Gartner’s Magic Roundabout
I spent part of this weekend pondering the values of the Gartner Magic Quadrant and trying to elucidate for myself just who buys into this scorecard smorgasbord other than the companies who pay for Gartner’s venerable services.
As you may know, Gartner’s Magic Quadrants use standard criteria in two categories: completeness of vision and ability to execute. The analyst firm’s MarketScopes on the other hand may use up to seven criteria to focus on factors that differentiate a particular market.
It’s always fun to study one of these things. The top right hand corner is always inevitably populated with an Oracle or an HP or a Microsoft etc. But I always feel sorry for the guys in the bottom left with poor execution and poor vision. Why don’t they just pack up and call it a day now? They must still be trading after all.
Gartner says that its Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes offer, “Visual snapshots of a market's direction, maturity and participants.” So I suppose some of those bottom left players might be growing companies with emerging technologies. If you scour the web, there are very few critical comments out there on the Magic Quadrant series – but is that because so much PR content is out there that has been created by the companies who have been ranked positively?
Personally, if I had to choose, I think I’d rather be recognised for completeness of vision rather than ability to execute, but it’s hard to pick. Gartner of course doesn’t wish to completely negate the value of the bottom left corner of the Magic Quadrant and therefore labels this section as “niche players”. Is that a politically correct way of saying that these companies really could do better if they tried?
I’m being a little superficial, so in an attempt to provide some substance I thought it would be good to detail the criteria that Gartner uses for its ‘Ability to Execute’ measurement: product, overall viability, sales execution, market responsiveness, marketing execution, customer experience and operations. Aligned to this, the ‘Completeness of Vision’ scale is built from an analysis of the following criteria: market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, product strategy, business model, industry strategy, innovation and geographic strategy.
As previously mentioned, there’s very little criticism of the Magic Quadrant in the IT media out there, but I did find one excellent leveling comment from Alan Pelz-Sharpe (also an analyst) who 18 months ago when writing on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and some firms possible over-reliance on the Magic Quadrant noted that, “If there is a problem to identify, it is likely a business model that hinges on such charts, and a public's demand for ever simplified information, along with the vendors addiction to getting the ‘right’ placement in the chart. It is both the beauty and the curse of the Magic Quadrant that it dramatically simplifies a marketplace. But ECM tools and choices are far from simple. In short, buyers of ECM beware.”
The reason I started ranting on about these things in the first place is that late on Friday I was sent a note about Compuware’s “enviable” position on the Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management – something the company is touting to tally in with its appearance at the Vision Events Project Portfolio Management Summit (what do you mean – you didn’t know it was on?) in California.
Just for good measure – it’s also probably worth mentioning that I didn’t spend my whole weekend thinking about Magic Quadrants. I also went fishing during humid hot thunderstorms on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay and got worm guts stuck ender my fingernails. A rather more magical experience all round I can promise you.