Looking at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms (MQ) and the Critical Capabilities for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms (CC), let’s cover how we should be looking at this research and what we should be considering for the next 12 months.
First of all,…the picture is not THE entire story. It is a story, and that story is centered around markets. How a vendor is selected to participate and show up on the MQ first comes down to the market share it holds. We have no idea what the cut-off is, but if we imagine a pie chart in a bad use case, at some point, slivers of pie are no longer useful even as an aggregate. Same goes for this use case. The vendors must have relevant market size (revenue), and Gartner must hear about them (inquires) enough that it impacts their business. Yes, Gartner is a business like any other, and they cater to their clients as they should. Gartner’s clients tend to be larger organizations, so let’s keep that in mind.
What does Gartner gather from the vendors to support the research? There are vendor surveys asking about functionality and things for the critical capabilities where evidence must be provided (love this), and then there are questions about the health of the business and strategy going forward. Finally, a list of clients provided by the vendor who get surveyed and mix in some Gartner Peer Insights reviews. What this helps us as consumers understand is the viability of the vendor going forward. Vendors in the top right have higher market share and are likely to continue to invest in their future to maintain that direction. Don’t take this as Microsoft has a larger development team than everyone else, but a generalization that they have a ton of market share (everyone has Power BI if they are a Microsoft client) and are still investing in it as they have a comprehensive roadmap around analytics. Notice the nuance…we said, “roadmap around analytics.” This is on purpose, as a vendor in their roadmap may have newer offerings or adjacent capabilities that they are leveraging to round out their capabilities for the MQ and CC. An example of this is IBM leveraging IBM Analytics Content Hub to further its scores with the Analytics Catalog critical capability (which we’ll come back to). There is also some gamesmanship by the vendors in this area when it comes to stating or sharing revenue numbers. Did the vendor include just revenue for their BI tool, or did they also include the adjacent offerings, and how far did they go? As an example, A tool like Power BI at its low price would have to sell a ton to have caught the older vendors at the pace it did, and we know it is included in enterprise licenses, but what percentage is unclear. In almost every case, unless the vendor is only an Analytics tool vendor, they are using a higher roll-up of multiple pieces of software.
Being fair to Gartner, there is another common mistake most people make when looking at the quadrant. Microsoft is the leader, so Power BI is the best! Remember that we just covered that the MQ is more about market share, viability going forward, vendor-friendly biased input (survey and Peer Insights), and don’t forget the adjacent offerings! I would like to see Gartner list the offering set used to respond to the MQ for each vendor. If we want to see who has the best / most capabilities, then we must turn to the Critical Capabilities report.
Reading the Critical Capabilities report also can’t be done without understanding and engagement with the content. Overall scores are nice, but if certain capabilities are not important, then they can be ignored. Yes, we can argue against that, saying the best well-rounded vendor might be the best place to start; however, smaller companies (not typically Gartner clients) likely can’t afford the full-blown offering and the adjacent offerings. The vendors in this research are Gartner clients as well, so this also gives them something to market to capture newer clients. An example of this might be a local football club that is looking to start with Analytics (aka pretty pictures) and just needs some simple tooling above Sheets or Excel, meaning that Power BI or Looker is likely the best choice given their starting point in price, learning curve and ease to start with spreadsheet / CSV data. Let’s dive into that fictitious example, as it will highlight why the MQ and CC are tightly coupled.
The Football Club use case:
Small business. Has access to the Gartner research as BI tool vendors license and make it available on the internet to help inform their decisions. Uses spreadsheets and presentations along with some SaaS offerings for day-to-day (email, registrations, billing, website, and other sources for game and player data).
The Critical Capabilities (website or downloaded CSV) allows Customization to create your own use cases. You can weigh the importance of each critical capability, and it will tell you, based on the research, the rank of each tool for that use case. In this use case, if we said 80% for Data Visualization (cause I’m looking for visuals), 5% for Automated Insights (cause that might be cool), 5% for Data Preparation (cause I always have to fix extract data), 5% for Data Storytelling (again, sound cool and might use), and finally 5% for Natural Language Query (cause we don’t want to work hard), then what comes out as our top 5 are: Pyramid, Salesforce, Sisense, SAS and Microsoft. FYI – Google / Looker is 14th! Now, using the MQ to help refine these further, we would look for a good community and widely accessible knowledgebase (market things that put vendors to the right and up) and, lastly, a focus on price. This would leave the club with two likely choices: Power BI & Looker. Fictitiously, they chose Looker because they are already using Google Suite, but the data really suggested Power BI. The last influencer here is what is already in place and ease of acquisition.
It should be noted that Gartner clients can also use an interactive version of the MQ to see the vendor position change based on various attributes, such as ability to execute and completeness of vision. While interesting to see if I was a vendor, as an end consumer, I think Gartner’s defaults are in our best interest.
The takeaway for the MQ is:
- Don’t start with the MQ!
- Using the Critical Capabilities Report – decide what’s important to your use case (might be multiple).
- Take the results from #2 and cross reference that with what’s in the MQ
- If you already have an existing vendor that covers your use cases, be happy or be prepared to justify the new additional spend (nothing is free)
- If your vendor is not in the reports, and you are getting what you need, also be happy. Bonus if they have been mentioned by Gartner anywhere.
But wait – we said we would come back to IBM Analytics Content Hub. IBM has done a good job pushing its Analytics Catalog technology, which allows content from most major popular Analytics and BI tools to surface together in a single entry point. However, when using the Critical Capabilities report and focusing on that piece alone at 100%, the score is not what we would expect. IBM is the only vendor in the MQ & CC that has a true Analytics Catalog, and the other vendors are not able to surface analytics content (not datasets but actual visualizations and charts) from multiple vendors. So, the last takeaway is to use the Gartner MQ & CC to shortlist and inform, but then when spending time with a vendor, be sure to be clear in your questions and use cases.
In the case of focusing on a single capability like Analytics Catalog, your choice may not be included in this Gartner research at all! Digital Hive was a previous Gartner Cool Vendor and has been mentioned seven times in the last 12 months in Gartner research, so we know we are getting this capability right. We also know that this capability is getting more critical, as it was covered specifically in Gartner’s webinar on the MQ by none other than Kurt Schlegel! Our favourite Kurt Quote: “We need to organize this mess!”.