Gartner Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant: Winners & Losers 2014

Click on to Expand

Taking a closer look at the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytic Platforms 2014, there are some clear winners and losers and some interesting contrast from the previous year’s report.

Right out of the gate Gartner signals a massive repositioning of the top solutions from 2013 by stating that, “The most notable change in this year’s Magic Quadrant is that all the vendors in the Leaders quadrant have been moved to the left in terms of Completeness of Vision.”

Surprising Gartner makes a mistake here as they apparently forgot that they upgraded three of their Leaders – Tableau, Tibco Spotfire and QlikTech – on that same Completeness of Vision horizontal axis, moving all three clearly to the right from where they were in 2013.

According to the analyst, the chief driver for this resetting of the Leaders Quadrant is “the fact that no one vendor is fully addressing the critical space in the market for ‘governed data discovery’ — in other words, platforms that address both business users’ requirements for ease of use and enterprises’ IT-driven requirements.”

Interestingly in last year’s (February 2013) Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant, Gartner praised market leaders SAP, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle for the “emphasis on data discovery from most of the leaders in the market — which are now promoting tools with business-user-friendly data integration” and other features that “greatly enables organizations’ ability to perform diagnostic analytics.” Gartner even went into line by line detail regarding each leaders new feature release or acquisition and further stating, “If there were a single market theme in 2012, it would be that data discovery became a mainstream architecture.”

In fairness, the business intelligence and data analytics market is evolving so rapidly it appears that Gartner is having some difficulty determining what technology is actually trending. Which they seem to be indicating at the conclusion of the 2014 report when Gartner states, “Year-to-year comparisons of vendors’ positions are not particularly useful, given the market’s dynamics and clients’ concerns have changed since our last Magic Quadrant, particularly since we are in the middle of a significant shift in this market.”

One other odd anomaly worth noting is that every company in the 2014 Gartner study that was founded more than 20 years ago was moved backward from their placing in the 2013 BI Magic Quadrant while every company launched less than 20 years ago was moved forward.

Now on to the Winners.

Winner #1: Birst. The year-over-year Gartner trend line has Birst clearly positioned as the next “Leader” in Business Intelligence solutions – another solution moving steadily to the right on the Completeness of Vision Access. Comparing both 2013 and 2014 seems to reinforce that Gartner is trying to analyze a market demand in rapid evolution.

Gartner circa 2013: “Birst (and GoodData) are the first cloud-based BI vendors to have enough market traction and customer references to enter the Magic Quadrant. Birst has achieved this momentum — resulting in its placement in the Challengers quadrant — not because of its cloud BI credentials, but rather despite them, given its relatively low cloud BI investment intentions (only around 33% of survey respondents expressing an interest in deploying BI in the cloud). “

Gartner circa 2014: “Birst’s specialism in cloud BI is a strength since, of all the companies surveyed for this Magic Quadrant, 45% reported that they run their BI in a private, public or hybrid cloud or that they plan to do so during the next 12 months (up from approximately 30% one year ago). This shows strong momentum behind cloud BI that will benefit specialists in this space.”

Winner #2: GoodData. No other solution moved as far as fast as GoodData in the 2014 Gartner BI report – moving across a full 50% of the Niche quadrant to the threshold of Challenger. This is another indication that Gartner is rapidly re-evaluating the make-up of a top technology provider.

In the new report Gartner praises GoodData for its strength as a cloud capable solution as well as for offering “customers an end-to-end business analytics platform-as-a-service solution for data governance, data integration and data warehousing, as well as BI capabilities for reporting, dashboards, data discovery, interactive analysis and advanced analytics that are viewed by customers as highly extensible and embeddable.”

Winner #3: Alteryx. The only solution provider to have crossed into another quadrant, Alteryx moved up and to the right from Niche to the top of the Visionary quadrant. In the 2014 report, Gartner explains the Alteryx upgrade as “due to high scores for innovation, market understanding and product strategy.”

Winner #4: Pentaho. In one year’s time, Gartner has Pentaho making a giant leap to the center of the grid along equal growth along the “Ability to Execute” vertical axis as well as for Completeness of Vision. Overall, Pentaho’s weighted product score, factoring in extent of use across the 17 individual capabilities, is slightly above the average for vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Pentaho is ranked above average for many individual product capabilities, including the quality of development tools, for which it ranked second-highest among the vendors in the Magic Quadrant survey.

So there you have slightly deeper dive into the new Gartner Business Intelligence report. There is a lot of great knowledge to be gained from their analysis and a full copy of the report is available here.