Making Sense of the 2016 Business Intelligence & Analytics Magic Quadrant
What do you do when you’re the premier analyst firm analyzing the fastest growing enterprise software segment and you realize most vendors have hit a dead end? While other analysts might be too cautious to call it as it is, Gartner just raised the bar. The firm slapped the wrists of vendors for not delivering on their promises and radically shook up their predictions for 2016.
Unprecedented shifts in the Magic Quadrant
In this year’s Magic Quadrant (MQ) report for business intelligence and analytics, six out of the nine vendors in the Leaders Quadrant got pushed out. SAS, SAP, IBM and MicroStrategy were pushed down to the Visionaries Quadrant, Information Builders got recategorized as a niche player, and Oracle didn’t even make the cut for the MQ this year. Gartner also put together a new market guide report that shows where legacy enterprise reporting platforms will find their place going forward.
It seems like a pretty bold move by Gartner, but this has been a long time coming. In their 2014 MQ report, Gartner said that “all the vendors in the Leaders quadrant have been moved to the left in terms of Completeness of Vision” because “no one vendor is fully addressing the critical space in the market for ‘governed data discovery.’” Gartner called out all the vendors for not meeting both the business users’ needs for ease of use as well as IT’s needs for centralized governance and administration.
Trending towards decentralized access to insights
In the 2015 MQ report, Gartner hinted at what a modern BI platform should look like. They also highlighted a six-year trend towards business-user led, decentralized access to insights vs. IT-heavy centralized reporting. Gartner wrote: “As companies implement a more decentralized and bimodal governed data discovery approach to BI, business users and analysts are also demanding access to self-service capabilities beyond data discovery and interactive visualization of IT curated data sources.”
The next generation of UX
Even though business users want access to BI, poor adoption numbers reflect the sad truth that existing solutions are just too difficult to use. The BI and analytics industry is at an inflection point where customers are looking for products that are easier to use. We have already seen great improvements in visualization and data prep user experience. And Gartner expects the core BI user experience to be redefined by search. They said that “The combination of smart data discovery and natural language query and generation is likely to have a significant impact on the next generation BI user experience and the market in general.” Not coincidentally, 2015 was the first year that ThoughtSpot was featured in the MQ report, “to make it easy for business users (not just analysts) to build reports using a Google like search experience.“
So what makes a “modern BI platform”?
Last October, Gartner released a report on “Technology Insight for Modern Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms”. This report foreshadowed the thinking behind this year’s MQ in terms of what Gartner expects from a modern BI and analytics platform.
A shift to “modern” BI requires five key changes:
- Data Sources: From required upfront modeling to optional
- Data Ingestion & Preparation: From IT-created to business-user-created
- Content Authoring: From power users to business users
- Analysis: From predefined reporting to free-form exploration
- Insight Delivery: From distribution to collaborative storytelling
With this framework as the foundation, Gartner has redefined what critical capabilities vendors need to meet to be on the 2016 MQ report. And as a result, existing vendors that did not match up to the revised requirements lost their positions on the MQ. You can see a great summary of the thought process behind this year’s MQ report from the Gartner analyst Cindi Howson on her blog.
Now, it’s your move
So what does this mean for you if you’re looking to upgrade your BI platform? Here’s what the MQ report recommends: “Gartner's position is that organizations should initiate new BI and analytics projects using a modern platform that supports a Mode 2 delivery model, in order to take advantage of market innovation and to foster collaboration between IT and the business through an agile and iterative approach to solution development.“ As indicated in the MQ report this year, modern BI platforms will become their core focus - expect to see a lot of changes there in the coming years.
Want to learn more about why a modern BI platform is so fundamentally different from legacy products out there? Attend our webinar on March 9th where we will do a deep dive comparison between the two types of platforms. Or check us out in Dallas March 14-16 at the Gartner BI and Analytics show!