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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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2022

It’s that time of the year again: Gartner just published its holy Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI) Platforms for 2022! Our beloved SAP Analytics Cloud is SAP’s offering in this area and is compared to tools as PowerBI (Microsoft), Tableau (SalesForce) and Qlik.

Status Quo?

When I look at the sections in the report for these four players I’m surprised how little has changed since the 2021 quadrant. I could basically just repeat most of the comments that I wrote in last year’s blog here.

Microsoft is still the top leader with PowerBI, Tableau is a strong number 2 and even Qlik is still regarded as a “leader”. Besides the (obvious) ability to deliver a proper technical solution, PowerBI and Tableau already have a very high adoption and with their extremely rich and active user communities it is very unlikely that they will loose this position any time soon. On that topic, SAP is still paying for trashing their (BOBJ) community years ago and has to build this back up from scratch. Fortunately, I do see that SAP is actually showing some very good progress on this and it is definitely going into the right direction again (I’m still not a fan of the community site in its current form though, but that’s another topic).

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Gartner Magic Quadrant 2021

Aaaah, winter is almost over which means that the whole BI world is waiting for Gartner to come up with a new Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms report: The holy scoreboard of the BI Vendor Wars! Behold!

I always like to skim through the report to see how SAP BI is seen from a somewhat outsider view and to learn about some highlights and challenges of comparable solutions in the market.

Looking at the quadrant itself not really that much has changed since last year. Microsoft is the clear industry leader and the PowerBI guerrilla strategy of the past years (give the tool away for free and promote it from within MS Windows/Office) has definitely paid off here. 

Next we have Tableau. I alway keep thinking about what could have happened if SAP acquired Tableau (instead of Roambi) a couple of years ago?

And then there is the big blob of “traditional visionairs” like Oracle, SAS and SAP, where our beloved SAP is getting dangerously close to the edge…

Let’s have a look at some of the comments on SAP:

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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2020

It’s February and as every year around this time Gartner publishes its Magic Quandrant report on Analytics and BI Platform vendors/solutions. So it is always interesting to see how SAP is doing compared to the other big names in the industry, especially Tableau (Salesforce) and PowerBI (Microsoft) as those are the parties that I hear most about in the field.

What I also find interesting (and kinda funny) is that almost all vendors seem to be happy with their place on the quadrant, regardless of their position as a leader (obviously), challenger, visionair or even niche player. Look at all these press releases!

When I compare the quadrant to last year’s version, SAP is still in the same position as a visionaire, while Tableau and MS PowerBI are clearly way ahead as industry leaders. With Sisense, Oracle and Yellowfin moving to up it is getting crowded around SAP…

So let’s first have a look at the comments on SAP and SAP Analytics Cloud. Just as the last two editions Gartner is ignoring the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform and its capabilities, but that is nowadays nicely in line with the SAP strategy for analytics.

SAP is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant, thanks to its improved product functionality and strong vision, but it remains of interest predominantly to the wider base of SAP enterprise application users.SAP Analytics Cloud is a cloud-native multitenant platform with a broad set of analytic capabilities. Most companies that choose SAP Analytics Cloud already use some SAP business applications.

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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2019

Gartner just published its legendary Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for 2019. It is always interesting to see how the SAP BI offering compares to its competitors. In previous years I’ve been critical on this report, as most of the SAP tools were completely ignored (SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, Lumira, etc.) and SAP Analytics Cloud was really just getting started. In the 2019 edition the BOBJ stuff is still out, but that is something I can live with as SAP clearly changed its strategy to cloud.

So let’s have a look at the chart. SAP is seen as a visionaire, but with a low ability to execute. The big competitors Microsoft (PowerBI) and Tableau seem to be far ahead, both in vision and execution. The details on SAP are basically a repeat of my good, bad and the ugly write up on SAP Analytics Cloud in 2018. Some quotes from the report:

SAP is a Visionary, its position in the Magic Quadrant being influenced by product limitations and relative weakness in terms of sales and marketing strategy. SAP still does not have the broad market momentum of the Leaders in this market. Its decision to focus on one product is beginning to improve its competitiveness, however. Reference customers for SAP Analytics Cloud report a much improved view of SAP’s viability as a vendor of modern analytics and BI.

SAP Analytics Cloud’s integrated functionality for planning, analytical and predictive capabilities in a unified, single platform is a differentiator. SAP is one of only two vendors in the Magic Quadrant with such an offering.

I can only agree with this. The focus should not be on purely closing the functionality gap with the quadrant leaders, but on offering a more integrated, broader solution. 

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