3rd party Forrester released their analysis on MDR providers. Expel leading the charge. Thoughts on vendors in this space? I know I sometimes take these reports with a grain of salt.

Takeaway: Interesting to see how far Crowdstrike has come in this market.

How are these better than any of the traditional MSSPs out there?

Some interesting movement since last year. Splunk slipping a bit and Grafana Labs shooting up.

Wondering what people think about this? What opinions do you have in the solutions you use.? I would really appreciate the opinions of people who are experienced in more the one of the listed solutions?

https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2LFAL8EW&ct=250710&st=sb

For years I've done BI enablement consulting and have regularly referenced the Gartner Magic Quadrant when commenting on trends and opportunities within the BI space, so I decided to take a deep dive into the last 20 years of the Quadrant.

I found some very interesting trends and insights to say the least. Ever wondered why some BI platforms stay on the Quadrant well past what feels like their prime? Or why some big names seemingly vanish? Here are 4 of my key findings.

1. EVERY VENDOR, YEAR BY YEAR

This seems self explanatory, but from 2005 to 2024, big platforms (Microsoft, AWS, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Alibaba, IBM, SAS) dominated the Magic Quadrant. Some of them were homegrown but many were via acquisition:

ProClarity → Microsoft (2006)

Cognos → IBM (2007)

Hyperion → Oracle (2007)

Business Objects → SAP (2007)

Tableau → Salesforce (2019)

Looker → Google (2020)

2. ENTRY IS ROUGH

My next bit of analysis focused on where new platforms start their Gartner Magic Quadrant journey. As expected, new tools are generally not given high status on the Quadrant. See a few insights I found below:

• Ten of last 12 new BI tools started in the Niche category

• Tableau had the highest debut as a Challenger

• Qlik's low rating in its debut is interesting given its current market share

The visual below displays where all tools on the 2024 Quadrant debuted, with the exception of the tools that were on the MQ prior to 2004 (Microsoft, SAS, SAP, IBM, MicroStrategy, Spotfire).

3. NO RECENT CHANGES

The years 2010 thru 2012 saw an explosion of new BI tools with 10 new companies entering the Quadrant, but as of 2024 - only Tableau remains.

The least amount of change has been in the last two years with no new companies being added to the Quadrant. With so many changes in the industry happening, my guess is that there will be some new names this year. My best guesses are:

• Sigma Computing - now marketing themselves as a BI platform instead of just a BI tool with their write-back functionality. They've also been strong with integrating into modern cloud data architecture so I would expect to see them on there this year. Probably not as a Leader, but as a Niche Player (where most platforms start).

• Databricks: Databricks continue to expand beyond traditional CDW and data science use cases with their AI BI tool. The tool is integrated with the Databricks Lakehouse and positioned as a natural extension of their unified platform. Similar to Sigma, it's likely that if they do end up on the Quadrant this year it will be as a Niche Player.

4. WHO’S NEXT TO FALL?

Churn is natural in all business cycles, and the current field of BI tools is no different. Churn generally happens most with Niche players, though occasionally a Visionary gets the boot. If I were a betting man, I'd bet on the following tools to be the biggest candidates to be left off this year's list:

• Sisense: Its 2022 mass layoffs disrupted development momentum - its placement in the Magic Quadrant reflects this.

• Spotfire: Split out from TIBCO in 2023. Feels slower in innovation - if any.

• Incorta: More focused on their lake-house vision. Feels a bit out of place overall. They’ve got three straight years as a Niche Player but little progress in the magic quadrant.

What do you think? Drop your hot takes below!

Gartner seems to be a big deal in analysing software vendors and ranking them in different categories. There magic quadrant makes often quite some noise. They also offer analyst help with vendor selection

Is Gartner actually something you look at when making a purchase decision?

They charge very heavily so I wondered how useful their services actually are.

Hi Sysadmins,

we are going to renew our EDR solution which was Comodo IT & Security Manager. We are not sure and don't know how to compare them. Which EDR solution you are using in your company? or What/Which EDR solution you would suggest?
PS: Comodo Rebranded it's solution to Xcitium, Supplier suggest to buy Xcitium Bundle SEC RMM.

What do you guys think about this?

I wanted to get some thoughts on who people think is the best MDR vendor. In a crowded field, whose price point/quality of product stands above the rest?

Hello analytics,

What are your thoughts on Gartner's Magic Quadrant and their reports like "Top 10 Trends in 20XX"?

They produce these every year and it always seems very dreamy and aspirational about what will happen and what the "leaders" should do. Especially the "Top trends in <year>" reports.

Now I always think they are doing this to make themselves, Gartner, sound extremely relevant but also do the job of various tool providers in their quadrant and market stuff. In reality most organisations are still swimming around in data quality issues.

Any thoughts?

So, its Sunday , I am bored and saw another comment about how Gartner quadrants are rigged.

I am interested to know why you think they are rigged, and you will have to be specific what is rigged exactly, because it’s quite vague.

First let me tell you about my experience from the inside, I currently work for a company who is on many Gartner quadrants, and I was in a previous one who also was in many Gartner quadrants, I participated actively (meaning providing answers and data) to 2 quadrants.

The process is same for every company you see on a particular quadrant, first you need to be a Gartner customer, but even the cheapest option is valid, so there is no barrier to entry moneywise.

Then you select the quadrants to be part of and need to submit your candidature to qualify, lets assume only one for the following steps.

That where it become difficult, the documents to fill to be evaluated for quadrants are huge and you need lot of data, to give you a sense of scale the teams I was part of to fill all data was around 15 peoples over 3 months, that the same for every participant. You must provide financial data, market data, contracts data, customers reference, peoples data, roadmap, etc.…

One of the complex parts is you need to provide customers who will agree to answer questions too, and if I recall, more than 1.

I am high level enough to know that we didn’t give any money to Gartner to end up in the upper quadrant so there is no bribe going on, plus there is no point, Gartner make their money based on trust between all participants and make enough money just with their consulting side of the house, and everyone paying them to access the data.

I know also that not being on the Gartner quadrant is a death sentence for a lot of enterprise software, you are not selected anywhere anymore if you are not present, changing quadrant down, or not being on top is manageable, make life more difficult for the sales team but that ok, they need to suffer a little bit sometime, but not been on it, that a major problem.

So, my take on the bias I see:

• Small company will have difficulty to have enough peoples available to fill the forms

• If you don’t have customers and customers willing to help you, you can’t participate (and if you don’t participate you are never selected and don’t get customers, vicious circle here)

This 2 together give an advantage to larger companies and existing companies with already a market share.

So, is it rigged? is it biased? is it a bad tool for selection? I like to hear your point of view.

I'm looking through some Gartner reports for a project we're working on, like I've done many times before. I'm looking for other opinions on here. But, I feel these reports are a way for management to justify their jobs and the Magic Quadrant is a little bit like Motor Trend Car of the Year (Make with the most money wins).

I feel like I'm a reasonably intelligent person, but when I read these reports I have to re-read a paragraph three times just to comprehend what it's saying.

Please tell me I'm not the only one.

The latest MQ for Observability has been released. Naturally, the companies defined as "Leaders" are celebrating, but it also raises plenty of questions:

• What are Oracle doing there?

• Are Microsoft and AWS really Challengers to Datadog and Splunk??

• Why are the likes of SigNoz, Observe, Victoria Metrics not included?

I've put a few thoughts together in this article:
https://observability-360.com/article/ViewArticle?id=observability-magic-quadrant-2024

Hello, I am looking for some MDM recommendations. In our company we use Blackberry (and it sucks). I asked some friends from other big companies and they are using MobileIron and Relution. But maybe you have a better solution?

(I don’t want to go to my coworkers and just say “The MDM sucks. It doesn’t work. - I would love to give them some advice)

This can be completely subjective, but, share your thoughts and context such as what’s great for massive enterprises and small shops, good budget/no budget, HALO products and vendors, and those to be avoided no matter the org.

For instance, I’ve never had a good experience with Trend or Sentinel… have others? What are your thoughts and experience supporting EDR?

Thanks!