So what is this posting about? It seems, after the wide-spread publicity of the open discussion with Talend here on this blog (thanks again for the many responses), other open-source providers apparently want to jump on the bandwagon and voice their dismay about not being recognized, or not being included in a magic quadrant, or not being taken seriously by Gartner analysts, or whatever. Now, there are multiple ways of engaging a Gartner analyst: a simple briefing request, an equally open discussion with the facts on the table, or, and that alternative seem to be sometimes preferred, start kicking and screaming.

The latest in this series is Patrick Beaucamp (what is it with these French open source guys?), who is responsible for Vanilla, another open-source BI project. On his blog, Patrick takes out a shotgun and fires away at everything that moves, and some shrapnel came flying my way. The title of the post is “10 reasons to launch Vanilla BI platform”, but the content more looks like a random selection of insults. I will not spend any time here to comment on most of those, but I will respond to the bitching directed to Gartner or myself.

7) to be certain not to be listed in Gartner’s annuel Quadrant (see Talend comment on Gartner) or my post on decideo.

I don’t get this. You are launching Vanilla “to be certain not to be listed” in a Magic Quadrant. Weird, particularly when I continue reading through the next sentence, in which you complain that Gartner wouldn’t be tracking you.

Honestly, people from Gartner … please, last year you missed the Big Crunch in commercial BI and you wrote Open Source BI was not mature enough … how can you put under silence platform such as Talend and Vanilla ?

Honestly, Patrick, I don’t think you’re making any sense. We missed what? The “Big Crunch”? Oh please, do you make this up? I’d suggest that you’ll be a little more specific next time. And to your point, Open Source BI sure is mature enough for many things, just not for everything. Btw, this is not new, we’ve been saying this for a few years. Finally, we are “putting under silence” Talend and Vanilla? First of all, there is an obvious difference between the maturity of Talend and Vanilla. Talend has some traction in the market, decent brand recognition, (Yves, are you reading this?) and we sure didn’t put any mufflers on the company. On the other hand, Vanilla is largely irrelevant (at this point in time). So if it’s too silent around Vanilla for your own taste, don’t blame Gartner for that fact, as it is your own job to get the word out. You guys don’t even have a real website and we are not your marketing department. So before you start blaming others, I’d suggest you do your homework first.

to read answer to Talend post from Gartner analyst … Is this man really aware of what he wrote ? are we leaving in the same world ? For those who just read this just, please note that Pentaho and JasperSoft – 2 american companies – entered Magic Quandrant just 1 year after the launched their solution …

“This man”, I am assuming that would be me. I can confirm that I was aware of what I wrote. Still am, in fact. Got that? However, it sure seems as if we are living in different worlds. In my world, both Pentaho and Jaspersoft have not entered the Magic Quadrant (for BI Platforms), not one year after launch nor any other year. Again, do your homework and stop distributing nonsense, Patrick.

… to be in an Analyst study, it’s very easy : you just have to pay !

As far as Gartner is concerned, I would qualify this as a “Bold Statement”, or B.S. for short.

One final comment: It is clearly everybody’s right and own decision to select the most appropriate way to start a dialogue. The “Vanilla way” would not have been my preference, as it comes across as rather unprofessional. I always welcome a proper discussion about technology, markets, opportunities and the like, and I’d never shut out small start-ups, but I have no interest in a dispute a la Vanilla. Take your pick.

P.S. I like Rimsky-Korsakov.

Not often, a vendor reacts with a blog posting to the publication of a Gartner document. Press releases, yes, and a lot, kinda like “Company XYZ announces that a leading analyst firm has placed it in the leaders quadrant of the ABC Magic Quadrant…” Rarely, though, do we see a posting directly referring to a magic quadrant, particularly from a vendor that wasn’t included. (Draw your own conclusions.)

Yves de Montcheuil, VP of marketing at Talend, did just that on his blog, where he commented on the latest data integration magic quadrant. I never met Yves, only talked to him on the phone a few times, and I have likewise a lot of respect for him, just like he wrote he has for the Gartner analysts who authored the Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. In his post, Yves makes a few statements that call for a response, as they indicate a distorted perspective on the authors’ view and some other comments are just plain wrong.

No surprise, Gartner’s analyses are still very conservative

If this means that we are not jumping on every new idea and announce it as the silver bullet, then yes, we are conservative. It does not mean, though, that we are turning a blind eye on new developments. Quite the contrary, in fact, as demonstrated by the large number of tiny and often virtually unknown vendors that are featured as a “Cool Vendor”.

Their analysts use mostly their rearview mirror, to look at what happened behind them, whereas they should have a radar to see what’s happening around them and ahead of them.

This is rather meaningless to me, because it’s rather irrelevant what was “happening behind me“, or is “happening ahead of me“. Of course, we are evaluating each vendor’s past, present, and potential future. As an author of any magic quadrant, what the analyst is looking at, and that is clearly communicated to every vendor that is potentially included, are not only things such as product capablities,  but also revenues, sales, marketing, support, alliances, or their financial position. I’m sure, even Yves would agree that those criteria are more backwards looking, as they describe a track record, which, by definition, is always looking at the past. A “future track record” does not exist, with radar or without. And “future revenues” are fairy tales.

… the Magic Quadrant reflects past adoption of certain technologies by large accounts in the US, who are customers of Gartner.

Wrong on all accounts. The MQ is not an adoption map. It has nothing to do with the size of the company. The MQ does not have a US focus. And finally, surveyed companies do not have to be a Gartner client.

Updated every 18 to 24 months and reflecting the long cycles of traditional vendors, who used to take years before their could achieve a significant position on a market

Wrong again. This MQ is updated every year, and Yves should know that. And the MQ is definitely not reflecting sales or product cycles from anybody.

This quadrant includes a combination of dying technologies which have been acquired over and over again (ETI, Open Text’s Genio…), loading utilities (Syncsort, Pervasive, Sybase’s Solonde…) and real enterprise solutions (Informatica, IBM’s DataStage). One component is missing: open source – of course.

I may be repeating myself here, but for every MQ there is a pre-defined set of inclusion criteria, and every vendor that meets those criteria, will be included. Period. Whether they have been acquired a gazillion times (not sure, why that matters), sell “dying technology” (as Yves puts it, well, it’s his job as marketier to knock the competition) or sell products that are made from clay. It does not matter, as long as they match the criteria. And open source vendors are not “missing, of course”, but because not one of them can meet those set criteria (to date). We are even changing the inclusion criteria to make it possible at all for open source vendors to be evaluated. If we would stick with “minimum license revenue of 20M USD” (I picked an arbitrary figure!) as one of the inclusion criteria, it’s hard to see how any open source data integration tools vendor would make the MQ any time soon, as they typically don’t license the software. Because this wouldn’t be fair to open source vendors, we use a figure for “minimum total revenue” instead (only for open source vendors, that generate revenues mostly from service subscriptions), so they have at least a chance of being included in the MQ. If the vendor does not make those figures, they are still out. Nobody gets included for good will.

Some would say that open source vendors cannot afford to pay Gartner (I personally don’t think it makes a difference). This may be true for some vendors. But in our case, Talend is a commercial vendor with strong resources and could afford a contract with Gartner.

Ah, the old mis-perception. Being included in any MQ (not just for data integration tools) is in no way depending on being a Gartner client. I’m happy to see that you don’t think it makes a difference. Because it doesn’t.

But why? To hear that “open source is immature (probability 0.9) and will become mature in 5 to 20 years (probability 0.8)”?

That is funny. But Yves made that up, of course. Interesting though is, that Yves makes the connection between Talend’s exclusion in the MQ and general open source maturity. I think that’s a bit of a stretch, as there are many technology areas that are considered mature (operating system, web servers, app servers, DBMS, to name a few), but data integration is just not there yet, according to our data from user surveys. Yves himself has provided reference accounts of Talend users for our open source data integration survey.

No thanks. We know, and our clients know, that open source has changed a lot over the past years and has become a true alternative for the enterprise (probability 1.0). Maybe even Gartner will realize this one day (probability 0.2)!

We are not disagreeing at all, that “open source has changed a lot”, but that’s not the point. We are also realizing that open source tools (of many kinds) are used in small, medium and large enterprises. All of these things are definitely taken into consideration when we evaluate open source, as we update the MQ again next year. Equally, we will be looking how the rest of the data integration market has developed, as open source does not exist in a vacuum. Criteria may change, too.  Until then, I hope this clarifies the 2008 version of the data integration MQ, even for Yves. Probability … uh.. never mind. We stopped using those probabilities quite some time ago, anyway.