Gartner Magic Quadrant BI and Analytics Platform 2015 key take aways.

Every year the Business Intelligence vendors and users await the Gartner Magic Quadrant to be released to see who is the current leader in the space.

The 2015 report released on 23 February 2015 shows Tableau as the clear leader.

Gartner make it clear that readers should not use this report solely to choose BI and Analytics vendors, but to use it as an overview of the marketplace. The vendors used in the report are the ‘power providers’ and many of the smaller vendors, of which there are many do not fit into the 13 Critical capabilities defined by Gartner.

Overview

Gartner’s view is that the market for Business Intelligence and Analytics platforms will remain one of the fastest-growing software markets. The market (for BI platforms) grew 9% in 2013, and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.7% through 2018, driven by the following market activity:

• Continued Investment into Data Discovery
• Shift towards self-service platforms for end users
• Smart Data Discovery opened up to the end user
• The move to BI Cloud offerings
• The drive to incorporate the Internet of Things with live feeds
• Multi-structured Data Analytics
• Embeded Business Intelligence
• BI to change from cost centre to profit centre
• Collaboration and stakeholder adoption

Gartner Magic Quadrant Historical Plot

The following visualisation by Eric Tobias using Tableau Public demonstrates the movers and shakers over the last few years. Hopefully Eric will add 2015 to the visualisation soon (sorry Eric).

Key Take Away’s

Growing business user requirements for ease of use, support for users to conduct complex types of analysis, and a fast time to business benefits are not being well met by vendors.

Gartner inquiries and survey data suggest that, increasingly, companies would like to expand their use of, and even standardize on, data discovery platforms for their larger enterprise BI deployments, but find that in many cases these platforms lack the necessary enterprise features in relation to governance, administration and scalability (among other things). The data discovery vendors continue to invest in capabilities to reverse these limitations.

Next-generation data discovery capabilities that leverage advanced analytics, but hide its complexity to simplify business user data preparation and automate pattern exploration, are likely to be more important enablers.

Leaders

The undisputed leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant is Tableau with it’s ability to deliver an excellent customer experience, including sales experience, support, product quality, user enablement, availability of skills, upgrade/migration difficulty.

Qlik follow a close second in the data discovery space continuing to deliver excellence in customer experience requirements.

Customers place huge value with ease of use, satisfaction with product features, sales experience, support, product quality, upgrade experience, user enablement, achievement of business benefits and supporting a range of analysis for all users.

Challengers

Birst sits at the top of the challengers segment as they delivered on most customer requirements for centralized BI deployments in the cloud, but to move into the leaders segment needs to concentrate on their go-to-market machine, and some vision elements of a Leader. Birst is one to watch as the end user requirement for BI cloud starts to take hold.

Logi Analytics offers an easy-to-use IT-centric platform that is well-suited to embedded use cases; customers are satisfied with all aspects of their experience.

Visionaries

A significant move into the Visionaries quadrant this year was Tibco Software, with a strong product and good product vision that spans business-user-driven data discovery, geospatial, advanced analytics (Tibco Spotfire). The recent aquasition of Tibco by Vista Partners has led to an increased uncertainty, however the strong product and increased sales execution this year will provide the recovery from last years results.

Alteryx and Panorama Software fix their positions in the Visionaries quadrant because each delivers a unique set of capabilities targeted at key buying requirements.

Niche Players

There are many vendors in the niche quadrant, that it is difficult to single out anyone vendor, as they accommodate a wide variety end user requirements. The report does not single out any particular vendor but lists the summery of each vendor alphabetically.

Summary

This years report singles out Tableau as the undisputed leader in the BI and Analytics space. Gartner reports that the BI & Analytics Platforms will remain one of the top software marketplaces of 2015.

The market for Business Intelligence Platforms will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.7% all the way through to 2018.

Key drivers for this will be the continued investment in Data Discovery by the enterprise end user to gain competitive advantage over their competition, whilst being able to create in-house self service BI utilising vendor products.

Smaller SME’s may not have the resources to create an in-house department and will need to rely on specialist BI agencies to create the solutions on their behalf.