The report can be obtained here. Along with some industry analysis hear

Well the top right quadrant is becoming a crowded place.

I have not had time to really go over this and compare it to last year’s but the trends and challenges that we have been seeing are reflected in this report; some interesting points:

1. All of the Enterprise level systems are reported to be hard to implement. This is not surprise – what always surprises me is that companies blame this on one company or another – they are all like that! It has to be one of the decision criterion when selecting one of the comprehensive tool sets.
2. My sense is that IBM is coming along – and is in the running for the uber BI / Analytics company. However, the write up indicates that growth through acquisition is still happening. This has traditionally led to confusion in the product line and difficulty in implementation. This is especially the case when you implement in a big data or streaming environment.
3. Tibco and Tableau continue to go head to head. I see Spotfire on top from a product perspective with its use of “R”, the purchase of Insightful and building on its traditional enterprise service bus business. HOWEVER, Gartner calls out the cost model as something that holds Spotfire back. This is especially true when compared to Tableau. My sense is that if TIBCO is selling an integrated solution, then they can embed the cost of the BI capabilities in the total purchase and this is how they are gaining traction. Regardless – Spotfire is a great product and TIBCO is set to do great things, but their price point sets them up against SAS and IBM, while their flagship component sets them up against Tableau at a lower price point. My own experience is that this knocks them out of the early stage activity, and hence they are often not “built in” to the later stage activity.
4. SAS Continues to dominate where analytics and  Big Data are involved. However, interesting to note that Gartner calls out that they are having a hard time communicating business benefit. This is critical when you are selling a enterprise product at a premium price. Unlike IBM who can draw on components that span the enterprise, SAS has to build the enterprise value proposition on the analytics stack only – this is not a problem unique to SAS – building the value proposition for enterprise level analytics is tough.
5. Tableau is the darling of the crowd and moves into the Gartner Leader’s Quadrant for the first time. The company has come out with a number of “Big Data” type features. They have connectors to Hadoop, and the article refers to in-memory and columnar databases. While these things are important, and the lack of them was holding the company back from entering certain markets, it is a bit at odds with their largest customer segment, and their traditional positioning approach. Addressing larger and a more integrated approach takes them more directly into the competitive sphere of the big guys (SAP, IBM and SAS), and also into the sphere of TIBCO Spotfire.
6. It would be interesting to run the Gartner analysis along different use cases (Fraud, Risk Management, Consumer Market Analysis, etc.) In certain circles one hears much of companies like Palantir that has a sexy interface and might do well against Spotfire and Tableau, but is not included here.  Detica is another company that may do well. SAS would probably come out on top in certain areas especially with the new Visual Analytics component. There are probably other companies that have comprehensive BI solutions for particular markets – If anyone has information on these types of solutions, I would be interested in a comment.

More to follow – and there is probably much more to say as things continue to evolve at a pace!

Tags: BI, COTS, Gartner, Open Source, products