Gartner 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence
One of the most respected sources of ratings of Business Intelligence platforms (tools/tool-stack) is the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Now that the 2010 Magic Quadrant is out, let's take a deep dive into it. Let us focus on the 4th Quadrant. There are 7 players here namely Oracle (Siebel/Hyperion), IBM (Cognos/SPSS), SAP (Business Objects) and Microsoft - the large infrastructure service providers (or mega vendors) and then the independent BI providers like SAS, Microstrategy and Information Builders. All other are essentially in the niche player category...and in my opinion more suitable for specific company needs rather than go-forward strategy for entire enterprise wide BI initiative. Gartner notices that though mega-vendors account for over 75% of BI Platform, the pure-play or niche vendors are not loosing ground and companies are sometimes impatient with results from large BI projects and turn to smaller vendors for more point solutions. Departments acting as independent cost cent