Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2023

Sometimes it feels as we are at the end of history and nothing changes anymore. I’ve been reading these annual Gartner “Magic Quadrant” reports on the state of Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI) for a couple of years now and every edition concludes the same, at least for the “big four” that I look at as I encounter those the most in project (SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce Tableau and Qlik). MS Power BI on top, Tableau second and Qlik still somewhat regarded as a leader. However, SAP is getting closer and closer to take over that third spot!

You can find the report summary here and use the slider below to compare the quadrants of 2022 and 2023.

So what?

The question is of course what all of this actually means. Gartner defined 12 “critical capabilities” that these ABI platforms should contain and the vendors nicely follow up by making sure each topic is somewhat covered. That’s probably why we have these “Search to Insight” and “Smart Discovery” features in SAC that are cool for demos but actually don’t work in real business situations (and thus are never used).

Don’t get me wrong, these capabilities eventually make sense to have in the SAC (and SAP Datasphere) platform, but as someone who is working with this kind of tooling on a daily base I’d rather see some more development effort on the basic stuff (for example enriching reporting features) and hold off a bit more on the stuff that is not “ready” anyway.

SAP Analytics Cloud

But let’s have a quick look at what the Gartner findings are for SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC).

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Dashboards are dead? Really?

I saw this nice discussion on LinkedIn last week on the state of dashboarding. And yes, I was as surprised as you to see a relevant, professional post on this platform in 2022, as LinkedIn has turned into some sort of Facebook lately, but okay… 😅  

The premise of the post was that dashboarding has gone completely out of hand: everybody now creates his own version of the truth with all these modern easy-to-use tools. An interesting memo by ThoughtSpot called Dashboards are dead was included with some thoughts on a different approach for data analysis. The ThoughtSpot solution is driven by natural language search (NLS) and artificial intelligence (AI) and it actually ranks pretty high on the Gartner Quadrant for Analytics and BI. This is actually a very current topic as SAP acquired Askdata last week! Askdata also operates in this area and can be expected to further extend the “Search to Insight” capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud.  

Time wasted

Although this “Dashboards are dead” document by ThoughtSpot is obviously created for marketing, it does give some interesting insights on how dashboarding and reporting is approached, especially in the world outside of our SAP bubble. Some comments made me scratch my head though. One of the narratives here is that although we have all these fancy dashboards now, still a lot of time is wasted in keeping them up to date with proper data (chapter 3). I actually do recognize this from some projects where we were asked to rebuild/develop some PowerBI solution that had grown out of hand and indeed couldn’t be maintained anymore. But, I absolutely don’t agree that this is because of the tools that are used. 

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