Gartner has recently published the 2012 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence (BI) Platforms which presents Gartner’s annual opinion of the main software vendors that should be considered by organisations seeking to develop business intelligence applications.
Gartner defines BI as “platforms that enable all types of users – from IT staff to consultants to business users - to build applications that help organisations learn about and understand their business”.
This year’s report states that the market for BI platforms will remain one of the fastest growing software segments despite sluggish global economic growth. Business organisations continue to turn to BI as a vital tool for smarter, more agile and efficient business. According to Gartner’s annual survey of CIO technology priorities, BI has yet again been named the top priority for 2012, a position it has held in three of the last five years.
To be included in the Magic Quadrant, vendors were required to prove competence in nine or more of the 14 BI capabilities stipulated in Gartner’s market definition description under the categories of integration, information delivery and analysis. BI solution providers must also be able to obtain a minimum of 30 customer survey responses from clients who use the vendor platform as their enterprise BI platform.
The 2012 Magic Quadrant shows two of the four squares (Leaders and Niche Players) heavily populated. Only two companies were considered to qualify as Challengers, although the latter were both very close to shifting into the Leaders quadrant. There were no vendors classified as Visionaries in the latest Magic Quadrant.
For the second year running QlikTech’s QlikView has been classified as a Leader matching much bigger players such as Oracle, Microsoft IBM and SAP. Rita Sallam, a business intelligence analyst at Gartner, highlighted how QlikTech has, since its relatively recent emergence, completed the “Z-shaped movement through the Quadrant from Niche, to Visionary, to Challenger, to Leader.”
The 2012 Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms describes QlikTech as “a marketing juggernaut; it has brand recognition many times more prominent than a firm with its current market share would expect. The company continues to be featured in a high number of Gartner inquiries and evaluations, which reinforces just how strong its momentum is.”
Gartner reports that “feedback from QlikView’s end-users invariably centres on how intuitive and likable the product is to use: 68 per cent of customers surveyed selected it due to its ease of use for end-users – higher than for any other vendor on the Magic Quadrant.”
QlikView is a self-contained BI platform, based on a set of well-integrated BI tools. Such an all-encompassing approach may explain why, according to Gartner, “customers’ rating of QlikView’s functionality is very positive, in the highest quartile and above average in nine out of fourteen functional capabilities: dashboards, interactive visualization, mobile BI, search-based BI, scorecards, ad hoc query, Microsoft Office integration, OLAP, and development tools.”
Gartner emphasised QlikTech’s strong growth potential when it commented that the company “has the momentum to be a truly global player, with strong geographic expansion.”
Such a bright future is supported by the fact that “QlikTech’s customers report strong delivery of business benefits, particularly in making better information available to more users and expanding the type of analysis undertaken.”
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Mr Sammut is a business solutions adviser with local firm iMovo, which specialises in ‘Know Your Client’ assignments based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM and QlikView business intelligence tools.