I burst out laughing when I saw Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for “Single-Instance ERP for Product-Centric Midmarket Companies.” Talk about a mouthful. When I was there in late 90s, we worried about segmenting markets too narrowly. Apparently, in the last 15 years, that worry has gone away.
And even then that MQ does not include vendors like NetSuite, Plex and others who do sell to mid-market, product centric manufacturing and retail/distribution companies. Presumably that’s because of the fine print which says to be included vendors have to report at least 20% of their revenue in each of 2 out of 3 major global regions.
So, where to next?
Will they use “more than 5 global data centers” as a filter and leave out Workday (which has 2 each in NA and in EMEA) from some MQs?
You wonder how brutal the filtering process was when only 17 out of what it identified as 7,400 SAP service/channel partners were included in the MQ for those services.
Or worse, will Gartner have to resort to external channels to explain why for example Oracle was not included in their recent MQ for BI reporting tools?
When I was at Gartner, clients were already complaining our definitions and segmentation were confusing. Now, they must need a Master Data Management tool to keep up with all the MQs.
Come to think of it, Gartner probably uses a MDM tool to keep all their stuff somewhat coherent. Wonder which one from their MDM MQ they do use? Hopefully, not one from the Mobile Device Management MQ
