Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant Released - But Is It All Smoke and Mirrors?

Gartner's annual roundup of business intelligence (BI) leaders, challengers, niche players and visionaries often draws ire from competitors who don't make it into the Magic Quadrant, or experts convinced the report is more about market positioning than innovation. Nonetheless, the research firm's data offers insight into both current market conditions and likely trends through the year. Simply put: get ready for agility and the cloud.

Two of Four

Only two of Gartner's four quadrants are well-filled in the latest BI report. The section for "challengers" has just two companies: LogiXML and Birst, while "visionaries" is empty. The split between "niche players" and "leaders" is as you'd expect: MISO vendors (Microsoft, IBM, Sap and Oracle) are represented in the leaders quadrant, with Microsoft coming out on top with their ability to execute, while IBM gets credit for completeness of vision. Startups like Bitam and Prognoz do well in ability to execute, almost pushing into the challenger territory, while choices like Jaspersoft, Pentaho and Actuate trend more toward the middle. This is impressive given that they're open source; while the Big Data space is comfortably owned by open source, prospective customers seem far more comfortable with proprietary BI.

Although there's a fairly decent "line of best fit" one can draw through the Gartner numbers - a nice, 45 degree climb which puts incumbents out in front and shows open source struggling to keep up - what the quadrant doesn't show are specific strengths and weaknesses. Microsoft, for example, still has trouble with mobile and getting a decent intelligence solution running on Windows 8, but excels when it comes to integration to its Dynamics offerings. Jaspersoft, meanwhile, is ...