You wouldn’t belive, Oracle was a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2007-2015. 2015 was the time of the Enterprise BI platforms and the strong vendors. IBM, SAP, SAS, MicroStrategy, Microsoft with it’s new offering Power BI and already Tableau and Qlik.
In 2015 Gartner stated: “The BI and analytics platform market is undergoing a fundamental shift. During the past ten years, BI platform investments have largely been in IT-led consolidation and standardization projects for large-scale systems-of-record reporting.“ But what happended? “This shift to a decentralized model that is empowering more business users also drives the need for a governed data discovery approach.“
Gartner reacted in 2016: “The BI and analytics platform market's multiyear shift from IT-led enterprise reporting to business-led self-service analytics has passed the tipping point. Most new buying is of modern, business-user-centric platforms forcing a new market perspective, significantly reordering the vendor landscape.“ which results in “to better align with the rapidly evolving buyer and seller dynamics in this complex market. This Magic Quadrant focuses on products that meet the criteria of a modern BI and analytics platform“
So 2016 was the year Oracle, IBM, SAP, SAS and MicroStrategy fell off the right upper Leader quadrant and never came back…
Oracle was dropped because “… Oracle, … were excluded from the Magic Quadrant this year because they did not meet all of the inclusion requirements.”
But Oracle came back in 2017:
Fig. 1: Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2017-2019 for Oracle
After years as a leader and as a major software vendor Oracle came back in 2017 with Oracle Data Visualization (ODV) and stayed there for 2 further years. Gartner explained “Oracle made it back onto the Magic Quadrant this year because its modern BI and analytics components continue to gain market traction and have functionality matured“.
In 2020 Oracle made the next move:
Fig. 2: Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2017-2023 for Oracle
Oracle made steps in the Completeness of Vision with their 2018 cloud offering rebranded to Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC). Gartner explained “Oracle is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant, for the first time since re-entering it in 2017. Its continued focus on augmented analytics is now coupled with an improved go-to-market approach.“.
Oracle worked hard on their product offering with new innovations and changed the market and community approach, co-innovated with customers delivered prebuild content for Oracle business applications and prebuilt data science models. The also showed one of the strongest visions in the market.
Now it’s 2024 and while the other former big BI vendors still struggle to come back to former Leadership, Oracle did it:
Fig. 3: Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2017-2024 for Oracle
Gartner highlighted Oracle for it’s database management, business application and cloud service provider footprint. They explained: “Oracle is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) is embedded in OracleFusion Apps and brings together business data, prebuilt data pipelines, analytics and AI models.OAC delivers insights and recommendations to specifi c roles in the process.“.
Todays BI and Analytics tools are not the same as 2016. We have to be aware that the market is constantly changing. We see the hyperscalers in a strong position now with Google in the leaders quadrant for the first time and AWS making attempts to jump into it, too. For SAP it seems to be a really small step to switch from Visionaries to Leaders but I wait for it already for years. Microsoft, Qlik and Salesforce (Tableau) are still strong.
There are 8 honorable mentioned vendors in the report. So even if the market sometimes seems to be mature, there is always room for new players. There is not time to rest.
But for today, congratulations to Oracle!