Gartners Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms

2014-02-25T11:50:14+10:00

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Last Thursday 20 Feb Gartner released this years Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, the crew at Tableau are certainly happy campers and rightly so!  Tableau is far and away the strongest visualisation tool out there at the moment and the speed of incremental improvement has been impressive.
The summary stated “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.”
My observations and interpretations are as follows:
  • Tableau in a well deserved first place for execution – fast quick & easy – if the underlying data is in good shape.
  • Ability to prepare & govern underlying data is emerging as the next differentiator in product maturity – “Can we trust the portrayal of the data we so quickly generated”.
  • My other favourite toolsuite in this space (IBM products) one out in “completeness of vision” which I interpret to include data governance or Master Data Management, MDM for another TLA 😉
  • Tableau is certainly changing the game big time, Excel on steroids is almost inept as a description for how it makes data easy to visualise but like Excel it is to easy to portray data incorrectly if incorrectly applied or source system issues exist.
I am increasingly finding my engagements being more and more about the underlying data quality rather than making the data easy to interpret because, well Tableau is making that part so easy!.