Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Data Integration for 2016 and my opinion is that Gartner is behind the times and have missed the boat with this one.  

A bold statement but here is why I am saying this.

Have a look at the MQ:

quadrant data integration 2016

As I mentioned in my blog about the BI (Business Intelligence) MQ earlier this year, Gartner had rightly identified the BI market had moved and completely rejigged the MQ to reflect that.

In the land of Data Integration, the same thing has happened. We have seen a raft of DW (Data Warehouse) automation, cloud data integration, and self-service data wrangling style tools appear and start to get wider adoption. Some have been around for a while and some are relatively new.  Tools such as:

None of these or the many alternatives appear in the MQ, and I’m guessing it is because none of them hit the number of customers or the revenue mark required to be included, given they still sit in an emerging market.

In the BI MQ Tableau and Qlik had been around for years so didn’t have these problems.

But this is the problem; the BI, data, and analytics markets are moving so fast these days that the Gartner Magic Quadrants are starting to become laggards on what the market is doing. But it is still one of the major go-to references for customers on what to evaluate and buy.

As an aside, I am seeing the same problem with cloud BI offerings, where the software is being updated so fast the users cannot adapt and keep up, interesting problem to have.

So here is an interesting problem; the need for a bar for the number of customers and revenue provides the MQ with a level of authority on supposedly sustainable offerings and offerings being adopted. While at the same time the new world is accelerating product development so new offerings are being made available every day.

I would hate to be a customer trying to decide what to buy for Data Integration right now.

Or a consulting company focussed on helping these customers.

Damn Daniel!

You can read the full Gartner report care of Attunity.

Change, learn or fade away, it’s your choice – Shane

Shane blogs about all of the things data and business intelligence. 

Read all of Shane’s blogs here.

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