February 21, 2012

The 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms — company-by-company comments

This is one of a series of posts on business intelligence and related analytic technology subjects, keying off the 2011/2012 version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. The four posts in the series cover:

The heart of Gartner Group’s 2011/2012 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms was the company comments. I shall expound upon some, roughly in declining order of Gartner’s “Completeness of Vision” scores, dubious though those rankings may be. 

The other three vendors in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms “Leaders” or “Challengers” quadrants are advanced visualization poster children QlikTech, Tibco Spotfire, and Tableau. That’s in decreasing order of “Completeness of Vision” — i.e., of sales/marketing maturity — but increasing order of “Ability to Execute”. Gartner gushes over Tableau:

For the third year in a row, Tableau is the “sweetheart” of the Magic Quadrant, with customers even more enamored with it this year than in the last two. It gained overwhelmingly positive customer survey feedback across the board in all measures in the survey, including ease of use, functionality, product quality, product performance, support, customer relationship, success, achievement of business benefits and view of the vendor’s future. Indeed, it earned a top or near top score in most of these key categories — even with its high revenue growth (94% in 2011), when growing pains might be expected. These stellar results in part contributed to Tableau’s strong Ability to Execute position, despite its relatively small size.

but is more measured about QlikView:

QlikTech’s growing pains are more evident. The note of realism that first appeared in 2010 grew in 2011 and became a genuine concern for 2012. For the first time, QlikTech’s customers reported having a poor overall customer experience (of the vendors on the Magic Quadrant only SAP, IBM, Targit and Microsoft fared worse), and below average ratings for product quality and support. Furthermore, more QlikTech customers than for any other vendor (with the exception of Oracle) said that QlikView became less successful in the previous year (that is, the product is being used by fewer users, or is being replaced by other tools).

and makes a good point about the whole category in a Tibco bullet:

Tibco Spotfire has among the highest complexity of user analysis score than any vendor on the Magic Quadrant, while at the same time customers rate it above average on ease of use, particularly for end users. This paradox typifies why data discovery tools in general, and Tibco Spotfire in particular, are so compelling and are proliferating.

Beyond that:

Gartner places 11 other BI vendors in the “Niche” quadrant. Of those, the ones I know most about are the three open source vendors. Gartner’s views on Jaspersoft seem to boil down to:

Somehow this adds up to the lowest “Ability to Execute” rank in the whole Gartner BI Magic Quadrant.

Gartner sees Pentaho similarly to how it sees Jaspersoft, and gives it the second-lowest “Ability to Execute” score in the quadrant. Actuate is placed higher in the Quadrant than Jaspersoft or Pentaho, but it’s tough to see why from Gartner’s comments, unless Gartner was giving credit for the best aspects of each of Actuate’s two alternative reporting software product lines.

Comments

5 Responses to “The 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms — company-by-company comments”

  1. The 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms — overview comments : DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on February 21st, 2012 7:46 am

    […] Company-by-company comments based on the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence …. […]

  2. Business intelligence industry trends : DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on February 21st, 2012 8:35 pm

    […] Company-by-company comments based on the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence …. […]

  3. Visualign on February 23rd, 2012 11:09 am

    For an interactive Magic Quadrant chart with the last 5 years of Business Intelligence company trajectories, see here:

    http://visualign.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/gartners-magic-quadrant-for-business-intelligence/

  4. aditya on February 24th, 2012 5:49 pm

    Well said 🙂

    Mostly Gartner forces people to read between the lines. This time it seems that they avoided that effort too.

  5. State of Data #88 « Dr Data's Blog on March 1st, 2012 11:44 pm

    […] –  Gartner Magic Quadrant 2012 for BI Platforms – detailed […]

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