Business Intelligence Market Overview
Posted by Noel Shannon on Tue, Jun 28, 2011 @ 02:49 AM
Business Intelligence Market Overview
The 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms gives a snapshot of the product players in the Business Intelligence Sector. I have disagreed with Gartner over the years on their BI market assessment. However, I believe they have it right this year (albeit 12 months late).
Figure 1 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms 2011
There is a significant shift happening for the first time in a number of years, which has led Gartner to formally split the market into Traditional BI Platform Providers and Data Discovery Platform provides
a. The Traditional BI Platform Providers
The bigger platforms have becomes excessively complex, expensive and bloated, but retain the largest customer base. They tick all the boxes for functionality, but under the hood they are a myriad of independent, acquired technologies due to an acquisition spree by IBM, Oracle and SAP several years ago. They are generally reliant on SQL based retrieval of data from relational databases, and are architecturally struggling with the exponential increase in data volumes. Many of their customers are also baulking at the relentless year-on-year costs increases, complex upgrades and poor support. Business satisfaction is rapidly decreasing, although this is not always recognised by IT, who often pushed the ‘Single Platform’ agenda.
b. The Data Discovery Platform Providers
These are BI Platform vendors focussed on an alternative approach to the traditional BI platform vendors. They emphasise speed of implementation, flexibility to change, highly attractive ‘consumer’ oriented interfaces and high-performance response times. They use modern ‘Big Data’ architectures (Reduce algorithms, In-Memory processing, NoSQL) instead of SQL architectures. They are not as functionally complete as the traditional vendors, but are a hit with the user community. The leaders in this sector are Qliktech, Tableau and Spotfire, with Qlikview by the most mature and broady adopted, recognised by their positioning in the Leaders Quadrant for the first time.
c. Market Opportunity Conclusion
Breaking into the ‘Traditional BI’ platform services market place is expensive, difficult and crowded. The Data Discovery Platforms are proving more innovative, popular and are massively popular and ‘cool’ to the customers. Consequently, these products are rapidly making their way into organisations as either displacements for existing tools, or in addition to the existing IT ‘Corporate Standard’. The buyer is typically the business, or more progressive IT functions, giving an easier, often inbound, sales process.
It is somewhat akin to the Blackberry V iPhone war inside organisations, IT will stress the security and manageability of Blackberry, but ultimately the business customer will win and iPhones become corporate handsets. The business does not care, once the product is useful and ‘cool’ enough. This has been highlighted by Garner this year.
Gartner Quote:
With "ease of use" now surpassing "functionality" for the first time as the dominant BI platform buying criterion in research conducted for this report, vocal, demanding and influential business users are increasingly driving BI purchasing decisions, most often choosing easier to use data discovery tools over traditional BI platforms — with or without IT's consent.
This is also sector that is under populated with larger, quality professional services and development providers, they have largely ignored it. Of the vendors in this sector, Qliktech is by far the largest, and fastest growing. They are adding customers globally at the rate of 18 a day, and are rapidly pushing into large enterprise deployments (again, noted by Gartner).
For more information on QlikPower - Qlik here