Our visionary cloud bet, and passing Tableau and Qlik in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant

Every year, when Gartner releases a new Magic Quadrant, a few predictable things happen:

1. Vendors who are happy with their positions will love it and tout it.
2. Vendors who are unhappy with their positions will vent and rant. 
3. Gartner will encourage everyone to actually read the report, but most will just look at the picture and let their opinions fly.

So now that the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Analytics & BI is released, let me do my part to adhere to the aforementioned roles. 

How did ThoughtSpot do this year?

First, the good news: ThoughtSpot is now the second most visionary company in this massive and crowded space. We've overtaken Tableau and Qlik, with Microsoft PowerBI squarely in our sights. Overtaking Tableau is especially sweet since it's a company we deeply respect.

When you read the report's comments, you see that Gartner clearly credited ThoughtSpot with modernizing the stale dashboard-driven BI world. They recognized ThoughtSpot One as a fresh approach to democratizing data insights with knowledge and social graphs. 

They noted that we’re setting the standard in innovation since our “search-first approach to analysis is being widely emulated by competitors.” 

Not so good news: We moved down a tiny bit on the Y-axis, enough to change quadrants. And here’s where I break from the predictable — if you expect me to spin that news or lash out at Gartner, don’t hold your breath —

I believe that Gartner mostly got ThoughtSpot's position right. 2020 was a year like no other for the entire analytics industry. The impacts of COVID-19 and pricing pressure from the commoditization of visualizations on our industry cannot be understated. Both factors forced 15 of the 20 vendors in this Magic Quadrant down the Y-axis. 

For ThoughtSpot in particular, 2020 was a year of transformation. COVID-19 was a crisis on so many levels, but it was also the catalyst to move our business to the cloud with the launch of ThoughtSpot Cloud. We took the time in 2020 to build our cloud foundation so we could execute stronger and faster. As McKinsey says, we needed to slow down, so we could speed up in 2021. 

The cloud is only one-half of the story. Analytics is moving to a new, augmented world. Gartner reports, “the scope of augmentation is extending. Originally intended to assist analyst personas using self-service, augmentation and, increasingly, automation is now being applied to help end-users directly, giving rise to a new user category: augmented consumers.” 

ThoughtSpot brings the best of both together — cloud-based search and AI-driven analytics that empower these augmented consumers at every level of the business —

Looking ahead to 2021

With this shift to cloud analytics, I am quite optimistic about our industry and expect many vendors will make a significant upward turn, ThoughtSpot included. 

If we execute well, we have a real shot at catching up and, perhaps even, overtaking the mighty Microsoft PowerBI. 

Now wouldn't that be something!

If you would like to try ThoughtSpot for yourself, check out our free trial today.