Few events in the Analytics and BI calendar get as much universal recognition and anticipation as the annual publishing of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. The whole industry - from vendors through system integrators and consultants to end clients - use it as a benchmark for the success of a particular technology and for analysing the movement trajectory of the overall market. The 2023 report (screenshot of the key diagram below) was published last week and I decided to give my view in this post. The one liner take away is that the top of the Analytics and BI (ABI) pile is largely unchanged from 2022, and Microsoft continues to be all-conquering and largely the default choice for an ABI platform.
There are various ways to get hold of this year's report free of charge (a simple web search yeilds multiple results). Most analytics platform vendors mentioned in the report offer it via their websites to promote their success.
Only minor changes compared to 2022
The state of play compared to 2022 is largely unchanged as mentioned earlier. In the Leaders quadrant, Qlik seem to be lagging behind the pace which Salesforce/Tableau and Microsoft are setting. I will add more on Qlik in my leaders analysis below as a potential explanation of why that might be.
Compared to 2022 a lot of the Niche Players have moved forward either to become Challengers (AWS, Alibaba Cloud, MicroStrategy) or Visionaries (Pyramid Analytics). I will talk more about the position of the Public Cloud vendors later but it is certainly interesting that AWS seem to be lagging behind in the ABI platforms market compared to Google (Looker) and most starkly Microsoft.
Microsoft ruling the ABI roost
The key reasons for Microsoft's dominant position in the ABI market are competitive pricing, and the strong integration of this vendor's flagship Power BI product with Office 365 (we should not forget that Excel is still the omnipresent analysis tool) and Azure data warehouse/lake products such as Synapse. The product roadmap is also considered very strong with the other main components of the Power Platform family, Power Apps, and Power Automate, covering most of Gartners critical capabilities, especially around workflow integration.
Microsoft's key weaknesses are its Azure-or-the-highway approach and the deficient governance capability (without a solid set of processes and truly empowered gatekeepers, Power BI quickly becomes just one more version of the Excel "multiverse"). This seems to be a traditional shortcoming of Microsoft's BI offerings as was the case with a lot of SQL Server data warehouses compared to Oracle ones in the past. The latter enabled the running of a much tighter ship compared to the former. And yet that does not seem to be a showstopper for the Microsoft clients.
Salesforce and Qlik are left in the dust and are not about to challenge Microsoft. Salesforce seems to be the furthest ahead challenger for the ABI platform crown. It boasts an almost religiously fanatical community of developers and is the platform of choice for clients who are not Azure houses. Nevertheless, the momentum seems to be against them. Tableau's revenue growth has slowed down, there are still support delays unless clients don't pay for the pricy Premium Support add-on, and the elephant in the room is the fact that most of their deployments are client-managed while the strategy is cloud-first.
Qlik seems to be losing ground as mentioned above. They are clearly still a leader as they benefit from a large customer installed base with clients who have seen significant value from the flexibility in data preparation and swift visualisation of data. Arguably, Qlik defined the whole ABI decade of agile data preparation and visualisation.
This vendor still has a lot going for it as per the Magic Quadrant: 1) rich data and analytics capability (spanning various citizen data personas as well as developers) through acquisitions and organic growth; 2) open architecture making it the preferred choice for relatively simple integration with almost any business application; 3) it is the most cloud-agnostic vendor from the leaders quadrant attractive to clients that want to avoid vendor lock-in. The cautions however are signficant, with probably the most telling one being the clear pivot towards data integration (envforced by their published intention to acquire Talend), and less focus on data visualisation. Qlik is also one of the priciest vendors, which is feedback I have personal experience with from my own client projects.
GCP leads the rest of the big cloud vendors
There are three primary cloud vendors which fall in the "rest" category defined as not-Microsoft Azure as follows:
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Alibaba Cloud
GCP offers the most focused ABI platform out of the three with the Looker suite of tools now providing a more complete offering in terms of self service capability. Looker is traditionally strong from a metrics governance standpoint with its LookML code repository and that is another big strength for GCP. The integration with the rich and advanced set of tools in the GCP eco system completes the core strengths of this vendor in the ABI market.
The shortcomings of Google are still significant, e.g. automatically suggested insights remain weak, and GCP's tool kit remains developer focused. Clearly, this vendor is not accepting the position they have and are working to address the shortcomings. One clear example of that is the closer integration with ThoughtSpot. This was not mentioned in the report likely due to the announcement coming only a couple of weeks ago.
ThoughtSpot are a visionary in the Gartner report and excel at their consumer focus of intuitive user experience enabled by natural language querying (NLQ). The platform is also augmented by AI both in terms of automated insights, and in continuously learning and optimising the answers provided to consumers. Their main caution is that they lack an eco system of business applications.
The closer GCP-ThoughtSpot partnership (and potential merger?) then seems to be a marriage made in heaven as the two parties address their deficiencies with their strengths, and is expected to start giving Microsoft a run for their money soon.
AWS is usually the first vendor that comes to mind when anyone mentions cloud computing. It has arguably the biggest scale and variety of features among the public cloud providers. Its ABI offering QuickSight has a lot of advantages including the integration in the comprehenisve set of data services which AWS offers, and competitive pricing. It is, however, deficient in terms of capabilities such as metric stores and collaboration. The lack of a business application ecosystem (e.g. like Office 365) inhibits AWS further, despite the gigantic scale and resources which the vendor possesses.
Alibaba Cloud is the dominant public cloud player in the Asia Pacific region. It does have multiple advantages mostly around its open architecture and ability to integrate with multiple solutions. Quick BI, its ABI, offering is a SaaS tool and that has typically limited its adoption to the Alibaba ecosystem. It does not seem to be a strategic growth focus compared to Alibaba's database and AI tooling.
Another huge inhibitor for Alibaba Cloud is geo-politics which is not mentioned in the report. We live in an age where the competition between America and China is impacting visibly or less so almost every aspect of our lives. Technology is a particularly notable example of that with the most popular social media app TikTok, which is Chinese owned, becoming increasingly the target for restrictive regulation by countries in the west. The latter governments have data privacy and security concerns for their citizens as a result of the complete control which the Chinese Communist Party has in that country. It seems difficult to imagine that Alibaba Cloud would escape regulation if significant American consumer data is to be hosted there.
Microsoft's leadership position does not seem to be in immediate danger as Gartner's report is indicating. There are, however, significant undercurrents, especially driven by Google, below the seemingly static ABI market appearance.
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