The Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms

The quadrant presents Gartner’s opinion of the software vendors which should be considered as potential business intelligence solutions for any organization. Using the quadrant a company should investigate which vendor solution covers the most requirements. Gartner uses surveys, customer perceptions and vendor questionnaires as the data source for determining how solutions are measured.
Although Pentaho did not get placed in the actual Quadrant they did receive praise from Gartner:

“However, while they don’t meet the revenue requirement, Jaspersoft and Pentaho have emerged as viable players in the BI platform market and as such we invited these firms to take part in the Magic Quadrant user survey. Both open source vendors provide comprehensive BI platform capabilities that are comparable to traditional BI platform vendors. A key part of both vendors’ strategy is to forge OEM relationships with commercial independent software vendors (ISVs) looking to easily embed BI functionality at a low price point. Jaspersoft and Pentaho enable ISVs to OEM open-source BI components without being bound by the GNU General Public License (GPL) terms and conditions. Given their subscription-based model, both vendors need to provide exemplary support. This was in evidence in the MQ reference survey, as both Jaspersoft and particularly Pentaho scored strongly on the customer support question — higher than any of the megavendors.”

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms
Additionally, the Gartner report goes on to summarize the Pentaho platform, which is very comprehensive and feature-rich considering its open-source foundation:

“Pentaho, after just four years in existence, has put together a comprehensive open-source BI platform that includes data integration and data mining capabilities. In 2008, Pentaho was noticeably more aggressive, openly competing against traditional BI platform vendors. Like Jaspersoft, Pentaho is affordable and also offers a subscription-based model that avoids an initial large payment for the software license. Some of the significant features Pentaho introduced in 2008 include an automatic table designer that analyzes relational schemas and data patterns, performs a cost-benefit analysis of aggregation at different levels, and generates and populates those aggregate tables. Despite a handful of large customers, Pentaho reference survey respondents more frequently indicated that they had more departmental deployments (versus enterprisewide) and smaller data volumes compared with the other vendors.”

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