If you are in the market for a Business Intelligence/Big Data platform, and are struggling to decide whether Oracle is your best bet vs your Microsofts or SAPs, stop fretting, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, newly released for 2014 should provide some clarity. The market for business intelligence (BI) and analytics platforms has growth growth predicted at 7% through to 2017. A shocking key takeaway is that no single vendor has solved the challenge of meeting the dual demands of enterprise IT and business users – a concept insiders refer to as ‘governed data discovery.
As an annual exercise, Gartner analyzes every major player in both the Business Intelligence and Analytics market. Their research has particular significance because it often identifies the innovations and disruptors that drive the market. As part of that report, Gartner also releases the Magic Quadrant, which shows the relative positions of the market’s competitors. The Magic Quadrant represents a snapshot of the market at a particular point in time.
Gartner’s assessments take into account the vendors’ current product offerings and overall strategies, extensive customer feedback, as well as their future initiatives and product road maps, factoring in how well vendors are driving market changes or adapting to changing market requirements. 2014 is the first year Gartner has issued its first-ever Magic Quadrant, specifically on advanced analytics products due to the fact that big data analytics has evolved well past the older BI market that it evolved from.
Where as in previous years, reports would feature familiar top 10 vendors, this year, Gartner reveals a new guard of firms challenging the likes of IBM and SAS. Alteryx, Revolution Analytics, RapidMiner and Knime are the new kids on the block and companies you will need to keep an eye on in 2014. The vendors are quite different beasts, but together represent new areas of tech development that’s currently shaping the next generation of analytics apps. We are witnessing an unstoppable shift in the Business Intelligence and Analytics market, where users are demanding simpler ways to not just get the data, but to analyze it.
This shift is not about analyzing single data sources, but blending and enriching all relevant data with advanced analytics to deliver predictive and spatial insight – therefore driving greater sophistication and more significance around all available data. This enables organizations and their line-of-business analysts to gain these deeper insights, and in turn, better support the decisions that they need to make in today’s competitive landscape.
Gartner, thinks 2014 will be a critical year in which “the task of making ‘hard types of analysis easy’ for an expanded set of users, along with ensuring, governance, sales and performance for larger amounts of diverse data, will continue to dominate BI market requirements.” Come 2015, Gartner’s position is “the shifting tide of BI platform requirements, moving from reporting-centric to analysis-centric, will mean the majority of BI vendors will make governed data discovery capabilities an expansion of, and the prime competitive capability for, their BI platform offerings”.
Image credit: Gartner
Hayden Richards is Contributor of IntelligentHQ. He specialises in finance, trading, investment, and technology, with expertise in both buy-side, sell-side. Contributing and advising various global corporations, Hayden is a thought leader, researching on global regulatory subjects, digital, social media strategies and new trends for Businesses, Capital Markets and Financial Services.
Aside from the articles, interviews and content he writes for IntelligentHQ, Hayden is also a content curator for capital markets, analytic platforms and business industry emerging trends. An avid new media explorer Hayden is driven by a passion for business development, innovation, social business, Tech Trading, payments and eCommerce. A native Trinidadian, Hayden is also a veteran, having served with the Royal Air Force Reserves for the past 10 years.
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