Gartner’s Magic Quadrants and Qlikview

Posted by Gilles on 02/02/2010 under Articles, News | 5 Comments to Read

I just received a link from William (@williamvanlith) through twitter (@gillespol) about Gartner’s Magic Quadrant 2010. I’ve been following Gartner’s magic quadrants on BI and datawarehousing for quite some time now and something struck me immediately. THERE ARE NO VISIONAIRIES ANYMORE!! Even Qlikview isn’t a visionary anymore. I consider that as a bad thing, it looks like nobody is really innovative anymore. This reflects some of the conclusions from Nigel Pendse in his BI Verdict.  Another comment I’ve read at Jos van Dongen’s blog, is that it could mean that BI software is (finally) maturing.  

When reading the whole article, the explanation for Qlikview not being part of the visionaries anymore is quite understandable. Other parties are copying the unique selling points of Qlikview. Microsoft introduces PowerPivot, SAP created an easy entry proposition with Business Objects Explorer, and Cognos came with Express, all focusing at business users, some of them with in-memory techniques, enabling business users to what Gartner calls “Surf and Safe”. That “proves” that Qlikview is on the right track with the big vendors copying Qlikview’s approach. I’d like to quote this part of MQ2010:

Due to QlikTech’s (the company behind Qlikview) growth and success in 2009 in posing a significant challenge to market leaders, the company has moved from the Visionaries to the Challengers quadrant. QlikView’s (the product) architecture and go-to-market approach continue to deliver an exceptionally high degree of customer satisfaction.

One major issue that Gartner is pointing out in its analysis is that Qlikview could have had its momentum. Qlikview is/has been very successful with in-memory technology and 64-bit computing enabling scalability of Qlikviews model. Qlikviews self service BI and end-users being fed up with large development and analysis cycles from IT helped Qlikview a lot. An economic down-turn, tight IT budget in combination with Qlikview’s low cost of deployment helped them even further, but what’s next? Competition is growing and Qlikview lacks statistical and predictive modelling. Qlikview has to come up with some vision into the medium term how they will be innovating their product and how they will cope with the competition.

Both in 2010 and in 2009 comments are that Qlikview needs to show some large BI deployments to move into the Leader Quadrant.  Qlikview deployments are growing and spreading to multiple departments and, in many cases to the enterprise, but data sizes and number of end users are still low (compared to the competition). Besides that, it’s not very often that Qlikview is the enterprise standard, mostly in complement of existing BI platform implementations. Qlikview implementations are mostly departmental. That might be because Qlikview is offering inferior enterprise support, with security defined in a load script, not an easy way to maintain an enterprise wide semantic layer and poorly ranked usage monitoring, resource allocation and load balancing. Another concern is about support; the Gartner user surveys show below average support. Gartner suggests that Qlikview could be experiencing growing pains resulting from its success and rapid growth.

To summarize what Gartner says about Qlikview’s strengths, we can be very short: It is easier, simpler, cheaper, faster, quicker to deploy and is more feature rich than the competition.

To conclude this post: Qlikview is still going strong and has a very good product (and marketing), but Qlikview needs to show some vision on the short and medium term. Vision is not about incrementally adding new functionality, but more about how to service those large enterprise deployments. Qlikview has to do some serious work on an enterprise wide semantic data layer and better tools to manage large deployments.