From fascination to illumination

Gartner’s Q1-2011 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence was recently released.

Without much surprise, the four quadrants hosted some of the best BI offerings. As expected, QlikTech moved to the Leaders’ Quadrant thanks to its growing customer base, bigger deployments and a successful IPO back in October last year.

Other players also shone, inlcuding the likes of Spotfire (TIBCO) and Tableau earning the challengers title. This is what we see a trend of the Magic Quadrant, no vendor directly moves to the Leader’s box without entering the Challengers zone first. It is well expected that sooner or later, Spotfire and Tableau will join the ranks of the leaders while it is also quite possible that one or two existing leaders might start fading in history.

The Zeitgeist:

Data Discovery tools have the greatest mind share, success and momentum. They have proved to be highly disruptive and have pushed aside slowly moving elephants aside. Although elephants might be able to dance, tools like Qlikview, Tableau and Spotfire represent the new wave of BI both from both adoption and approach perspectives.

These vendors are business friendly, analyst-savvy, agnostic to (traditional)reporting and have very agile development approaches. That is why the buying criteria are reporting to be

1. Ease of Use

2. Rapid Deployment

3. Functionality

These in-memory offerings compete on OLAP’s limitations and thus add a value addition to functionality, which is pretty much appreciated by IT as well.

However, this addition to the Leaders and Challengers quadrant by these new wave BI tools have caused a chain reaction resulting in SAP, Microsoft and Cognos innovating with their own in-memory offerings and interactive visual discovery tools. However, the post-2007 acquisition hangover lingers on and still customer dissatisfaction caused due to these acquisition and merger into larger product and services suite of the mega-vendors is the cause of concern for these players.

For these new wave BI tools, old adage problems are surfacing including Data Governance, Data Quality, Master Data Management, Single Version of the Truth and the curse of the information silos. Some of these new age vendors  are solving this by having a larger portfolio of products to cater to this, like TIBCO while others focus more on OEM partners to deliver these important facets, like QlikView, while still others rely on a symbiotic relationship with existing (traditional) BI deployments like Tableau.

The Observations:

1. Both Traditional BI and Data Discovery tools are required, therefore, saturation in the Leaders Quadrant is far from reality while emergence of new vendors will still be observed.
2. The overall BI maturity is being observed with the trend shifting from measurement to analysis to forecasting and optimization
3. Cost is an increasingly important factor in purchasing and thus alternatives like open source offerings and SaaS deployments are gaining potential.
4. Niche players will continue to flourish but need to have a viable road map amidst constant threat from mega-vendors to replicate or acquire (similar) technology.