. The optics of the current location certainly play in their favor for the casual observer.
- QlikTech and Tableau not further ahead on vision. This is what I don’t get about this (and most other) quads. From all accounts QlikTech and Tableau are disrupting the market and growing at a phenomenal rate (albeit from a smaller base). Why aren’t the newer vendors who are innovating and disrupting given more credit on vision? Their execution is clearly impressive.
- SAP (Business Objects) is in such a weak position. What am I missing here? Who’s running analyst relations over there? This can’t have gone over well with my friends in BI marketing at SAP. In this just the on-going sea-saw with Cognos, was it the Cognos 10 release that helped them get so far ahead? How will SAP counter?
- Pentaho didn’t make the cut. I’m not sure if this is so bad given the bottom left position of fellow open-source BI vendor JasperSoft.
- Corda, arcPlan and Accuate are still in business. These guys have been around for a long time. What direction are they moving? Congrats to LogiXML for making the cut this year. I haven’t heard of Board International (name needs work), Targit, Salient,or Bitam, but congratulations to them as well.
- No SaaS BI…yet? Okay, just throwing that in. I realize there’s a revenue threshold here, but I do wonder how vendors in the cloud BI market are doing at this point.
Full disclosure: I realize the above “analysis” (ok, questions and commentary) is exactly what Gartner doesn’t like, but in my experience it’s exactly how both vendors and customers review these quadrants.
Any insight appreciated. Here’s the quad:
Related Articles
- Gartner Quadrant Reports BI Split (informationweek.com)
- Comments on the Gartner 2010/2011 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant (dbms2.com)
- Gartner Explains the Process for Creating a Magic Quadrant (readwriteweb.com)
In(tegrate) the Clouds 
I think the Microsoft team has been cleaved – one lot to go work on PowerPivot/DAX, and the other part to go cloudy with SSRS. Why that makes them #1 may be linked to when Gartner say that the total number of users accessing BI built using Microsoft tools is higher than for other tools – so it must be an enterprise standard. But because the report is in SSRS and that’s visible through Sharepoint, and that most of the company can access Sharepoint, does that make the reporting tool used?
Odder for me is MicroStrategy, who get their position apparently by dint of the larger volumes people point it at.