The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Business Intelligence: Gartner's Four Quadrants Shrinks to Two
The most recent report from Gartner, and available free courtesy of Oracle, on the state of Business Intelligence (BI) shows a sort of two-winged butterfly effect in the distribution of companies across Gartner’s famous magic quadrant. This was an effect first noted by Doug Henshen at InfoWeek. One wing of the butterfly, the upper right quadrant, is populated with high-end, expensive software targeting large enterprise customers, including companies like Oracle, SAP and IBM. These are Gartner’s “Leaders”. The other wing, in the lower left, you’ll find a collection of small companies, classified by Gartner as ‘niche players’.
Except a slight spillover by Tibco and Tableau from ‘niche’ onto the border between ‘niche’ and ‘challenger’ categories, the ‘challenger’ and ‘visionary’ categories are empty. The visual makes one wonder if there aren’t really two different market forces at work here. And the text of the report goes on to note that the target audience of the two product groups are different. The ‘leaders’ are going after big budgets with products that appeal to Enterprise IT, while the ‘niche’ players are appealing to the non-IT masses with cheaper and more self-service Business Intelligence offerings.
Gartner notes that the world of IT software is changing rapidly. Garnter says that users now want their BI tools to be “simple, mobile and fun,” and that is the direction than many of the new niche players are trying to take it. The result is that easier-to-use interfaces and lower-cost SaaS offerings are changing the market. But Gartner sees that the continued slowdown in the economy and price competition between players will limit the growth of Business Intelligence revenues in 2011 to about 7 percent.
Another new direction for BI is in the area of Big Data. Gartner sees a new category of high-value applications being created that are founded on the analysis of big data sets. Gartner sees three drivers for this direction:
- Advances in in-memory computing
- Extreme volumes of data and non-relational data types
- Social and Content Analytics
