Symposium Times

By Eric Purchase, Gartner

You can see the drawing power of Gartner’s Magic Quadrants at the Magic Quadrant Theater presentations at Gartner’s 2009 Symposium in Orlando. Monday’s presentation by Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Yefim Natis on two of Gartner’s application infrastructure Magic Quadrants attracted a standing-room-only crowd of about 75 to ITxpo Theater B.

Theater B was thinly partitioned from the ITxpo show floor, which streamed with attendees keeping up a steady roar. But the audience listened closely to Mr. Natis explain that “application infrastructure is the enabling technology for projects of different kinds (including new SOA application projects, composite application projects, back-end integration projects and others). Although the same infrastructure technology is used in different projects, the priorities of the projects differ. The infrastructure suite that is great for one project type may not be well-suited for another type. Gartner’s set of application infrastructure Magic Quadrants is designed to look at the same set of platform/infrastructure providers through different lenses.”

Gartner has scheduled 12 Magic Quadrant Theaters over four days to introduce Gartner’s most widely recognized document type to Symposium attendees. Magic Quadrants show the relative strength of vendors in a given market at a point in time. They help Gartner clients make well informed buying decisions.

Research VPs Mark Gilbert and Toby Bell not only filled Theater B Tuesday afternoon but had them spilling out onto the show floor, standing on tip toes and craning their necks to hear about Gartner’s enterprise and Web content management Magic Quadrants.

One attendee from a medical device manufacturer uses Magic Quadrants for planning and strategy. She said, “Magic Quadrants have become a standard tool for a lot of companies. I always find some new insight when I read a Magic Quadrant.”

Filed under: ITxpo