Briefs

Big-name companies populate the Leaders Quadrant as vendors and customers alike look to leverage data warehouses as mission-critical applications.

Destination CRM, by Colin Beasty, October 26, 2007

Teradata was named top dog in Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems, 2007," followed in the Leaders Quadrant by Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, respectively. The report, released last week, highlights the evolution that data warehouses have made from being mere stores of information supporting business intelligence (BI) into being analytics infrastructure repositories for the enterprise. The report also notes the recent focus on appliance solutions that enable companies to use these tools as mission-critical hardware.

The data warehouse database management system (DBMS) space continues to grow, and has lately begun to embrace those appliance solutions. "Much of the market is following the mantra of 'easy to install, rapid time-to-productivity, and 80 percent of needs met,' " says Donald Feinberg, an analyst with Gartner and co-author, with Mark A. Beyer, of the report. IBM, Oracle, and Teradata (which completed its spinoff from parent firm NCR on October 1) continue to battle for the largest part of the market with increased marketing and new functionality, according to the report, with Microsoft entering the fray offering a more competitive DBMS that has experienced rapid uptake among midsize businesses.

(In last year's report, Gartner had rated Microsoft right on the border between the Leaders and Challengers Quadrants. This year, no vendor made the Challengers Quadrant.)

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Visionaries:

Compared to the 2006 report, the population of this Quadrant doubled from two to four.

• Sybase, which moved from the Challengers Quadrant last year thanks to an improved completeness of vision, and missed this year's Leaders Quadrant by just a hair's breadth;
• Netezza, which was virtually unchanged from its previous rating; this year, the company is just slightly lagging Sybase in ability to execute, but squeaking past in terms of the completeness of its vision;
• Greenplum, the only new vendor added to Gartner's assessment since last year, is the result of the merger of two DBMS vendors (Metapa and Didera); Gartner noted in the report that the vendor has been gaining ground rapidly, thanks in part to a partnership with Sun Microsystems; and
• DATAllegro, which once again is the lowest-rated among the Visionaries; Gartner's report notes that the firm "is gaining new customers, though at a slower rate than other young companies of the same age."

This Quadrant contained the same three vendors this year as it did in 2006.

• MySQL;
• Kognitio; and
• Sand Technology, which remained the lowest-rated vendor to make Gartner's eligibility requirements for the Magic Quadrant.