What’s Changed: 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms
Gartner recently released the 2015 version of their Magic Quadrant report on Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms. In the industry study, Gartner goes into great length in highlighting the strengths and cautions regarding each listed company, while providing a helpful visual on the current trajectory of each company. The companies are grouped into four quadrants based on their ability to execute, while also taking into account the completeness of their vision. The names of each segment are as follows: Niche Players, Visionaries, Challengers, and Leaders. This is the third-straight year Solutions Review has had the opportunity to provide reaction to this report.
In the months since Gartner published the Magic Quadrant, a lot in the industry has changed, and depending on which end of the spectrum you stand; you could even say it has evolved. We’ve seen an explosion in real-time capabilities over the last half-year, as organizations want to view on-the-fly insights in order to react to events as they happen. In addition, BI seems to be quickly moving toward democratization, as many enterprise companies are seeing the benefits of putting data in the hands of more people. Although still in its infancy, mobile analytics will continue to grow in popularity as well as business practices become workable from a wider variety of platforms and devices. We’ve also witnessed giants in the space come together to give their customers more, with the most recent example being the partnership between Tableau and Datameer.
Our initial takeaway from this year’s Magic Quadrant is that the companies seemed to have been clustered more into the middle of the graph, as Gartner predicts a fundamental shift in the BI and analytics market to be on the horizon. They project that the BI and analytics software markets will continue to grow rapidly as the majority of data will be moved from hardware sources to the cloud. Further, they peg projected growth on the advancement of the Internet of Things, and all the real-time data that millions of new sensor-embedded products will produce, as well as data exploration, which is forecasted to dominate new investment, smart data discovery, and giving business users better access and governability to self-service data. Gartner explains: “This will enable companies that have historically competed on physical assets to compete on information assets.”
Several companies showed no notable move, while Birst, a representative of the “new guard”, has solidified its spot firmly in the “Challengers” quadrant as an organization that has had success in delivering an integrated BI platform that combines all of the essential components to create, deploy, develop and maintain enterprise-class reporting and data discovery solutions. The “old guard” of IBM, SAS, SAP and Oracle have continued to tumble, as this represents the second-straight year Gartner has downgraded each on the diagram.
The three clear winners are Pyramid Analytics, Logi Analytics, and TARGIT. Pyramid is a well-funded organization on the rise and in its second year on the report, targeting organizations that use the Microsoft BI stack. Pyramid is now within striking distance of the “Challengers” bracket, an impressive feat.
The four names no longer appear on the graph are Infor, Arcplan, Bitam, and Jaspersoft (due to its acquisition by TIBCO). There is one new name; Datawatch, a company that offers an interactive data discovery environment which specializes in real-time streaming and muti-structured data.
Tableau, a BI solution that provides fast and easy visual analytics for data sets, is on a planet of their own, while Qlik and Microsoft have fallen back a bit, now finding themselves in the middle of the pack. Alteryx, Panorama, GoodData, and Pentaho all saw slight regression in their placement on the Magic Quadrant, while Actuate (now OpenText) was downgraded noticeably. TIBCO also fell from a comfortable spot in the “Leaders” quadrant to the top of the “Visionaries” cluster.