IBM Leads in Vision in Two Gartner Magic Quadrants!

IBM Leads in Vision in Two Gartner MQs!*

NEW! Magic Quadrant for BI & Analytics Platforms

NEW! Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms

Gartner has introduced a “Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytic Platforms” to complement the existing “Magic Quadrant for BI & Analytics Platforms.”

*IBM has secured license agreement to use these Gartner MQ reports externally.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytic Platforms

“Customer references cite high levels of satisfaction with the data access, data filtering and manipulation, advanced descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, user experience, and the performance and scalability components of the product.”

The new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms shows IBM has clearly distanced itself from the competition on Completeness of Vision – including SAS Institute, which fell to third on Vision behind KNIME.  No other vendor comes close to the breadth and depth of the IBM Advanced Analytics portfolio in this evaluation, the first in this market since Gartner’s 2007 Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Mining, in which IBM held a top Leader position.

o    IBM has devoted considerable corporate emphasis to this product space. For example, the breadth and often depth of IBM’s analytic offerings (not just SPSS but also Watson and ILOG) and the successful positioning of them under the corporate Smarter Planet branding.

o    IBM was frequently selected based on speed of model development/ability to build large numbers of models, ease of use and product quality.

o    Customer references cite high levels of satisfaction with the data access, data filtering and manipulation, advanced descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, user experience and the performance and scalability components of the product.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI & Analytics Platforms

“IBM offers a complete range of enterprise-grade BI, performance management and advanced analytics platform capabilities, complemented by a deep services organization that is ready to implement them in solutions for any domain, industry or geography.” 

IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Several factors have significantly influenced vendor rankings in the new MQs:

  • o    The Advanced Analytics MQ covers functionality associated with diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics but assigns most weight to the predictive.o    The BI and Analytics MQ encompasses all four analytic “styles” — descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive — but allocates more weight to descriptive and diagnostic capabilities.

For the BI & Analytics MQ, more weighting was put on platform data discovery capabilities, based on Gartner’s view that a greater percentage of purchasing and usage within organizations is being driven primarily by business-user-oriented data discovery requirements.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI & Analytics Platforms shows IBM as the leading vendor, for the third year in a row, in Completeness of Vision!  The IBM write-up is detailed, balanced and highlights many key Strengths, including the potential for IBM innovations to significantly impact the market going forward.  The Cautions section does highlight some issues identified by IBM clients who completed the Gartner MQ end user survey.  From Gartner’s perspective, “the most notable change in this year’s MQ is that all the vendors in the Leaders quadrant have been moved to the left in terms of Completeness of Vision. This reflects the fact that no one vendor is fully addressing the critical space in the market for ‘governed data discovery’ — in other words, platforms that address both business users’ requirements for ease of use and enterprises’ IT-driven requirements.”  However, IBM remains the overall leader in Vision and is very well placed, in Gartner’s view, “…to create a next-generation data discovery tool that may transform the paradigm of how information is used in organizations.”

  • o    “IBM is pushing new boundaries in the analytics space. A strategic objective to broaden and grow its portfolio in BI, analytics and performance management, coupled with support from IBM Global Services and a global presence, makes IBM the leading vendor for Completeness of Vision, although other vendors are closing in. High marks for sales strategy, product strategy, and industry and geographic strategies, bolster IBM’s position on the Magic Quadrant.”o    “With an average data volume accessed in data repositories of over 10TB, an average deployment size of 2,428 users (top quartile; the average for vendors in this report is 1,364), and the biggest queries accessed averaging 1,858GB (second only to MicroStrategy), the IBM Cognos BI platform handles some of the largest deployments evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. Further evidence of IBM’s enterprise-ready credentials is that the platform earned an enterprise deployment score (for size of deployments and global pervasiveness across an organization) in the top three in our survey.”o    “IBM is trying to use lessons learned from the Watson project to create a next-generation data discovery tool that may transform the paradigm of how information is used in organizations; indeed, if disruption occurs soon in this sector, it will probably result from innovations introduced with Watson Analytics. Customers and vendors alike should prepare for its potential impact.”