MicroStrategy Placed Once Again As LEADERS in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2014 For Business Intelligence & Analytic Platforms

I always feel Gartner analysis of placing or positioning the technology in their magic quadrant is effective and gives customers/clients the vision to go for using the technology in current generations of IT world. They perform thorough analysis/survey and come up with their magic quadrants which is of 4 sections (Each has its own value)

• Visionaries
• Niche Players
• Challengers
• Leaders

Based on the above 4 criteria or sections, they positions the technology players within the specific market.

About Gartner Magic Quadrant Report:

How do I use a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

How does a Gartner Magic Quadrant Work?

Now, i believe everyone would be aware of the Gartner way of rating the technologies playing in the current market. Out of these 4 sections, MicroStrategy is always in the LEADERS quadrant for quite a few years continuously. Below is the information’s (Strengths & Cautions) that Gartner Analysis says for MicroStrategy in 2014.

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence(BI) & Analytic platforms for 2014:

MicroStrategy

Strengths

• MicroStrategy remains an industry benchmark in large BI deployments running on top of large enterprise data warehouses, and it is often viewed as the vendor of last resort when enterprise requirements are complex. The company invests continuously in scalability and performance enhancements for its full, natively developed and integrated portfolio, which enables it to support the largest average data volume accessed in data repositories, at 17TB (the market average being 4.2TB), and the highest average data volume size for the biggest query, at 2TB (the market average being 492GB). The average number of end users is more than double the market average (2,979 versus 1,364). Deployments serve, on average, 773 users per IT administration user — the highest score in the survey.
• Customers identify functionality as one of the main reasons for selecting MicroStrategy’s platform, and they awarded several capabilities almost the top score: mobile BI, reporting, dashboards, geospatial and location analytics, BI infrastructure, and administration and metadata management. Interactive visualization, OLAP and embedded advanced analytics also received above-average scores. MicroStrategy’s composite product ratings are among the highest, both with and without factoring in its enterprise deployment score (the size and reach of deployments within enterprises), contributing to its position on the Ability to Execute axis. In particular, MicroStrategy is the market leader in terms of the breadth and depth of its mobile BI offering. The tool natively supports iOS and Android devices, and it offers advanced capabilities such as GPS-based context awareness, bar code scanning, transactions write-back and videoconferencing between users. This level of capability enables MicroStrategy to win deals and penetrate key accounts where mobility is a strategic requirement.
• The cloud has been another area of strategic investment for MicroStrategy. Of the MicroStrategy customers surveyed, 19% already use cloud BI and another 15% plan to in 2014. MicroStrategy claims that the cloud offering is its most successful product ever in terms of revenue growth, with strong initial adoption in departments and lines of business in the MicroStrategy installed base. This trend is expected to continue for the next few years, given the global acceleration of cloud adoption — overall survey results show that existing and planned usage over the next 12 months rose from 30% in 2012 to 45% in 2013. Moreover, MicroStrategy’s investments in cloud capabilities and its sales team’s preparations to sell cloud place it ahead of the other Leaders in this area and will continue to propel the company forward.
• In late 2013, MicroStrategy released an updated version of its visual data discovery engine. It now supports data blending between multiple ad hoc data sources, such as Microsoft Excel, and semantic layer-based data sources, such as the corporate data warehouse. It also enhances the user self-service capabilities, while maintaining IT-driven data governance. An equivalent free stand-alone product — MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop — has also been introduced to increase market awareness, foster adoption by individual business users and encourage eventual adoption of the corporate solution. In the absence of competing data discovery specialists, adoption both in MicroStrategy’s installed base and beyond will be key. A scalable multiterabyte in-memory engine is also being developed in cooperation with Facebook, for release in 2014. This could differentiate MicroStrategy from direct competitors in the data discovery sector.

Cautions

• MicroStrategy’s customers point to limitations that prevent them from expanding their deployments and which may, in the future, represent a genuine risk to this vendor. Cost of software heads the list, being identified by 48% of its surveyed customers (surpassed only by Alteryx, with 67%), although MicroStrategy supports the highest number of users per IT administration user of any vendor surveyed. Customers identified ease of use for both developers and business users as an ongoing concern. They also reported issues with software and support quality. MicroStrategy received the second-lowest result of any vendor in the survey for both of these criteria, which is worse than in previous years, when MicroStrategy hovered around the survey average.
• MicroStrategy’s platform requires, along with SAP’s, the most days to create a new report: 7.9 on average (almost twice the market average and nearly four times that of the survey leader on this measure). The trend is confirmed at all levels of report complexity. A highly featured development environment often goes hand-in-hand with a steep learning curve for developers, but MicroStrategy will need to address this challenge, as ease of use will remain a key buying driver. Moreover, although it is an early investor in Hadoop connectors, such as Cloudera Impala, MicroStrategy lacks more user-friendly and comprehensive advanced analytic capabilities, as well as unstructured data support. The existing integration with R and PMML is a start but, as previously in the data discovery sector, this remains a gap that could result in MicroStrategy lagging behind the upcoming generation of BI and analytics tools driven by big data and smart data discovery initiatives.
• For the past few years, MicroStrategy has invested in areas loosely associated with its core business, such as access management and consumer-focused social apps, which, in our view, has created an ambiguous product portfolio and blurred the company’s marketing message, without adding significant value to its current offering. In our opinion, although MicroStrategy’s earlier and new research-and-development efforts have often created significant opportunities, these investments — unlike those in the mobile and cloud sectors, which have complemented its core business — have diverted sales, development efforts, and focus away from addressing critical market requirements for ease of use and data discovery in a more timely fashion.