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the Free CMSWire NewsletterEarlier this week we saw that increasing enterprise demands for different kinds of business intelligence is stretching vendors to come up with software that will keep business users happy. The result is a software space that is currently characterized by innovation and change, according to Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence 2012.
BI Magic Quadrant
Unlike other software areas, when we look at the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence, there are only two categories of players: Leaders and Niche players (with the notable two exceptions of Tableau and Tibco that made it into the Challengers Quadrant.)
Gartner has some interesting thoughts on this worth looking at before looking at the Leaders Quadrant.
The BI market, Gartner says, is a mature market that is expanding at a rapid rate. The result is a high level of innovation across the market, coupled with significant and widespread acquisitions over the past five years.
Notable among those acquisitions is the Oracle buy-out of Siebel and Hyperion, SAP and Business Objects, and the IBM purchase of Cognos. In all cases assets and technologies were incorporated into the relevant technology portfolios.
Parallel Trends
But it seems like the market has a way to go in this respect, and acquisitions still abound. In 2011, for example, Oracle acquired Endeca, and IBM purchased Algorithmics, and has already announced a number of analytics related acquisitions since the beginning of this year.
The larger vendors also bring wide-reaching experience with thousands of customers that help shape their development experience with mobile applications and in-memory platforms.
Running in parallel with this is the work and development being done by speciality vendors that tend to develop one or two areas of BI, like predictive analytics, advanced visualization, geospatial analysis or cloud analytic platforms.
They tend to develop packages for specific verticals like healthcare, consumer or financial services, creating packages that can then be built on to broaden their appeal.
These two trends have had significant impact on the "shape" of the Magic Quadrant participants in 2012, and Gartner says it expects it to continue over the coming year.
The Leaders Quadrant
So who made it into the Leaders quadrant, and what’s more, how do you get into the Quadrant? Firstly, vendors need to generate US$ 15 million in BI-related software license revenue annually.
Vendors were judged on their ability to turn concept and vision into a market reality. On top of that, Leaders are vendors that can implement enterprise-wide implementations that support a broad BI strategy and have the operational capabilities to deliver on a global scale.
In alphabetical order, the companies that fall into the Leaders category are:
IBM
Strengths
According to Gartner, IBM has maintained its position on the completeness of Vision axis, mainly as a result of its holistic vision of unified BI, analytics and performance. It has built up the IBM BI portfolio over the past five years and has added information management software into the mix to make it one of the most robust offerings on the market. The result is that it can offer both a tools-based and/or a solution-driven offering, along with significant vertical expertise, to customers and prospects.
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