Show me your Quadrant and I show you mine

In a recent Intelligent Enterprise article, author David Stodder, no less than editorial director and editor-in-chief, takes on the Magic Quadrant, and the Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant in particular. As one of the co-authors of the same, I thought, why not do a little analysis. Hey, that's what I do for a living.

Perhaps that's what makes it amusing to see how hooked vendors and some customers are on Gartner's Magic Quadrants for BI and performance management, just two of the hundreds of reports the IT research and analysis giant produces.

True, although I wouldn't use the word amusing to describe the reaction, particularly demonstrated by the vendor community. User organizations are much smarter than vendors may think. For them, it's one data point and typically not the ultimate deal maker (or breaker).

Gartner analysts converse, ruminate and then plot the vendors into one of four sectors

That's a pretty simplistic description, but yeah... something like that. And for those that have attended my "MQ power session" at the BI summit in London in February, you now know how we come up with the positions of each vendor: That's where the ball dropped.

"We measure the distance between our dots down to the millimeter," one BI vendor marketing chief tells me, describing how they evaluate their success against competitors.

That is actually pretty pathetic. There is more to life than dots on a chart. And I have never heard of any potential buyer making the case for one vendor over another because of a few millimeters further towards "Northeast." That would be silly. So vendors should equally not get hung up on this. In any case, Betsy and Lee, my two colleagues quoted in the article, got it exactly right.

So, which vendors are in the upper-right Leaders sector — the only section that seems to matter?

Well, I don't mean to repeat myself, but it sure seems as if the leaders quadrant is the only one that matters to the author. If only the vendors from the leaders quadrant would really matter, then we could just as well get rid of the other three quadrants altogether, publish a list of the three "leading" vendors to pick from and be done. Would that provide any value to anyone? Certainly not. Well, maybe except the three vendors on the list.

Millimeter highs and lows aside, there were few surprises.

Not sure what David Stodder's point here is. He should well know that this market does not change over night, with "Joe Blogg's BI company" coming out of left field and taking over the market.

Perhaps expecting tomatoes, the analysts devoted almost as much time assuaging the disappointment of those positioned in the other three sectors. They offered a pep talk to vendors they thought would "move up" next time. They also let newer players like Kalido know they still must "overcome the challenge" of helping the Gartner analysts figure out where to fit them in the Quadrants.

What David calls a pep talk is funnily enough the first reaction by the vendors in pretty much every review call. BTW, we get lots of (verbal) tomatoes all the time. Not getting hit is the trick, and it's done by having a substantiated argument for each and every ranking criteria. It's also called "doing the homework."

Some vendors (and Kalido being one example) have product offerings that don't fit the quadrant's market definition well. It's often even the vendors themselves struggling with positioning their company in any one market. So it's not surprising that vendors want to be on the quadrant (for higher visibility) and want to be off the quadrant (because of an unpopular position) at the same time.

In choosing products, it can make the most sense to go with established vendors, a mode Gartner's Quadrants tend to reinforce.

Yes, it can make sense, but not every time and the decision making is certainly not "reinforced." To make that point clear, I created a rather unscientific version of A3Q - "Andy's Advanced Automobile Quadrant" - using the same quadrant definitions.
Does this quadrant answer the question which car to buy? If every potential car buyer would base the decision solely on positions on a graphic, we'd all be driving the same car. The fact that we are not, shows that there are vendors for different requirements, budgets, use cases, etc. The same applies for every software market, such as Business Intelligence platforms.

Disclaimer for car manufacturers: The above graphic is my personal opinion, created in about 5 minutes and there is no data whatsoever behind it.