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.

To cover all those topics, we bring in 20 analysts, the local EMEA folks as well as our colleagues from the US and as far as Brazil. Add to that, a large number of clients talking about their specific success stories, presentatoins by the sponsors, a variety of panels, breakouts my McKinsey, hands-on tech labs, it is going to be another intense event. I am looking forward to meeting many of you, in 1on1 sessions, over breakfast, lunch, dinner, a fly-by coffee or during the reception, with a glass of wine to toast to the new US President.

I recently met with a representative from the education department of a large African city. They wanted to do BI, getting reports on students, classes, teachers, grades, and so on. Now, I learned to be more careful with my advice in places like Africa, as some parts of the infrastructure aren’t comparable with European standards. So I didn’t recommend putting in a big honking data warehouse and some funky BI platform, as I knew (a) the budgets wouldn’t be there, (b) skills would be an issue, and (c) data volumes wouldn’t warrant such an investment.

So I started slowly and asked what kind of reports they’d be expecting to create, what applications and data sources they’d be tapping, how much data, how many potential users, and that sort of thing.

The lady from the education department said they wanted, for example, to get some “teacher reports” and what teachers were more successful, as indicated by better grades of their students. Easy enough I thought. Boy, was I wrong, as there was one problem: There wasn’t any data.

Apparently, the department wanted to know “which teacher is actually physically in the classroom?” or “what topics are those teachers actually discussing in class?”. Kinda different set of problem, compared to the run-of-the-mill inquiries on BI. So I suggested having some employees do regular rounds in the schools to monitor attendance, and create some data by recording their observations in … uh … Excel, at least for the time being. Never thought I would do such a thing. Good reality check.

I asked the same question yesterday afternoon at the Gartner Future of IT conference in Sao Paulo, and, what do you know, more than 10% claimed to have a BI strategy. Still not the number I’d like to see, but significantly higher than in Chicago, Cologne, Copenhagen or Cape Town. I gotta have a closer look at those strategies.