It is always an exciting morning when the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms is published! Let us compare the 2013 quadrant to the one of 2014 that was released February 24th 2014.
Tableau is probably the winner this year, topping all the others when it comes to Ability to execute and gaining points on the Completeness of vision-axis. In December 2013 Tableau presented a clear and spot on vision on Business Intelligence. Putting this vision to practice seems to pay off for them.
Also QlikTech - that was recently renamed Qlik - is going forward in these two categories and surpasses Microsoft on the Y-axis. QlikView being my main development environment, I am already very curious how the 2015 quadrant will look like when QlikView.Next will be rolled out. Will it convince Gartner of it's ability to execute more than it does now?
However, the largest jumps on both axis we can see in the quadrant of the niche players, where amongst others GoodData and Pentaho are leaping forward.
We can see some losers in the leaders quadrant: Microstrategy, Information Builders, IBM and probably the most dramatic: Oracle. I haven't got any experience with their BI solutions, so any thoughts about how this came about are welcome! Also SAP got my attention: it seems they are giving up some of their Completeness of vision to gain in the Ability to execute-category, which makes sense to me.
I have made proof of concepts in Tableau and GoodData some time ago and in Pentaho more recently. In Tableau I missed the associative experience too much to go through with it, I also found that it had somewhat limited possibilities to finetune the layout. With GoodData the support team in the Czech Republic helped me very good to set up the dashboard, but on the downside there were some performance issues. Although Pentaho is quite complex to set up, it is open source which means I don't have to deal with the limitations Qliks licensingmodel is posing.
Time to check out Tableau again.
