Tableau and QlikTech move up. See who moves down in Gartner’s ranking of industrial intelligence vendors.

The more things change, the more they stay the identical. That adage could apply to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms for 2014, released last week, because the same vendors manifest within the prized Leaders quadrant.

At first glance, the recent report delivers a really different-looking positioning of vendors than the 2013 quadrant (as shown below). On closer inspection, however, you could find that an analogous 10 vendors are still inside the Leaders quadrant. And the identical two vendors, Birst and Logi Analytics, remain within the Challengers quadrant, albeit in changed positions. The best new news, quadrant-wise, is the emergence of Alteryx and Panorama Software into the Visionaries quadrant. (Tableau Software is one of the vendors offering free downloads of your complete report, but Tableau doesn’t require registration.)

In Gartner’s defense, BI and analytics suites don’t are likely to change dramatically in a single year, so incremental shifts are to be expected. What’s more, within each quadrant there are notable shifts in vendor positioning. First, all vendors moved to the left at the horizontal Completeness of Vision axis. That’s because Gartner has raised its expectations, something it must do every year so vendors never get to the head-right corner and begin resting on their laurels.

[It is the right time to invite the uncomfortable questions. Read Digital Business Strategy: 8 Gut-Check Questions.]

The broad shift to the left is tied to the years-long ascendance of knowledge-discovery platforms from the likes of Tableau Software, QlikTech, and Tibco Spotfire. Data discovery is now driving nearly all of new software license revenue, but these platforms are inclined to lack “the mandatory features on the subject of governance, administration, and scalability,” Gartner reports.

Meanwhile, incumbents like IBM, SAP, Oracle, and MicroStrategy that have a tendency to do well on governance, administration, and scalability have had “limited success in delivering ‘good enough’ data discovery capabilities,” Gartner writes. In other words, practitioners want and wish the benefit and speed of knowledge-discovery platforms, but they would not have to renounce admin control and the peace of mind of information-modeling and information-quality consistency across high-scale deployments.

“The race is directly to fill the space in governed data discovery,” Gartner writes. “Next year, Completeness of Vision positions will partially be determined through which vendors be successful in addressing this critical market requirement.”

As for the vendors that bucked the broad trends, Tableau Software and QlikTech both moved to the correct at the Completeness of Vision axis, but Tableau Software also moved up significantly to become the highest-ranked vendor at the Ability to Execute axis.

“Tableau’s strong survey results for customer satisfaction, coupled with its market momentum, are behind its dominant Ability to Execute position,” Gartner reports. “Surveyed customers identified ease of use for end users and developers, and functionality, as their main reasons for selecting Tableau. Definitely, 73% selected Tableau’s product for its ease of use for end users, which places it among the many top two vendors within the survey.”

Oracle and MicroStrategy sank significantly at the Ability to Execute axis, though they continue to be inside the Leaders quadrant. Oracle’s decline was tied to customer survey results that showed that “recent Oracle BI releases received scores for customer experience, including support and product quality, that were a few of the lowest,” Gartner states. At MicroStrategy, “customers identified ease of use for both developers and business users as an ongoing concern. Additionally they reported issues with software and support quality. MicroStrategy received the second one-lowest results of any vendor inside the survey for either one of these criteria.”

As for Alteryx and Panorama, both vendors that jumped into the Visionaries quadrant, Gartner lauded Alteryx for “the very best capability and use scores for ad hoc reporting and querying, geospatial and placement intelligence, the second one-highest for support for large data sources, and the third-highest for business user data mashups and modeling.” Panorama was praised for its “high marks for ease of use, breadth of use, and enabling users to conduct complex varieties of analysis. Panorama also received high marks on critical satisfaction metrics for product functionality, support and product quality.”

Birst and GoodData also rose significantly in Gartner’s latest report, with their gains tied to growing acceptance of cloud-delivered BI and analytics capabilities.

Gartner started making greater use of purchaser-survey-based information in its BI quadrant rankings several years ago, and this year greater than ever this feedback appears making the adaptation in vendor rankings. That’s an amazing thing, and it has generated a protracted list of “cautions” inside the descriptions of vendors large and small. Read the whole report and buyer beware. [Author’s note: This year Gartner has issued its first-ever Magic Quadrant specifically on advanced analytics products, a report we plan to hide in a separate article.]

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Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, big data and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of … View Full Bio

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