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.
Salut, Yves. While I’m the guy that you have worked with “to a lesser degree”, I felt I needed to set the record straight after reading this post. I am looking very closely at open source, both from the BI and the data integration angle, and I think you got a few things wrong in your views. As I couldn’t respond properly as a simple blog comment here, I addressed your post over on my blog at http://blogs.gartner.com/andreas_bitterer/2008/12/28/setting-the-record-straight/
Looking forward to our ongoing discussion.
Andy
Thanks Andreas for the comment, I have posted my own comment to your post: http://blogs.gartner.com/andreas_bitterer/2008/12/28/setting-the-record-straight/#comments
Best,
Yves
Hi Yves,
Dealing with a Magic Quadrant is one of the most difficult tasks for an Analyst Relations professional. At the IIAR (analystrelations.org), we’ve had many discussions and learnt several things from each other, such as:
- engage early and often with analysts (Andy says he doesn’t know you well, maybe that’s a hint?)
- make sure you spend time understanding the inclusion criteria (ask the analyst what they are was a learning from the lastest Gartner AR Forum at their Cannes Symposium) as well as the weightings of the different criterii
- finally, it’s all in the positioning -ensure that you maximise your competitive advantage
Amazing how many AR firms track these discussions - maybe because there are not many open forums between vendors and analysts.
Anyway, thanks Ludovic, and thanks Carter, for offering your advice. And sorry if I sound pedant, but I know all that stuff. Thing is, unless you are on retainer with these analysts firms, you don’t get many opportunities to engage with them, at least not “often and early”. I know, this is how the game is played - but for our part we don’t think the yearly retainer is worth it. Geez, you don’t even get to have fun reading the probabilities anymore, since they stopped using them.
And, shall I say, the problem here is more profound that just not being “in their face” often enough…
Yves
Will the situation be different if Talend was an American company ? If you read at some Gartner conditions to be listed in the BI MQ, you will read that company need to have 20 millions USD of revenu. This is not the case for some american Open Source BI editor, existing for 3 years, and beeing listed in the MQ for 2 years minimum. So, I think MQ is also influenced by human relations and network … which shouldn’t be the case.
It’s like Gartner MQ was influenced by marketing & promotion. I read carefully the 2 blogs, there is other issues such as clear and fixed conditions to be evaluated in MQ. There is a lot to say on MQ, one important thing is that this is only a picture by Gartner, not the reality. This is a guideline for discussion, not taken into account OEM licences, Open Source licences, …
One thing that surprised me when I tried to promote Vanilla Open Source BI Platform to Analysts is that they are asking for money to evaluate the platform. Sounds strange, isn’t it ? They are paid by customers to write those analysis. How can they be good judges if they have to take into account financial relation with editors ? By money, I mean : either direct request with an invoice, or co-marketing event that editors have to pay.
Patrick
Lets focus on finding out all the details that can counter someones findings empirically and statistically, in counts I mean. The logic is not to tell “we are better” but to find “how to understand what is better” and more importantly “whether we (Talend Community) answer to all those points or not”.
People who stand to win (and take it all) are not those who know they are the best but those who can prove that they are the best.
Please write to me in case you are interested in publishing a report, an exhaustive one, that can take months, to prepare a comparison matrix of features and comparative advantages on the same lines. I AM READY TO CONTRIBUTE.
Patrick, thanks for the comment. I do not believe being a French or American company matters as long as your outreach is global, and you articulate your message the way the global community is used to read it.
As far as analyst firms that ask for money to cover you - sure, there are some out there. But most of them do not carry much weight…
One point I’d like to clarify: Jaspersoft and Pentaho are not “listed” on the BI MQ. They are mentioned as “almost made it but didn’t” - a strange new category… (see this post)
Gourav, we appreciate your willingness to help. The more visible our community will be, and the more they will tell analysts that they are using or considering open source data integration, the more mind share we’ll get with these guys. Of course, for this, they need to believe that analysts are open minded when it come to open source, and the discussions we had through this blog and others help tremendously.
Yves
Gartner’s methodology is inherently biased towards larger vendors. It creates a self-reinforcing loop. I’m with a smaller tech vendor, and we compete with larger VC-funded companies in the $10-50M revenue range.
We commonly have prospects tell us that their outgoing vendor (”Strong Positive” on the most recent Marketscope) has horrible service, that the implementation was disastrous, and that they were promised things that weren’t delivered. And then they say that they love what we can do for them, but can’t buy from us, because Gartner doesn’t recognize us. Even though they know from direct experience that this particular Marketscope is bunk, it’s a powerful CYA tool for job security. (Nobody gets fired for hiring IBM, or listening to Gartner.)
Larger vendors can provide more positive references, even if their overall percentage of satisfied customers is small, so Gartner only ends up hearing from the few happy customers. Gartner recommends larger vendors more favorably, which its clients are more likely to purchase from because of their rankings, which helps these vendors grow larger still. Smaller players are effectively shut out of Gartner client opportunities.
@”Scared of Gartner’s wrath”: Hiding under such a pseudonym is not going to help you. From my own experience a constructive discussion with specific pointers is much more efficient than commonplace criticism. Just my 2 cents.