Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI/BA and the Lone Three Leaders

History clearly confirms that good things come in threes.  As far as I know this is the first time that only the three most widely recognized Business Intelligence platforms have been placed in the top-right leaders/visionaries space of the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, as of February 2016.

Microsoft is rated by Gartner as the having the most complete vision while Tableau and Qlik rate slightly higher in their ability to implement.  This makes perfect sense as “Microsoft BI” is not one product or tool.  It has many components and offers many choices, but is certainly comprehensive and scalable.

Power BI is delivering “the last mile” of data visualization beautifully on top of the robust foundation of SQL Server, Analysis Services, Integration Services, HDInsight, Stream Anlytics, machine learning and all the other Azure services.  It’s also a great single-product solution for simple projects with room to grow as needed.

Oh, here are the results…

The quadrant chart also shows that there is significant opportunity for all these vendors to improve their execution and implementation strategy.  BI is not easy to do.  Using some tools, it may be easier to get started or to build something simple to demonstrate functionality but data is inherently complex and every business must approach analytics a little bit differently.  There is a lot of wisdom in this simple portrayal.  (just got the link to the entire Gartner report and added the link below).  A notable statement is that there are no “challengers” which emphases a significant margin between the leaders and others.

More details are available in this announcement on the Microsoft Power BI Blog

The reprint of the complete report from Gartner is available here