26 January 2007
Kurt Schlegel, Bill Hostmann, Andreas Bitterer

Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00145507

The business intelligence platform market is dominated by traditional pure-play BI vendors, but several large application and software infrastructure vendors became much stronger BI competitors in 2006.
 

What You Need to Know

The goal of this Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms (see Figure 1) is to present a global view of Gartner's opinion of the main software vendors that should be considered by organizations seeking to develop business intelligence (BI) applications. Buyers should evaluate vendors in all four quadrants, including those from the Niche Players and Visionaries quadrants, as these vendors are driving innovation in many areas such as interactive visualization, in-memory data analysis, real-time dashboards, wizard-based application development and spreadsheet-based reporting. The scores and commentary in this document are substantially based on customer perceptions of each vendor's strengths and challenges derived from BI-related inquiries that Gartner performed in 2006. To assist with the evaluation, participating vendors were asked to complete a survey about their BI strategy and operations. Gartner analysts also performed a detailed analysis of the technical capabilities of each BI platform.

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q07

Source: Gartner (January 2007)