The right BI platform is the one that fits your business, not the Magic Quadrant
TL;DR: Gartner's Magic Quadrant 2025
Gartner's Magic Quadrant is a useful industry snapshot, but it won’t tell you which analytics platform is right for your team, your problem, or your business context.
This year’s report is packed with AI, agentic tools and automation — but that doesn’t mean it’s the right time (or the right tool) for you. This post breaks down what the Magic Quadrant doesn’t tell you — and what to focus on instead when choosing a platform.
What is the Gartner Magic Quadrant?
Every year, the Magic Quadrant gets released and decision-makers skim through it, scanning for who’s in the top-right corner — the “Leaders”. It’s a useful industry snapshot, but if you’re trying to solve a real business problem? It’s just one piece of the puzzle.
Here’s what we encourage our clients to focus on instead — and why it leads to better, more confident outcomes.
1. Don’t just ask “who’s a leader?” Ask “what can this tool do for us?”
The 2025 Magic Quadrant highlights vendors like Microsoft and Qlik as Leaders — but that status doesn't tell you how well their tools will work with your team, your data, or your internal processes.
A better approach:
Get clear on what you're trying to achieve — whether it’s reducing manual reporting, unifying siloed data, or enabling AI-driven decision-making. For example, Qlik’s associative model is ideal for exploring connected datasets without needing a data scientist. Oracle’s new AI Assistant now brings natural language capabilities directly into dashboard creation and reporting. Those are real features that might solve *your* problem — but you’d never know it from a quadrant alone.
2. The best tool is the one that matches your context
Rather than jumping to a platform decision, we work with clients to understand their business context, internal capability and data maturity — then recommend a solution that delivers value quickly and sustainably.
For example:
- Fyna Foods Australia partnered with Notitia to modernise operations and reduce manual reporting overhead. The right fit was Qlik Cloud Analytics, delivered through our Analytics as a Managed Service model. This gave Fyna real-time insights across finance, operations and sales, without needing to build a large internal team.
- Laing O’Rourke, delivering the North East Link Project as part of Victoria’s Big Build, needed a modern, scalable data environment and a more effective way to share performance insights across engineering, finance and project teams. Notitia supported the migration from on-premise Qlik to Qlik Cloud Analytics, co-designed multi-layered dashboards, and delivered training to empower internal teams. Alongside this, we developed a UI/UX-designed Microsoft SharePoint intranet to improve internal communication across 800 staff. The result? Real-time reporting, improved decision-making, and streamlined collaboration — all without requiring a full internal analytics team.
In both cases, the platform was chosen because it matched the team’s goals, constraints and delivery environment.
The 2025 Magic Quadrant also reinforces this point. Platforms like SAP Analytics Cloud and Oracle Analytics Cloud work best when used inside their native ecosystems — great if you're already embedded there, but less practical if you're not. That’s why understanding your own environment first matters more than chasing rankings.
3. Timing is everything: Know where you are.
The Magic Quadrant assumes you’re in the market and ready to choose. But in reality, many organisations are still navigating their data maturity — and that’s okay.
A better approach:
Start by assessing where your business is today. What are the biggest pain points? Who are the end users? Do you have the right people, processes and structures in place to get value from a new platform?
The 2025 Magic Quadrant confirms that the industry is racing towards AI-enhanced tools — GenAI, conversational analytics, and agentic workflows are everywhere. But those features only matter if your users are ready to adopt and use them effectively.
If you're still buried in Excel and ad hoc reporting, starting with exploring your organisational processes and data governance might be the first step.
So, where should you start?
Instead of defaulting to the top-right corner, we recommend asking questions like:
- What specific business problem are we solving?
- How will this help us deliver value faster or with less effort?
- What capabilities will we need in 6–12 months?
- What skills and support do we have in-house — and what will we need to bring in?
The 2025 Magic Quadrant reinforces what we see every day: there’s no one-size-fits-all. Natural language queries, agentic workflows, and auto-generated dashboards sound impressive — but what matters most is whether a platform fits your use case, your team, and your goals.
We help you figure out what works for your business. We’re vendor-agnostic for a reason. We don’t push platforms — we work with you to understand your problem, your team, and your context.
Whether you need help assessing your options, preparing your business for a platform shift, or just understanding what’s changed since last year’s Magic Quadrant — we’re here to guide you through it.
Want an independent view of the 2025 analytics platform landscape? Let’s work out what matters — and what’s next. Book a chat with our team!
