In its yearly survey of business intelligence (BI) software, Gartner named Microsoft, Qlik, and Tableau to its leader quadrant of BI providers. The leader quadrant represents those BI vendors who have achieved the highest rankings in both complete vision and ability to execute. Out of all the vendors tested, Gartner only selected Qlik, Microsoft, and Tableau as industry leaders. The current honor is Microsoft’s tenth consecutive nomination to the leader quadrant, as well as Qlik’s seventh. Gartner also stated that Power BI had the most complete vision among BI providers for the second year in a row.
How They Were Measured
The Gartner Magic Quadrant report measured the BI providers on their ability to provide solutions to five use cases. The use cases were agile centralizing BI provisioning, decentralized analytics, governed data discovery, OEM or embedded BI, and extranet deployment. Gartner measured the vendors on 15 different critical skills. The different capabilities measured included infrastructure, data management, analysis, sharing of findings, and overall platform capabilities.
In these categories, Gartner found that Microsoft, Tableau, and Qlik were all significantly better than their competition. Although the three leaders measured relatively close to each other, they all performed much higher than the remaining vendors.
Microsoft’s Power BI
In their analysis, Gartner reported that Power BI’s strength lies in its cost, vision, ease of use, and active community of users. Power BI is among the most affordable BI providers and is substantially more affordable than its high-end competitors Tableau and Qlik.
The placement by Gartner in among the highest quadrant of analytics providers further cements Power BI’s place among the business intelligence elite. It’s another victory for Microsoft’s business intelligence. Microsoft was a latecomer to the field of BI software. Microsoft released Power BI to the public only recently. But in the last few years, Microsoft has already created a product capable of delivering the high-end services associated with industry leaders such as Tableau and Qlik. It appears that Power BI’s initial success is set to continue for years to come.
Qlik
Gartner chose to focus on both Qlik’s Qlik Sense and QlikView. Qlik Sense is Qlik’s lead product, while QlikView makes up a larger proportion of Qlik’s total users. Gartner rated Qlik highly and placed them into the leader’s quadrant. Overall Gartner based Qlik’s high rating on a strong customer experience, a powerful product, and a large global partner network.
Qlik was especially noted for having a fast deployment speed; allowing businesses and IT departments to quickly combine or separate data from multiple sources. Gartner also praised Qlik for its robust user training system. The training system helps users quickly produce content.
Qlik has been a leader in the Magic Quadrant for the past several years.
Conclusions
For both Qlik and Microsoft, Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant further cemented their place at the apex of BI vendors. Gartner only selected Microsoft, Qlik, and Tableau to be industry leaders. As the field of business intelligence continues to grow, these three BI vendors continue to maintain their industry dominance.
