On February 5th, Gartner released the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics Platforms. First, they have updated the name of the report to add analytics to the BI platforms report. Gartner explains,
BI and analytic platforms enable companies to measure and improve the metrics that matter most to their businesses, such as sales, profits, costs, quality defects, safety incidents, customer satisfaction, on-time delivery and so on. BI and analytic platforms also enable organizations to classify the dimensions of their businesses such as their customers, products, and employees with more granular precision. (page 1)
Next, they announced the 2012 market trend is a move from descriptive analytics (e.g., reporting) towards analytics that support diagnostics (e.g., data visualization). Thus, a move towards data discovery.
I am not too surprised by either of these announcements; they have been topics in frequent product updates and announcements in 2012. The “aha moments” in the report for me were as follows:
- Birst, a cloud-based BI platform, is Gartner new darling. It was rated number one by the customers for functionality, quality, ease-of-use and it has an extensive product breadth and depth.
- Gooddata was added to the list with its Software-as-a-Service BI business model. Gooddata offers a hosted service that empowers organizations to create their own revenue-generating data-as-a-service offering. Interesting business model.
- Jaspersoft, an open source BI platform, runs natively in the several cloud environments (e.g., Amazon Web Services, VMware Cloud Foundry). This supports the development and deployment of BI applications in the cloud.
- Microsoft plans to enhance the visualization, reporting, and ETL capabilities in Excel. They plan to go so far as to added geospatial analysis and self-service ETL to the product.
- Oracle checks all the boxes necessary to have a BI and analytic platform; nevertheless, I missed the big picture for what it means from a technical integration point-of-view (seems disjointed and complex) and a business user value proposition point-of-view. I will have to study this one a little closer.
- I like this Gartner prediction: Gartner has predicted that, by 2014, up to 40% of analytics projects will be service-led and software-supported. (Page 9)
- SAS is expected to maintain its leadership position in the analytic market (no surprise); they are already leading in the analysis of unstructured data (surprise).
- Tibco Spotfire seemingly contradictory user impressions and cloud ambitions. On one hand, it has the highest scores for user complexity; on the other hand, users choose it for its ease of use. On one hand, 67% of survey respondents say they will never put their enterprise Bi platform in the cloud; on the other hand, a high percentage of Tibco clients plan to move to the cloud. Tibco deserves further investigation.
- There are a few names I expected to see, but did not (Um!).
Reference
Schlegel, Kurt, Rita L. Sallam, and Joao Tapadinhas. Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms. Analyst, Gartner, 2013