Gartner Magic Quadrant ™

Most people are familiar with the graphic that sits atop the Magic Quadrant.  It positions companies along two axis - “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision”.  While many people only look at the graphic, Gartner also supplies three ‘strengths’ and three ‘cautions’ for every vendor.  Overall, we feel, the report text tends to be fair and objective and reading this report can be a great first step in getting a high-level view of the market as viewed by Gartner.

As someone who has gone through this process for more than 10 years, I am really excited by the significant shifts that we are seeing this year which I believe can be attributed to a few key areas - – areas where MicroStrategy has made significant investments over the past few years.  And, not surprisingly (at least to us) align perfectly with our three product pillars: Pervasive, Open, & Trusted.

PERVASIVE - The Rise of Generative

Clearly the market is very excited about the introduction of Generative AI and the potential that it has to change the way that we all work which is why MicroStrategy has invested so heavily in this area over the past year.   In fact, we were first to release comprehensive Generative AI powered capabilities last September including Auto SQL, Auto Dashboard, and Auto Answers. 

Even though they are built on large language models (or LLMs), Generative AI has real world applications to Analytics & BI as well.  However, applying ad-hoc human questions to the structured world of data is non-trivial. Most people don’t tend to speak in computer code.  And, LLMs are very good at understanding language – but not really the language of our unique business.  In order to have the LLM respond intelligently to your employees’ questions, it needs to understand a LOT of context.

Thankfully, MicroStrategy’s integrated Enterprise Semantic Graph provided us with the perfect lattice on which to build the various elements that are necessary to use this technology in a meaningful way – without having to ‘train’ a custom model every time.

 The MicroStrategy Semantic Graph ensures that everything is reusable, inheritable, and privacy aware.  This means that we store information at the enterprise, role, application, and personal level giving us the framework we need to understand the unique language of every user.    Sometimes this is something as simple as a corporate acronym (SLS = Sales) other times this is something more complicated – maybe something that isn’t even represented in the data.  For example, we have a pharmaceutical customer whose employees refer to groups of drugs as a ‘drug family’ even though the concept of family doesn’t appear in the data set.  We can simply teach the LLM that when someone uses the X family, the drug name should be filtered on X.

Understanding all of these layers of nuance is critical if we want to drive analytics adoption and deliver on the promise of AI+BI.

OPEN - Cloud isn’t a place, it is a way of thinking

MicroStrategy has been around for a long time and we ‘grew up’ in the era of large on-prem systems.  However, over the past few years, we have invested heavily in completely refactoring our platform for the cloud.  This meant much more than just dropping our software inside a giant container!  We thoughtfully built out a new microservices architecture with 18 discrete independently managed microservices giving our customers extreme agility.    

Thousands of the largest and most demanding companies in the world depend on MicroStrategy.  For many of these companies, the flexibility to deploy in more than one cloud or even in private cloud is paramount which is why we have secured partnerships with all three major cloud providers – AWS, Azure, & Google – ensuring that MicroStrategy ONE is available from all three marketplaces.  Additionally, we have made our new cloud architecture available for private cloud* as well.   (Private cloud is currently in private preview with select customers.)

We believe that this openness is critical to take full advantage of the rapidly growing ecosystem of technologies such as Azure Open AI – the engine behind Chat GPT.  However, these models are developing rapidly and this year’s darling may not always be the clear option. 

TRUSTED - What is Old is New Again

We have always believed in the fundamentals of good governance.  Interestingly, we believe it is exactly this strength that is propelling our ability to deliver quickly on the promise of Generative AI.  LLM models are phenomenal at mimicking human interaction, but they require additional context in order to interpret business questions accurately.  As it turns out, the MicroStrategy Semantic Graph provided the perfect framework from which to do just that.  This means that companies that have invested in governance with us over the past decade are able to deploy reliable AI much faster.

There are numerous technologies that are attempting to mimic the power of our Semantic Graph – evangelizing a highly decoupled model.  However, it is exactly this tight integration that is the fuel for rapid performance and the ability to drive trusted results from AI.

What’s Next for Us

We will continue to invest in our three product pillars – Pervasive, Open, and Trusted. 

• We are doubling down on our mission to bring Intelligence Everywhere understanding that pervasive BI means more than serving only the data elite.   
• Our open platform design means that we can react quickly to new opportunities in a rapidly evolving market - if you haven’t seen the launch video for GPT-4o, I strongly recommend taking a look. 
• And, governance – which was frowned upon for the past decade is suddenly popular again as it is the very thing that is needed to drive reliable trusted AI.

But we are also investing in the way we do business as well.

During the time that we took to refactor the platform, we slowed down our marketing efforts.  But we are reigniting the marketing engine and I can’t wait for the opportunity to share our solution with the world.  At MicroStrategy we are fiercely independent and believe that this allows us to focus 1000% on the needs of our BI counterparts.   We also believe that it gives us the ability to tap into the full array of services across all three cloud vendors.  So, not being embedded into a specific ecosystem isn’t really a caution in our mind.

I am excited and proud to be able to share the full report with you today.

Click HERE to read the full Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ report.

We are even more proud of our continued recognition as a Customers’ Choice for Analytics and Business Intelligence.  This recognition is based on our Overall Rating and User Interest and Adoption from verified customer reviews over the past 12 months.

Unlike other analyst reports, we believe the ‘Voice of the Customer’ offers unfiltered, aggregated user ratings and perspectives on working with leading analytics and BI partners. Download your complimentary copy to see how MicroStrategy compared to others in the market—and even segment the peer reviews by industry, company size, and region.

Click HERE to read the full Gartner® Voice of the Customer Report

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_{Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms”, Published 20 June 2024; Kurt Schlegel, Anirudh Ganeshan, David Pidsley, Julian Sun, Georgia O'Callaghan, Christopher Long, Kevin Quinn, Fay Fei, Edgar Macari, Jamie O'Brien}

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