Last month, Gartner released their latest Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools.

No surprise, Gartner’s analyses are still very conservative. Their analysts use mostly their rearview mirror, to look at what happened behind them, whereas they should have a radar to see what’s happening around them and ahead of them. More than a state of the market, the Magic Quadrant reflects past adoption of certain technologies by large accounts in the US, who are customers of Gartner. Updated every 18 to 24 months and reflecting the long cycles of traditional vendors, who used to take years before their could achieve a significant position on a market, this Magic Quadrant is no longer compatible with new development and adoption cycles such as the ones we can find in open source and SaaS. This quadrant includes a combination of dying technologies which have been acquired over and over again (ETI, Open Text’s Genio…), loading utilities (Syncsort, Pervasive, Sybase’s Solonde…) and real enterprise solutions (Informatica, IBM’s DataStage). One component is missing: open source – of course.

Some would say that open source vendors cannot afford to pay Gartner (I personally don’t think it makes a difference). This may be true for some vendors. But in our case, Talend is a commercial vendor with strong resources and could afford a contract with Gartner. But why? To hear that “open source is immature (probability 0.9) and will become mature in 5 to 20 years (probability 0.8)”? No thanks. We know, and our clients know, that open source has changed a lot over the past years and has become a true alternative for the enterprise (probability 1.0). Maybe even Gartner will realize this one day (probability 0.2)!

Yves

PS: For the record, I have worked with Ted Friedman and Mark Beyer (and to a lesser degree with Andreas Bitterer) for many years and have lots of respect for them as individuals. I think the problem has more to do with general Gartner policy with regards to innovation, than with individual analysts not seeing what is obvious.