Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms
6 February 2012 ID:G00225500
Important note: Cloud/Saas Business Intelligence & Analytics vendors were not included
SaaS remains a viable option for some buyers. Just 30% of respondents to the Magic Quadrant survey were currently
using or had plans to use cloud-based BI and analytics within the next 12 months — a slight uptick from last year. The
subcategory shows slow but steady momentum as a departmental, mid-market and/or analytic application approach
to augment existing analytic capabilities and analyze data already in the cloud. Pure-play vendors continue to
compete aggressively for mind share and budget dollars. Cloud capabilities have emerged from traditional BI platform
providers, with new capabilities regularly introduced over the past year.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
The vendors in this Magic Quadrant were included based on the following criteria:
To be included in the Magic Quadrant, vendors must generate at least $15 million in BI-related software license
revenue annually. Gartner defines "total software revenue" as revenue that is generated from appliances, new
licenses, updates, subscriptions and hosting, technical support, and maintenance. Professional services revenue and
hardware revenue are not included in total software revenue (see "Market Share Analysis: Business Intelligence,
Analytics and Performance Management, Worldwide, 2010").
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Those that also supply transactional applications must show that their BI platform is used routinely by
organizations that do not use their transactional applications.
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Vendors must deliver at least nine of 14 capabilities detailed in the Market Definition/Description section
above.
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They must be able to obtain a minimum of 30 survey responses from customers that use the vendor's product
as an enterprise BI platform.
This year's Magic Quadrant customer survey included vendor-provided references, as well as survey responses from
BI users from Gartner's BI Summit, as well as respondents from last year's survey. There were 1,364 survey
responses, with 120 (8.8%) from non-vendor-supplied reference lists. To ensure the integrity of the survey data, each
survey response was checked by company respondent email. For survey responses from non-identifiable email
accounts such as Gmail or Yahoo accounts, the respondent was contacted and had to provide Gartner with a company
email address, a company role and other contact information (this amounted to fewer than five responses, all of which
were vetted and ultimately included). Further details of the survey results will be published in the forthcoming
reports: "BI Platforms User Survey, 2012: How Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendors;" "BI Platforms User
Survey, 2012: How Vendor Customers Rate Their BI Platform Functionality;" and "BI Platforms User Survey, 2012:
How Customers Rate Their BI Platform Ownership Costs (BIPOC)."
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders are vendors that are reasonably strong in the breadth and depth of their BI platform capabilities and can
deliver on enterprisewide implementations that support a broad BI strategy. Leaders articulate a business proposition
that resonates with buyers, supported by the viability and operational capability to deliver on a global basis.
Challengers
Challengers offer a good breadth of BI platform functionality and are well positioned to succeed in the market.
However, they may be limited to specific use cases, technical environments or application domains. Their vision may
be hampered by a lack of coordinated strategy across the various products in their BI platform portfolio, or they may
lack the marketing effort, sales channel, geographic presence, industry-specific content, and awareness offered by the
vendors in the Leaders quadrant.
Visionaries
Visionaries are vendors that have a strong vision for delivering a BI platform. They are distinguished by the openness
and flexibility of their application architectures, and they offer depth of functionality in the areas they address, but
they may have gaps relating to broader functionality requirements. A Visionary is a market thought-leader and
innovator. However, it may have yet to achieve sufficient scale — or there may be concerns about its ability to grow
and provide consistent execution.
Niche Players
Niche Players are those that do well in a specific segment of the BI platform market — such as reporting or
dashboarding — or that have limited capability to innovate or outperform other vendors in the market. They may
focus on a specific domain or aspect of BI, but are likely to lack depth of functionality elsewhere. Or they may have
gaps relating to broader BI platform functionality. Alternatively, Niche Players may have a reasonably broad BI
platform, but have limited implementation and support capabilities or relatively limited customer bases, such as in a
specific geography or industry. Or they may not yet have achieved the necessary scale to solidify their market
positions.
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
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Product/Service
Overall Viability
Sales Execution/Pricing
Market Responsiveness and Track Record
Marketing Execution
Customer Experience
Operations
Completeness of Vision
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Market Understanding
Marketing Strategy
Sales Strategy
Offering (Product)
Strategy
Business Model
Vertical/Industry Strategy
Innovation
Geographic Strategy