Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms

The BI and analytics platform market's multiyear shift from IT-led enterprise reporting to business-led self-service analytics has passed the tipping point. Most new buying is of modern, business-user-centric platforms forcing a new market perspective, significantly reordering the vendor landscape.

During the past several years, the balance of power for business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform buying decisions has gradually shifted from IT to the business as the long-standing BI requirement for centrally provisioned, highly governed and scalable system-of-record reporting has been counterbalanced by the need for analytical agility and business user autonomy (see "How to Modernize Your Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform for Agility, Without Chaos" ). The evolution and sophistication of the self-service data preparation and data discovery capabilities available in the market has shifted the focus of buyers in the BI and analytics platform market — toward easy-to-use tools that support a full range of analytic workflow capabilities and do not require significant involvement from IT to predefine data models upfront as a prerequisite to analysis. 
 
This significant shift has accelerated dramatically in recent years, and has finally reached a tipping point that requires a new perspective on the BI and analytics Magic Quadrant and the underlying BI platform definition — to better align with the rapidly evolving buyer and seller dynamics in this complex market. This Magic Quadrant focuses on products that meet the criteria of a modern BI and analytics platform (see "Technology Insight for Modern Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms" ), which are driving the vast majority of net new purchases in the market today. Products that do not meet the modern criteria required for inclusion in the Magic Quadrant evaluation (because of the upfront requirements for IT to predefine data models, or because they are enterprise-reporting centric) will be covered in our new Market Guide for enterprise reporting-based platforms. 
 
This change in the focus of the BI and analytics Magic Quadrant should not be interpreted by organizations as a recommendation to immediately replace all existing reporting-based system-of-record BI technology with a modern platform featured in the current Magic Quadrant. In many organizations, the existing enterprise reporting systems are integral to day-to-day business processes, and these processes would be exposed to unnecessary risk if disrupted by an attempt to re-create them in a modern platform. However, the problem that most organizations have encountered with lackluster BI adoption relative to the level of investment during the past 20 years stems from the fact that virtually all BI-related work in that time frame has, until recently, been treated as system of record from inception to development to delivery. This traditional approach to BI addresses Mode 1 of the bimodal delivery model, because it supports stability and accuracy, but does not address the need for speed and agility enabled through exploration and rapid prototyping that is essential to Mode 2 (see "How to Achieve Enterprise Agility With a Bimodal Capability" ). 
 
The shift in the BI and analytics market and the corresponding opportunity that it has created for new and innovative approaches to BI has drawn considerable attention from a diverse range of vendors. The list spans from large technology players — both those new to the space as well as longtime players trying to reinvent themselves to regain relevance — to startups backed by enormous amounts of venture capital from private equity firms. A crowded market with many new entrants, rapid evolution and constant innovation creates a difficult environment for vendors to differentiate their offerings from the competition. However, these market conditions also create an opportunity for buyers to be at the leading edge of new technology innovations in BI and analytics and to invest in new products that are better suited for Mode 2 of a bimodal delivery model than their predecessors. 
 
Gartner's position is that organizations should initiate new BI and analytics projects using a modern platform that supports a Mode 2 delivery model, in order to take advantage of market innovation and to foster collaboration between IT and the business through an agile and iterative approach to solution development. The vendors featured in this year's Magic Quadrant (and those highlighted in the Appendix) present modern approaches to promoting production-ready content from Mode 2 to Mode 1, offering far greater agility than traditional top-down, IT-led initiatives — and resulting in governed analytic content that is more widely adopted by business users that are active participants in the development process. As the ability to promote user-generated content to enterprise-ready governed content improves, so it is likely that, over time, many organizations will eventually reduce the size of their enterprise system-of-record reporting platforms in favor of those that offer greater agility and deeper analytical insight. 
 
As described above, this market has experienced a significant multiyear shift that has reached an inflection point — requiring a change in how Gartner defines the 14 capabilities that comprise a modern BI and analytics platform across the four categories — infrastructure, data management, analysis and content creation and share findings — in support of five BI and analytics use cases (see Note 1 for details of how the capability definitions in this year's Magic Quadrant have been modified from last year to reflect our current view of the critical capabilities for BI and analytics platforms). In this increasingly competitive and crowded market, the updated evaluation criteria for this year establish a higher bar against which vendors are measured both for execution and vision. As a result of this change and the resulting effect on the shape and composition of the BI and analytics Magic Quadrant, historical comparison with past years (to assess relative vendor movement) is irrelevant and therefore strongly discouraged. 

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Magic Quadrant for Identity and Access Management as a Service, Worldwide

A vendor in the identity and access management as a service (IDaaS) market delivers a predominantly cloud-based service in a multitenant or dedicated and hosted delivery model that brokers core identity governance and administration (IGA), access and intelligence functions to target systems on customers' premises and in the cloud.

This Magic Quadrant rates vendors on their ability to be global, general-purpose identity and access management (IAM) service providers for multiple use cases. The vendors in this Magic Quadrant must provide some level of functionality in all of the following IAM functional areas:

IGA: At a minimum, the vendor's service is able to automate synchronization (adds, changes and deletions) of identities held by the service or obtained from customers' identity repositories to target applications and other repositories. The vendor also must provide a way for customers' administrators to manage identities directly through an IDaaS administrative interface, and allow users to reset their passwords. In addition, vendors may offer deeper functionality, such as supporting identity life cycle processes, automated provisioning of accounts among heterogeneous systems, access requests (including self-service), and governance over user access to critical systems via workflows for policy enforcement, as well as for access certification processes. Additional capabilities may include role management and access certification.

Access: Access includes user authentication, single sign-on (SSO) and authorization enforcement. At a minimum, the vendor provides authentication and SSO to target applications using Web proxies and federation standards. Vendors also may offer ways to vault and replay passwords to get to SSO when federation standards are not supported by the applications. Most vendors offer additional authentication methods.

Identity log monitoring and reporting: At a minimum, the vendor logs IGA and access events, makes the log data available to customers for their own analysis, and provides customers with a reporting capability to answer the questions, "Who has been granted access to which target systems and when?" and "Who has accessed those target systems and when?"

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Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving

Enterprise information archiving is contributing to organizational needs for e-discovery and compliance requirements, and reducing primary storage costs. Gartner evaluates vendors offering products and services that provide archiving for email, files and other content types.

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Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

Three trends have altered the Web content management market since 2011: social media, mobile computing and the inclusion of WCM in more comprehensive solutions oriented toward online channel optimization. Buyers are looking for different capabilities and are changing how they buy WCM products.

The web content management (WCM) market is constantly evolving. In the past year, new trends emerged that drive customer's expectations for these solutions. For a wide-angle view of this market, complete with the latest trends and vendor evaluations, access the newest edition of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for WCM.

See Gartner's ratings of WCM vendors based on "ability to execute" and "completeness of vision," using these criteria to place vendors into one of four quadrants: Leaders, Visionaries, Challengers or Niche Players. Read the key strengths and cautions for each Web CMS vendor listed in the Magic Quadrant. The WCM offering must be available as a stand-alone product or suite of products, and have the following functions at minimum:

A content repository with basic library services, such as check-in/check-out and versioning; Authentication of users (authors, editors and reviewers) and assignment of permissions; Content authoring, through browser-based templates or via conversion from a word-processing application; Workflow sufficient for content review and approval; Conversion to HTML or XML and support of templates for Web rendering; Managed delivery of content to Web servers or site management systems; Multisite and multilanguage management; Web analytics and reporting capabilities; "What you see is what you get" design capabilities with the ability to customize look, feel, and behavior independent of content; Support for developer, administrator, editor, marketer and author roles in a distributed contribution environment; Support for content aggregation and syndication (such as via APIs, REST interfaces and RSS); Ability to manage rich media in the context of Web efforts; and Ability to publish content for consumption on various devices (such as tablets, smartphones and TV sets)

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