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Gartner: Microsoft’s portfolio... A 'formidable mix'
Mon, 22nd Sep 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

For the past few months, I've been Gartner's Vendor Lead for Microsoft.

For some 30 vendors, we assign a single analyst to act as a focal point for coordinating across the 1000 analysts we have when research covers that vendor.

In Microsoft's case, that has proven to be fascinating – we have some 3 dozen Magic Quadrants alone that have been published about their offerings in the last 15 months or so.

As Vendor Lead, I'm a mandatory peer reviewer for those and other documents. For my own edification, I decide to map the Magic Quadrants that feature Microsoft onto a quadrant that shows where Microsoft appears in that piece of research. The results are intriguing.

Microsoft has a sizable number of Leader offerings, but many in the Challenger quadrant, and a few that appear in the Niche Player quadrant as well.

It's a bit rarer for them to appear as Visionaries – if they have it figured out, their ability to execute tends to drive them up into the Leader space fairly quickly.

The chart shows places where Microsoft clearly needs to focus, and makes it clear that they play in numerous markets of interest to Gartner's enterprise IT-focused audience.

Many categories do not appear, and a half dozen MQs are currently in process. I'll keep this up to date for myself, and occasionally will share it here...

By Merv Adrian - Analyst, Gartner