Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
To be included in this Magic Quadrant, a vendor must meet the following criteria:
• The vendor must have midrange disk array storage systems commercially available and have active references that are using them in production scenarios.
• The vendor must generate at least $25 million in annual midrange disk array hardware revenue.
• The vendor must actively market its branded midrange disk array products in at least two major regions (for example, North America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), or Japan and Asia/Pacific).
• The vendor must sell its branded midrange disk array products to user organizations via its direct sales force or through a reseller partnership sales channel.
==================
Other MQ reports have equally focused and precise entry criteria – all of this seems quite rational and reasonable to me. They do what they say they are going to do, they do not say they are going to evaluate every mid-range array on the planet. Same with the other areas they evaluate, I’m sure.

There are also fairly detailed descriptions of their evaluation criteria and requirements for how they compile their “ability to execute” and their “completeness of vision”, although I’ll grant that these are much more qualitative than the quantitative and precise requirements for inclusion in the study.

For all that the big analyists are profit motivated and coin operated, it’s very hard to see how they could do it otherwise than they do. Many elements they measure are inherently subjective, and anyone who has done any polling or data collection from groups of people can tell you how difficult it is to nail down the right questions to produce credible, repeatable results.

Hopefully the majority use the MQ tool as one of many different guides as they do their due diligence and come up with a short list to invite to do POCs or bake-offs or in-house demos, etc. I can agree that anyone who blindly buys based on who is in the leadership quadrant this year deserves everything they get (and don’t get).

But to totally discount the MQ as a trending and guidance tool seems to me to be throwing the baby out with the bath water. It’s as extreme in its own way as totally relying on the MQ data… both seem a bit silly on the face of it.

Any fool who trusts Gartner’s analysis – to make any decision – is simply ignorant to the industry’s sleezy pay-for-play practices.

Anyone who calls themselves an IT expert and then relies solely on the Quadrant to make decisions is just plain lazy. Sometimes the extra information below the graph adds more than the graph.

It really comes down to how much work the CIO does when assessing a solution. In some cases availability is important and speed of change is not important – like storage – you want a stable company but features are not so important. In some cases features are all important and stability not so much. It may be worth finding a “visionary”. In some cases you may be looking for a “Niche Player” who will worship your business and deliver the exact solution that you need and not confuse matters with many features that just get in the way.

A bit of pre-planning makes all the difference.

Now excuse me while I drink this kool-ade.

Gartner simply ranks software by feature lists and how big/viable the company is. This encourages big enterprise companies to just add features to move up and to the right of the MC. Not create good software.

As for ZL’s product, its a niche that is not covered adequately by Gartner say ZL. Big deal – they need to get to the decision makers and make the sale. The lack of proper placement on the Gartner MQ is a great rallying cry but does not really solve their sales problem. The lawsuit is great bit of theater but it will not redefine the size of their market so that Gartner or anyone else will judge it separately.

Disclosure – 20 years ago, I used to work for a Gartner-like company. Although there were issues with some of the work we did, the value proposition was a fairly robust one. As a user, they spent $10 to 15K per year with us to get information that would take five full time people to compile. Not unbiased, not perfect but a lot of information boiled down and analyzed for pretty small fee.

What is their predictions success ratio over long period?

Have they been wrong predicting iSCSI or other technologies success? Even with there massive content gathered at big price?

Is there a conflict of interest here? They should disclose how much they received per vendors.

If it is true for blogger and comments posted on the internet it should be also true for analysts.