Microsoft Lead Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI

Hot BI news is the recently announced 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI and Microsoft was the clear leader, driven in part without doubt by the explosive growth of PowerBI .

2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant BI & Analytics

PowerBI is the story

PowerBI is advancing at a rate which its key competitors – Qlik & Tableau – are struggling to match. Further underpinning Microsoft’s lead is its ongoing investment in the underlying Azure Data & Analytics Platforms which give it an edge that competitors just can’t match.

One thing I am frequently hearing from the market is that other platforms are struggling to match PowerBI’s compelling price point – some might cynically say Microsoft are using their deep pockets to undercut everyone else. However in a recent conversation I had with a long standing Cognos customer, once they understood what the product could do – and how much cheaper and faster it would be – it drove them to reconsider their strategy.

I freely admit was initially cynical about Self Service BI a few years ago as it rapidly became transparent that for all the slickness of creating great looking reports the tools were still beholden to a clean set of well managed data. Now modern data platforms are reducing the cost and complexity of providing this data, I am now holding the position that self service BI can really deliver on its value rather than just provide a final polish to a Data Warehouse – as long as it is paired with such a platform.

I continue to maintain my (unpopular in some circles) position that Qlik has nothing unique to offer any more and is doomed to irrelevance unless it innovates or at the very least catches up with its competitors. Tableau remains a solid tool for self service analytics, but the absence of an underlying data platform is going to start hurting it before too long. I would expect it’s longevity to be tied to being acquired by someone suitably huge.

I also note the absence of any serious competition from the other two cloud megavendors. Google offers Data Studio & Amazon has Quicksight – but neither rate a mention. I would watch this space carefully as the pace of innovation by both companies is fierce and Google in particular has strong AI / ML capabilities. Both are also ramping up their own data platform services.

Outside the Big 3

If you are on any of the legacy on premise tools in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI such as Cognos/IBM, Oracle or SAS then i’d be seriously considering where you go next. The pace of innovation in the cloud is hard to ignore and users risk lagging behind their competitors if they cling to these.

SAP and Salesforce have a strong story within their own source but have their weakness in using data from outside the native platform. Doing anything in SAP is horribly expensive, and my conversations with Salesforce BI users have not left a very positive impression of the tools’ capabilities.

The remainder either are strong in their niches and / or have minimal presence in Australia (Microstrategy is basically unsupported here as there’s no people doing it) so i’ll not pass comment on them.

Where to from here?

If you have reviewed the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI and decided you want to know more about PowerBI and the Microsoft Data Platform, we can help.

Full disclosure – Talos are a Microsoft Gold Partner so this post is a bit biased. However if you are not using PowerBI and are looking at migrating to a more cost effective platform, want to understand how cloud capabilities are transforming data and analytics – or work for Qlik and want to lure me into a dark alley – please contact us.

Microsoft Gold Partners Data Analytics