Gartner and the Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant: Lots of Explaining, Lots of Subjectivity It Seems
March 13, 2016
I read a downright weird article/interview called “Big Data Discovery may put Oracle back in BI Magic Quadrant.” The title contains the magic word “may”, which does not promise to make Oracle a big dot in a Gartner Magic Quadrant, but it suggests that Gartner is doing some explaining.
As I understand the situation, the mid tier consulting firm analyzed the business intelligence sector and figured out which companies were winners and losers. Well, that’s the lingo that the original Boston Consulting Group quadrant used, and that’s how General Eisenhower used his quadrant. So those approaches override the Garnter words like niche players and visionaries. (Is it not possible for a niche player to be a visionary? Does Gartner know “Venn” to check it logic?)
The point of the write up is that Oracle, one of the big dogs in the Department of Defense’s DCGS-A and DCGS-N mash up analytics initiative is not in the Garnter magic square thing. Nope. Deleted.
Why may be a question which some folks at Oracle have been asking. The article/interview appears to be an “explainer” to make the Garnter mid tier method appear more near the top drawer in the cabinet of analytics collectibles.
I noted this passage:
Question: It sounds like the change isn’t coming from something Oracle did, but from Gartner.
Gartner’s R&D Big Dog, Josh Parenteau: Right, OBIEE is still there. It’s still being sold as their platform, but it does not meet the modern definition of the Magic Quadrant right now.
The acronym OBIEE means Oracle analytics. You, gentle reader, knew that.
Oracle was excluded because “they didn’t fully participate,” says Parenteau. He adds:
I do think that they’re late to the game by quite a bit… For Oracle, it’s recognizing the signals a bit earlier. It’s responding to customer needs and, I think, realizing that it’s not just about product. You can have the best product in the world, but if customers don’t want to work with you because they don’t like the relationship, it’s not going to matter.
So what companies of note made the Magic Quadrant? Since I don’t pay Gartner to advise me, I checked Bing and Google to locate the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence. It did not take long, because this MQ report appears to be a marketing item, not a confidential study like a report about the AVATAR program.
Check out these outfits who have met the Gartner criteria, objective and subjective:
- BeyondCore
- Domo
- Logi Analytics
- Platfora
- Sisense
Okay, some names of note.
These outfits made the list as well:
- IBM
- Microsoft
- SAS.
I highlighted this paragraph as particularly suggestive:
But I would say that, if you are a member of the install base of Oracle, know that they do have offerings in the space. They just didn’t have enough traction to get on the quadrant. If you have a big data Hadoop initiative going on, of course look at Big Data Discovery, because that’s exactly what it’s focused on. If you are looking for a tool to do data discovery, of course look at Visual Analyzer, which is part of the cloud service. If you have an initiative to get into the cloud, look at BICS. I wouldn’t say that, just because they’re not on the Magic Quadrant, if you’re an existing Oracle customer that you shouldn’t continue to look at them for solutions. This doesn’t mean that they are gone forever or off the MQ forever. It’s a transition. We’re in a market that is transitioning. Next year, it may be a new ball game.
Very mid tier. I liked the “you shouldn’t continue to look at them for solutions.” Are those words a positive or a negative? Worth watching the interaction of the Oracle folks at the Gartner experts.
Stephen E Arnold, March 13, 2016
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