Gartner released their latest Magic Quadrant for BI last month.

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms - 2013

My thoughts as I when reading through the document:

  • Microsoft has shot right up and given the massive disparity in pricing between them and the old Mega BI Vendors club (Oracle, IBM, SAS, SAP) and the fact they can compete in all the standard DW/BI capabilities (BI, DI, DQ, Storage, OLAP, In-memory), they have to take out more market share here in little old NZ.  (Still not convinced on their Analytics capabilities)
  • The upstart visualisation exploration companies (QlikTech, Tableau) have made it to the leaders quadrant – time for a buy out sale?
  • Open source BI is in and marching, are they going to be up the execution access or across the vision axis in 2014?
  • Analytics is hot and only going to get hotter (surprise surprise)

The one thing I really struggle with is their use of Data Discovery to describe data exploration or visualisation tools.  To me Data Discovery has always been more about the process of understanding and documenting what data is stored where and in what format.  Ideally all delivered in a metadata based repository, rather than drag and dropping data to make pretty pictures.

Of course as legendary as I am (in my own lunchtime) I think Gartner will probably win in the setting a global definition war.  So I need to reset my terminology.  Perhaps as we now have term “Data Scientist” we could use “Data Archaeology” instead?  I think I like that as much as Data Scientist (which is far from the top of my loved terms, oh by the way has anybody heard of big data ? 😉

 

If you want to read the full document here it is: Gartner Magic Quadrant Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2013