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The Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms – by Gartner

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I got several questions on the Magic Quadrant for BI from Gartner so I went out and found the publicly accessible information for you. View the entire document here but snippets are below:

The Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms above presents a global view of Gartner's opinion of the main software vendors that should be considered by organizations seeking to develop business intelligence (BI) applications. Buyers should evaluate vendors in all four quadrants — those from the Niche Players and Visionaries quadrants are driving innovation in areas such as interactive visualization, in-memory data analysis, real-time dashboards, wizard-based application development and spreadsheet-based reporting. The scores and commentary are based substantially on three sources: customer perceptions of each vendor's strengths and challenges derived from BI-related inquiries with Gartner, an online survey of vendor customers conducted in late 2007, and a vendor-completed questionnaire about their BI strategy and operations.

So what has been going on in the BI platform market in 2007:

  

 

 

As anticipated in last year's Magic Quadrant and other Gartner research large application and software infrastructure vendors completed or initiated significant strategic acquisitions in the BI platform market in 2007:

  • In July, Oracle completed its purchase of Hyperion. An example of straight market consolidation, this move brought two competing BI platforms, Hyperion System 9 and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, both Leaders on the 2007 Magic Quadrant, under Oracle ownership and expanded Oracle's BI resources and staffing.
  • In October, SAP announced its acquisition of Business Objects, which will expand its presence into the "business user" market, which SAP defines as being made up of business roles involved in analytical and information-intensive activities. This acquisition, which was completed in January 2008, fills a significant gap in SAP's query and reporting tools portfolio, but represents a major strategic shift away from "slot-in" technology buys and organic software development.
  • As the year closed, Cognos completed its acquisition of Applix, and its in-memory online analytical processing (OLAP) engine. It also agreed to be bought by IBM. Though not strictly a consolidating move, this acquisition is significant, as it will end IBM's abstinence from the BI platform and applications market. IBM has repeatedly stated that it will focus on the infrastructure and the middleware layer, and that it will only "enable" applications. While a BI platform includes many infrastructure components, the Cognos BI and performance management applications will fill a big void in IBM's stack.

Megavendors are beginning to dominate the BI market — in less than one year, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM will have gone from accounting for a quarter of the market to owning over two-thirds of it. As such, the "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2008" reflects the tipping point at which the market moves away from being led by independent BI vendors like Business Objects and Cognos, to one where the megavendors rule. Future BI investment decisions will be tethered much more closely to strategic sourcing and stack-led factors, and will be more influenced by organizational relationships with application and infrastructure vendors.