If a company is hailed by the Gartner Magic Quadrant they’re at the top of their game. For those unfamiliar with what the Quadrant means, it’s essentially is a series of market research reports published by leading research company Gartner. The firm relies on proprietary qualitative data analysis methods to reveal crunch market trends from maturity and participants, to direction. What makes the Quadrant fascinating is that Gartner only conducts their analyses every one to two years. Added to that, it is only done so via very several specific technology industries.
Gartner, however, recently published some guidelines for their Magic Quadrant for insight engines to combine search capabilities with artificial intelligence.
Here, we take a closer look.
“Insight engines represent an evolution of search and natural language technologies (NLTs). They deliver information in context to people (content in context) and to support machine automation (data in context),” the Gartner definition begins.
“They do this by connecting to varied sources and types of content (such as documents in content services platforms) and data (such as records in operational database management systems) in order to build an index of extracted data that can be queried by people and machines. Connectors and pre-index processing are used to gather and enrich data before it is indexed; touchpoints and post-query processing are used to simplify the experience for people. Insight engines should be viewed as platforms on which multiple insight applications are provided and developed.”
They also add that insight engines should have the following core capabilities:
- Ability to include key data sources
- Support for data enrichment
- Delivery of results to various touchpoints
- Evaluation and tuning of relevance
- Security features
- Query input flexibility
Gartner also advises optional capabilities and characteristics for insight engines:
- Ability to analyse result sets
- Architecture and deployment model
- Ease of use (for administrators and subject matter experts)
- Support for multiple languages
- Personalization features
The report also evaluates criteria definitions. Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market, including current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on
Overall Viability: An assessment of the overall organisation’s financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product
Sales Execution/Pricing: How capable is the vendor in all presales activities and the structure that supports them in factors such as deal management, pricing and negotiation
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act and customer needs evolve
Marketing Execution: The vendor’s clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programmes designed to deliver the organisation’s message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the brand in the minds of buyers
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated
Operations: How able is the brand or business to meet its goals and commitments? Factors include the quality of the organisational structure, including skills, experiences, programmes and systems
More information on the report can be found here.
