Data discovery capabilities are dominating new purchasing requirements, even for larger deployments, as alternatives to traditional BI tools. But "governed data discovery" — the ability to meet the dual demands of enterprise IT and business users — remains a challenge unmet by any one vendor.

The BI and analytics platform market is in the middle of an accelerated transformation from BI systems used primarily for measurement and reporting to those that also support analysis, prediction, forecasting and optimization. Because of the growing importance of advanced analytics for descriptive, prescriptive and predictive modeling, forecasting, simulation and optimization (see "Extend Your Portfolio of Analytics Capabilities") in the BI and information management applications and infrastructure that companies are building — often with different buyers driving purchasing and different vendors offering solutions — this year Gartner has also published a Magic Quadrant exclusively on predictive and prescriptive analytics platforms (see Note 1). Vendors offering both sets of capabilities are featured in both Magic Quadrants.

The BI platform market is forecast to have grown into a $14.1 billion market in 2013, largely through companies investing in IT-led consolidation projects to standardize on IT-centric BI platforms for large-scale systems-of-record reporting (see "Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2010-2017, 3Q13 Update"). These have tended to be highly governed and centralized, where IT production reports were pushed out to inform a broad array of information consumers and analysts. While analytical capabilities were deployed, such as parameterized reports, online analytical processing (OLAP) and ad hoc query, they were never fully embraced by the majority of business users, managers and analysts, primarily because most considered these too difficult to use for many analytical use cases. As a result, and continuing a five-year trend, these installed platforms are routinely being complemented, and in 2013 were increasingly displaced, in new sales situations by new investments, and requirements were more skewed toward business-user-driven data discovery techniques to make analytics beyond traditional reporting more accessible and pervasive to a broader range of users and use cases.

Also in support of wider adoption, companies and independent software vendors are increasingly embedding both traditional reporting, dashboards and interactive analysis, in addition to more advanced and prescriptive analytics built from statistical functions and algorithms available within the BI platform into business processes or applications. The intent is to expand the use of analytics to a broad range of consumers and nontraditional BI users, increasingly on mobile devices. Moreover, companies are increasingly building analytics applications, leveraging new data types and new types of analysis, such as location intelligence and analytics on multistructured data stored in NoSQL data repositories.

For this Magic Quadrant, Gartner defines BI and analytics as a software platform that delivers 17 capabilities across three categories: information delivery, analysis and integration.

As a result of the market dynamics discussed above, the capability definitions in this year's Magic Quadrant have been modified with the following additions and subtractions to reflect our current view of critical capabilities for BI and analytics platforms.

Capabilities dropped:

• Scorecard: Most companies do not implement true scorecard/strategy maps using BI platforms — they implement dashboards. Also, most BI vendors report limited sales activity for their scorecard products. Scorecards are primarily delivered by corporate performance management (CPM) vendors (see "Strategic CPM as a Driver for Organizational Performance Management"). Therefore, we have included scorecards as a type of dashboard, rather than as a separate category.
• Predictive Analytics: covered in the new "Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms."
• Prescriptive Analytics: covered in the new "Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms."
  

Capabilities added:

• Geospatial and location intelligence (see the Analysis section)
• Embedded advanced analytics (see the Analysis section)
• Business user data mashup and modeling (see the Integration section)
• Embeddable analytics (see the Integration section)
• Support for big data sources (see the Integration section)
  

The vendors' positions in this Magic Quadrant reflect a number of critical market trends that we expect to continue during the coming year and beyond:

• The most notable change in this year's Magic Quadrant 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. The major dynamic in the market in 2013 was data discovery platforms' dominance of new-license expenditure, with ease of use remaining a top purchasing criterion. However, Gartner's inquiries and survey data suggest that, increasingly, companies would like to expand use and even standardize on data discovery platforms for their larger enterprise BI deployments but find that in many cases these platforms (from Tableau, Qlik and Tibco Software [Spotfire]) lack the necessary enterprise features in relation to governance, administration and scalability, among other things. At the same time, the incumbent Leaders, while strong in IT-led systems-of-record enterprise capabilities, have had limited success in delivering "good enough" data discovery capabilities for business users, despite favorable bundling and aggressive investments to enhance data discovery capabilities introduced in 2012. The existence of both systems-of-record reporting platforms and data discovery platforms can pose challenges for organizations attempting to govern, scale and support these different environments and pace layers (see "Applying Gartner's Pace Layer Model to Business Analytics"), with no single vendor fully addressing both.
• The race is on to fill the gap in governed data discovery. The data discovery paradigm is in place and expanding, and it has disrupted traditional definitions of vision and execution. As a result, the current IT-centric BI and analytics platform Leaders, which currently "own" the installed base market share, but lack market growth momentum, are trying to change that by focusing their new product investment on business-user-driven data discovery and analysis. Microsoft, MicroStrategy and SAS have done a better job than the others of integrating their enterprise and new data discovery capabilities. At the same time, Qlik plans to release a completely rearchitected, enterprise-ready version of its platform, QlikView.Next in the latter half of 2014. Meanwhile, Tableau and Tibco (Spotfire) continue to focus on business users, but are also incrementally adding enterprise features with each new release. Notably, SAS has made one of the boldest moves of any vendor with its plans to replace its current enterprise BI platform (where it is integrated across the rest of its application and decision management stack) with Visual Analytics, a new data discovery environment, as its "go forward" BI platform. Importantly, SAS also plans to combine traditional report and dashboard development in the same user-friendly platform. Moreover, a number of Challengers and Niche Players have road maps and plans that reflect the same ultimate market objective. Next year, Completeness of Vision positions will in part be determined by which vendors achieve success in addressing this critical market requirement. In combination with this Magic Quadrant and Gartner inquiries, BI leaders should scrutinize the road maps of both data discovery and IT-centric vendors for their fit with growing business user and enterprise requirements as input into expansion, upgrade and/or switching decisions.
• Beyond the race for the market's "white space," advances in self-service data integration, which includes automatic semantic identification and data model inference and discovery (for easier and faster information access and modeling), the automation and encapsulation of advanced analytics (to highlight and visualize important findings, correlations, clusters or trends in data that are relevant to the user), and exploration with natural-language query technologies, give us a view of the next generation of "smart" data discovery and data preparation. These innovations have the potential to expand access to sophisticated interactive analysis and insights to business consumers and nontraditional BI users — the approximately 70% of users in organizations that currently do not use BI tools or have statistical backgrounds. IBM and SAS are drivers of these new approaches, which contributed to their Completeness of Vision positions.
• Cloud BI is becoming more acceptable as a deployment option, with 45% of respondents to Gartner's BI and analytics platform Magic Quadrant survey (compared with approximately 30% for each of the last four years) saying they would put their mission-critical BI in the cloud. BI vendors with cloud offerings are moving toward meeting critical market requirements for governed business-user-friendly platforms and to deliver strong product functionality, positive customer experiences and high business value to customers. Increasingly, traditional on-premises vendors are also prepared to support cloud BI. This is a significant shift, indicating that 2014 may be a tipping point for cloud adoption as data gravity shifts to the cloud. While most BI vendors now have a cloud strategy, many leaders of BI and analytic initiatives do not have a strategy for how to combine and integrate cloud services.
• In a crowded market where a good percentage of the new vendors (and the data discovery features of existing vendors) at first sight resemble Tableau in terms of their offerings and approach, Panorama Software and Alteryx earn places in the Visionaries quadrant because each delivers a unique set of capabilities targeted at key buying requirements. The large number of vendors in the Niche Players quadrant with specialized strengths suggests opportunities for customers to find a match for their requirements beyond the largest vendors.
  

It is very likely that 2014 will be a critical year in which the task of making "hard types of analysis easy" for an expanded set of users, along with ensuring governance, scale and performance for larger amounts of diverse data, will continue to dominate BI market requirements. At the same time, the ability to bridge widely proliferating business user silos with enterprise deployments will be a crucial challenge for IT and BI vendors. With the added complexities introduced by new data sources (such as the cloud, real-time events and sensors, and multistructured data) and new types of analysis (such as link/network and sentiment analysis, and new algorithms for machine learning), new opportunities will emerge to build business value. Leaders of BI initiatives to identify and optimize these opportunities will be under more pressure than ever to deliver results.

This document presents a global view of Gartner's opinion of the main software vendors that should be considered by organizations seeking to use BI and analytics platforms to develop BI applications. Buyers should evaluate vendors in all four quadrants and not assume that only the Leaders can deliver successful BI implementations. Year-to-year comparisons of vendors' positions are not particularly useful, given the market's dynamics (such as emerging competitors, new product road maps and new buying centers), and clients' concerns have changed since our last Magic Quadrant, particularly since we are in the middle of a significant shift in this market. For guidance on the Magic Quadrant evaluation process and on how to use a Magic Quadrant, see "How Gartner Evaluates Vendors and Markets in Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes."

Source: Gartner (February 2014)