Vendors in Gartner's BI Magic Quadrant 2009

Analyst firm Gartner has revealed the leading vendors in its Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms 2009.

They are: IBM (Cognos), Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Information Builders, SAS and MicroStrategy.

This Magic Quadrant presents a global view of Gartner's opinion of the main software vendors that should be considered by organisations seeking to develop business intelligence (BI) applications.

Gartner describes leaders as "vendors that are reasonably strong in the breadth and depth of their BI platform capabilities, and can deliver on enterprise-wide implementations that support a broad BI strategy. Leaders articulate a business proposition that resonates with buyers, supported by the viability and operational capability to deliver on a global basis."

This year, there are no new vendors in the Magic Quadrant. But since IBM has acquired Cognos, it thus replaces the latter in the list.

Visionaries and niche players

The visionaries identified in the quadrant are QlikTech and Tibco Spotfire.

Niche players are Actuate, arcplan, Board International and Panorama Software.

Among the criteria for vendors to be included in the Magic Quadrant are:

-- Generate US$20 million or more total software revenue from BI platform software sales annually or, in the case of open-source BI platform software, generate US$20 million total company revenue annually.

-- Have customers that have deployed the vendor's BI platform as their enterprise BI solution and, in the case of vendors that also supply transactional applications, the BI platform is routinely used by organisations that do not use its transactional applications.