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Licensed for Distribution

Magic Quadrant for Data Science and

Machine Learning Platforms
Published 1 March 2021 - ID G00467320 - 78 min read

By Farhan Choudhary, Afraz Jaffri, and 5 more

This report assesses 20 vendors of platforms that data scientists and others
can use to source data, build models and operationalize machine learning. It will
help them make the right choice from a crowded field in a maturing DSML
platform market that continues to show rapid product development.

Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines a data science and machine learning (DSML) platform as a core product and
supporting portfolio of coherently integrated products, components, libraries and frameworks
(including proprietary, partner-sourced and open-source). Its primary users are data science
professionals, including expert data scientists, citizen data scientists, data engineers, application
developers and machine learning (ML) specialists.

The core product and supporting portfolio:

■ Are sufficiently well-integrated to provide a consistent “look and feel.”

■ Create a user experience in which all components are reasonably interoperable in support of an
analytics pipeline.

The DSML platform:

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■ Offers a mixture of basic and advanced functionality essential for building DSML solutions
(primarily predictive and prescriptive models).

■ Supports the incorporation of these solutions into business processes, surrounding

infrastructure, products and applications.

■ Supports the sustainable consumption of insights derived from the platform, and offers
functionality to quantify and track the value of data science projects.

■ Supports variously skilled data science professionals (“data scientist” is an inconsistently

applied job title and professional distinction) — a DSML platform’s user base is often made up
of professionals with diverse technical and business backgrounds.

■ Supports multiple tasks across the data science life cycle, including:

■ Problem and business context understanding

■ Data ingestion

■ Data preparation

■ Data exploration

■ Feature engineering

■ Model creation and training

■ Model testing

■ Deployment

■ Monitoring

■ Maintenance

■ Data and model governance

■ Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)

■ Business value tracking

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■ Collaboration

Magic Quadrant
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning
Platforms

Source: Gartner (March 2021)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

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Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It provides two software products that
together make up its core DSML platform: Platform for AI (PAI) Studio and Data Science
Workshop.

In addition to China, Alibaba has a strong customer base in the South and Southeast Asian
markets, but it does not have many clients elsewhere. Its current platform focuses on applications
for the retail, internet and data service sectors.

Alibaba Cloud’s product and roadmap are well-suited to expert data scientists and data engineers
in sectors such as internet technology, data services, retail and government. Alibaba Cloud
emphasizes support for augmentation of certain tasks in the DSML workflow, but its platform
lacks functionality and ease of use for citizen data scientists, which slows its adoption by less
mature organizations.

Strengths
■ Strong community built in China: Alibaba Cloud showcases its community’s strength with the
Tianchi platform, a Kaggle-like platform for collaboration, competition and knowledge sharing.
The platform is widely adopted within the Chinese market.

■ Advanced use-case modeling: Alibaba provides strong solutions for advanced use cases such
as image labeling, image recognition and segmentation, and recommendation engines, which
can be useful to expert data scientists.

■ Seamless integration that creates coherence: Alibaba provides a coherent platform that
integrates well with its other offerings for data preparation, exploration, ML, augmentation and
delivery. It offers drag-and-drop interactive modeling features across its platforms, which can
be used by expert data scientists to support the ML pipeline.

Cautions
■ Geographic strategy: Although Alibaba Cloud has offices and service locations in many
countries, the clients it serves are mostly in Asia/Pacific. Prospective customers should ensure
they are satisfied with the vendor’s presence and support in their region.

■ Product vision: Given the current pace of development by other vendors, Alibaba Cloud will
have to be swift and agile, as this market is likely to remain highly competitive. Some key

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themes of, and items on, its product roadmap are already available as standard features from
many other vendors.

■ Narrow usage and lack of citizen data scientist support: The current PAI Studio and Data
Science Workshop offerings offer limited ML and advanced analytics capabilities, such as
agent-based modeling, discrete-event modeling, Monte Carlo simulation, support for generative
adversarial networks and self-supervised learning. Currently, the platform is suitable for
advanced users but may not be a good choice for citizen data scientists or business analysts.

Altair
Altair is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It offers a suite of products called Altair Knowledge
Works, and the core product considered in this Magic Quadrant evaluation is Altair Knowledge
Studio. The Knowledge Works suite also includes Knowledge Studio for Apache Spark, Knowledge
Hub, Panopticon and Monarch.

Altair’s operations are geographically diversified, and the vendor maintains strong offerings for
service-centric industries (particularly banking and financial services). It also offers various
simulation and high-performance computing solutions that appeal to customers in the
automotive, aerospace and manufacturing sectors and to other asset-based organizations.

Knowledge Studio’s capabilities for automated ML (AutoML), XAI and enhanced open-source
integration have strengthened, but it is still catching up with other vendors’ products in terms of
native capabilities for delivery and deployment and model management.

Strengths
■ Ease of use: Altair Knowledge Studio offers an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for both coders
and noncoders. Additionally, by exposing and allowing editing of the underlying open-source
code, it enables expert data scientists and data engineers to augment the platform’s standard
functionality.

■ Tools for building strong data pipelines: Altair Knowledge Studio offers strong capabilities for
augmented data preparation. Integration with advanced data preparation tools (Monarch and
Knowledge Hub) enables semistructured data to be easily extracted and included in ML
modeling. Knowledge Hub also offers strong data governance and metadata management
capabilities.

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■ Operations and customer experience: Altair customers report high satisfaction with the
vendor’s operations, including in the areas of deployment, service and support. Altair has a
team of product design experts who have a keen understanding of customer needs and
processes for simulation-based design activities.

Cautions
■ Gaps in current offering: Altair has added new features in areas such as augmented DSML,
MLOps and XAI. However, other advanced analytics and delivery capabilities are weaknesses
for this vendor. Altair also needs to strengthen its decision modeling and composite artificial
intelligence (AI) capabilities.

■ Limited resonance across industries: Although Altair has a strong focus on both service- and
asset-centric industries, its product marketing needs improvement to resonate with a wider set
of client needs. Existing and prospective customers need to work with the vendor to understand
its full suite of products, which are applicable to a range of use cases.

■ Comparatively slow growth: Adoption of Altair’s core Knowledge Works products has been
slow, compared with competitors’ offerings. Several competitors are sustaining extremely
strong growth and offering market-leading products.

Alteryx
Alteryx is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. It has repositioned its offering by introducing
Analytics Process Automation (APA) technology to provide building blocks for automating the
analytics process and integrating with applications and robotic process automation (RPA). The
platform includes Alteryx Designer, Alteryx Intelligence Suite, Alteryx Server, Alteryx Connect and
Alteryx Promote. Alteryx Analytics Hub provides an environment for workflow automation and
scheduling, collaboration, multitenancy and data connection management.

Alteryx’s operations are geographically diversified, and this vendor has clients in most domains
and industries. Top verticals include manufacturing, financial services, consumer packaged
goods, retail, healthcare and government.

Alteryx’s broad revamping is a work in progress. The newly introduced Alteryx Analytics Hub
provides a centralized approach to orchestrating workflow and collaboration when managing
analytics and data connection environments.

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Strengths
■ Ease of use for diverse personas: A collaborative user experience leveraging code-free and
expert modes contributes to ease of use by all personas. Alteryx also provides line-of-business
(LOB) and industry solution templates and jump-start kits to accelerate onboarding and use.

■ Go-to-market strategy: With APA, Alteryx emphasizes the creation of analytic content and
progression from insight to action. Strong channel and independent software vendor
partnerships and a verticalized go-to-market strategy, including Alteryx-developed and joint
partner-developed solutions, create momentum and increase visibility.

■ Customer experience and operational support: Alteryx has consistently delivered excellent
functionality and support, judging by feedback from customers. Customers generally respond
very positively when asked about their overall experience with Alteryx.

Cautions
■ Changing product portfolio: With the introduction of APA, Alteryx is making many changes to
its portfolio. Customers should seek clarification and verify that the evolving APA framework is
a good fit for their DSML strategy and users.

■ Perceived high cost: Pricing is commonly identified as a concern by Alteryx customers. They
report good value for money, but often also evaluate less costly alternatives as their data
science initiatives develop.

■ Innovation: Although Alteryx has delivered some good innovation with RPA integration,
augmentation and a multipersona approach, other vendors are leading the way in terms of
cutting-edge ML and key areas such as streaming, the Internet of Things (IoT) and XAI.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its vision is for data science
teams to use the entire breadth of the AWS portfolio and ML stack, with Amazon SageMaker at its
core. Many of the supporting AWS components and services were considered in evaluating AWS’s
offering. These included the SageMaker Studio IDE (which includes Autopilot, Notebooks, Model
Monitor, Experiments and Debugger), Amazon EMR (including S3), AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker
Neo, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, Amazon SageMaker Clarify, Amazon SageMaker Data
Wrangler, Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail and others.

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AWS is geographically diversified, and its client base spans many industries and business
functions.

Amazon SageMaker continues to demonstrate formidable market traction, with a powerful

ecosystem and considerable resources behind it.

Strengths
■ Breadth and depth of cloud platform: Users can directly leverage AWS’s prepackaged AI
services (such as Amazon Lex, Polly and Transcribe). SageMaker is also natively integrated
with AWS’s many cloud data and analytics tools. Additionally, SageMaker provides extensive
support for a broad range of popular and niche open-source software (OSS) libraries and
frameworks.

■ Performance, scalability and granularity of control: Amazon SageMaker and its supporting
portfolio offer best-in-class performance and scalability. The platform supports a significant
selection of hardware options optimized for various ML and deep learning frameworks, and
features a pay-as-you-go pricing model with no minimum fees or upfront commitment, thus
encouraging experimentation.

■ Data labeling and human-in-the-loop capabilities: Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth supports
labeling of training data, and Amazon’s Augmented AI (Amazon A2I) helps build optimal
workflows for human review of deployed models. AWS connects customers with third-party
marketplace vendors and the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workforce for human labeling
of data.

Cautions
■ Evolving citizen data science appeal: AWS has made its platform more accessible, mainly
through Autopilot, Data Wrangler, Pipelines and continued development of the SageMaker
Studio IDE. Still, the platform is more popular among coders — it is not as intuitive for
nontechnical users, compared with leading tools for citizen data scientists.

■ Rapid pace of development needed to match competitors’ functionality: AWS’s flurry of new
components and services is filling important gaps in its platform. However, these new
capabilities are neither as proven nor as strong as other vendors’ capabilities for data
preparation, user interfaces, collaboration and coherence.

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■ Maturing on-premises, hybrid and multicloud support: The majority of Amazon SageMaker
customers operate in purely cloud environments. Some capabilities within the AWS portfolio
change or become more complicated in hybrid, multicloud or on-premises environments.
Multicloud support is evolving, however, and today most customers manage data, models and
ML workloads within AWS.

Anaconda

Anaconda is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It offers Anaconda Enterprise, a data science
development environment based on the interactive notebook concept that supports use of open-
source Python and R-based packages. (This evaluation excludes the Anaconda Individual Edition,
formerly known as Anaconda Distribution Version.)

Anaconda is geographically diversified. The majority of its users are in the financial services
sector, but it is also used in sectors such as energy and utilities, healthcare, manufacturing and
retail.

Anaconda has made noteworthy innovations in the areas of model governance and scalability. It
has partnerships with vendors such as Google, IBM and Microsoft to drive DSML innovation with
the use of open-source technologies.

Strengths
■ Trusted and flexible platform: Anaconda offers a popular and trusted platform within the
coding community, one with options for both beginners and experts. The GUI is intuitive, gives
access to all R and Python libraries, and offers users the flexibility to work on several IDEs of
choice, including Jupyter and RStudio.

■ Optimization of open-source technologies: To optimize open-source technologies and support

scalability, Anaconda provides upscaling options using GPUs, managed within the Anaconda
environment. Users can also use Apache Hadoop, Apache Hadoop YARN and Kubernetes
clusters, on-premises or in the cloud.

■ Culture of collaboration and accompanying features: The Anaconda community supports the
Python open-source contributions, thus fostering a culture of code integrity and integration with
other open-source data science projects. Anaconda Cloud, for data scientists, provides ways to
collaborate, share deployments and exchange code libraries It also enables developers to

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explore and accelerate model development and deployment.

Cautions
■ Focus on technical audience: Anaconda targets a technical audience that prefers to code in R
or Python languages for data science. The platform lacks features that enable citizen data
scientists to take advantage of it.

■ Lack of some critical model operationalization capabilities: Anaconda’s platform lacks model
management capabilities such as dependency management, explainability and bias detection,
as well as model inventory features. Anaconda does, however, provide some model-monitoring
and governance features, such as scheduling of deployments, user information and resource
consumption for ML models (via the scheduler UI).

■ Stability: Anaconda users highlight compatibility and runtime issues with the platform.
Nonexpert users often find it challenging to keep their projects coherent when new platform or
package updates are released.

Cloudera
Cloudera is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It has a core ML product, Cloudera Machine
Learning (CML), supported by Cloudera Data Engineering (CDE) and Cloudera Data Visualization
(CDV). These products are interconnected and delivered as services on top of the Cloudera Data
Platform (CDP). CML has replaced and extended Cloudera’s previous on-premises DSML platform,
Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW), in order to provide hybrid and multicloud capabilities.

Cloudera is geographically diversified, and its client base spans many industries and various
business functions.

Cloudera’s heritage as a big data company is reflected in its ML offering being part of the CDP. The
vendor’s vision focuses on unifying ML workflows across data warehousing, data engineering,
DSML and operationalization.

Strengths
■ Native use of Spark on Kubernetes: With CDE and CML, Cloudera aims to overcome the
overhead associated with managing Spark clusters and dependencies by maintaining
containerized, repeatable workflows that can be scaled on demand. CML enables data science

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teams to use a variety of ML runtimes without prescribing underlying frameworks.

■ Processing of complex data workloads: CDP is designed for creating and managing high-
volume data integration and preparation processes across hybrid and multicloud environments.
CML and CDE are part of CDP, and thus provide control over data processing infrastructure and
ML execution environments from a single platform.

■ Metadata management for DataOps and MLOps: The central framework that enables the
building of scalable and repeatable DSML pipelines is Cloudera’s Shared Data Experience (SDX),
based on Apache Atlas, which stores metadata on each step of execution. An MLOps SDK
enables programmatic interaction with SDX.

Cautions
■ Code-first focus: The majority of DSML tasks undertaken in CML require coding and use of
open-source libraries in Python, R, Scala and similar languages with no visual workflow
interface. There is little augmentation in the platform to help citizen data scientists build their
own models.

■ Coherence of product offerings: CDP is the platform on which CML and CDE are offered. CDP
can also include Cloudera Data Hub (CDH), Cloudera Data Warehouse, Cloudera Operational
Database and Cloudera DataFlow. These services may be used to migrate on-premises
deployments to the cloud. Even with centralized access to these components from CDP, the
learning curve may be steep, even for experts.

■ Domain-specific solutions: The prototypes provided by Cloudera’s Fast Forward Labs in the
form of Applied ML Prototypes (AMPs) are still small in number. The goal of taking cutting-edge
ML from research and applying it to enterprise environments in a packaged form has great
potential. However, organizations with limited in-house expertise will have to rely on Cloudera’s
professional services.

Databricks

Databricks is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Unified Data Platform, available in multiple
clouds and with an emphasis on scalability, spans data science, ML, analytics and data
engineering.

Databricks is geographically diversified, and its client base spans many industries and various

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business functions.

The company is evolving beyond its perception as merely the leader of the Apache Spark
community, as is reflected by the renaming of its Spark + AI Summits as Data + AI Summits.
Databricks keeps contributing to the open-source community — for example, by leading the Delta
Lake and MLflow projects. It has also extended its offering with the acquisition of Redash, which
enables users to query and visualize data more easily, using SQL.

Strengths
■ Multicloud performance at scale: Databricks enables its customers to experiment and train
their models fast and then to scale them quickly. It offers automanaged and scalable CPU and
GPU clusters on multiple cloud platforms, preconfigured with the most popular ML frameworks,
with built-in optimizations. MLflow offers flexibility to deploy models to different cloud
environments.

■ Empowerment of mature data scientists: Databricks’ notebook-centric vision and optimization

of OSS appeals to expert data scientists who demand high performance and early access to the
latest innovative ML technology. This appeal is enhanced by an extensive collection of training
materials, other documentation and access to a large community of knowledgeable users.

■ Execution and expansion: Databricks has sustained strong revenue growth, catalyzed by its
successful partnerships with Microsoft (Azure), AWS and hundreds of other organizations
across the world. The company has a well-executed vertical sales strategy, with strong
commitment to customer value creation.

Cautions
■ Citizen data science support: Databricks still targets a mainly technical audience of data
engineers and data scientists with a coding background. Its platform offers collaboration
support and recently also gained new SQL analytics capabilities aimed at data analysts.
However, the platform is not well-suited to citizen data scientists and other low/no-code users.

■ Governance and responsible AI: Databricks offers support for General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliance, and has
embedded open-source techniques for bias mitigation and explainability. However, the
company’s vision and messaging should pay more explicit attention to the responsible, ethical
and trustworthy use of DSML, including the need for governance, risk management and

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compliance with emerging laws, policies and guidelines.

■ Growing competition from cloud partners: Databricks has a cloud-first strategy, offering its
customers a choice of a growing number of cloud platforms for scalable ML. However, the
company faces growing competition from its key cloud partners (and others), which all have
their own DSML offerings and visions that overlap with its.

Dataiku

Dataiku is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its core product is Data Science Studio (DSS), which
provides one platform for all DSML tasks, with a focus on multidisciplinary data science teams,
collaboration and ease of use.

Dataiku is geographically diversified, and its client base spans many industries and various
business functions.

The company announced a Series D funding round of $100 million in August 2020. It has also
formed partnerships with global system integrators and vendors including Tableau, Snowflake and
UIPath. It has a strong roadmap and vision in the areas of responsible AI, collaboration and
business applications, one that points to continued growth and innovation.

Strengths
■ Understanding of citizen data scientists: Dataiku has added augmented functionality to every
stage of the DSML cycle. Citizen data scientists are well-supported with everything from
detailed information on data quality and profiling to guided control over AutoML and
explainability features. Users who want to build models in a no-code manner have a wealth of
tools at their disposal.

■ Focus on business value: Dataiku understands the need for performance metrics that go
beyond model accuracy and provides the ability to create custom business metrics optimized
to deliver a particular business benefit and to monitor concept drift. A newly formed
professional services team that focuses on business value is also a testament to Dataiku’s
vision.

■ Increasing market traction: Dataiku remains on an impressive growth trajectory. The company
continues to expand its ecosystem of partners in order to build targeted industry and function-
specific analytic solutions. This expansion includes an increase in its OEM and managed

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service provider (MSP) programs.

Cautions
■ Heavy use of extensions and plugins: Deep learning support within DSS is primarily code-driven
using Keras and TensorFlow, while deep learning support for visual users is achieved via an
extension to DSS. Extensions are also needed for time-series processing, connecting to certain
data sources, signal processing and mining. Navigating and installing these features increases
platform management overhead and the complexity of containerized deployments.

■ Emerging vision for unifying XOps: Dataiku is working on better capabilities for full model
management that can be used by multiple operations teams (those for data, ML, models and
platforms). The personas the platform is built for will need to expand, as will associated
functionality for deployment in complex heterogeneous environments.

■ Pricing model for smaller teams: DSS is available in several versions that have increasing levels
of functionality. The prices of versions that do not offer full enterprise capabilities for model
scalability and deployment are higher than those of other vendors’ offerings that do have these
capabilities.

DataRobot

DataRobot is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. The DataRobot Enterprise AI Platform consists
of Paxata Data Preparation, Automated Machine Learning, Automated Time Series, MLOps and AI
applications. Its augmented approach enables both citizen and expert data scientists to
productively use data science.

DataRobot’s operations are geographically diversified. The vendor has a strong presence in the
banking, insurance, other financial services, manufacturing, retail, life sciences and healthcare
sectors.

DataRobot delivers trusted AI through its Humble AI initiative, which enables prediction quality
management. The vendor prioritizes measuring business value with its Use Case Value Tracker, a
centralized hub for managing ROI. A Series F funding round in November 2020 and additional
investments in December raised $320 million.

Strengths

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■ Sales strategy and execution: DataRobot’s simplified pricing structure and self-service trial
drives consistent addition of new customers and growth within its existing client base. In
addition, a relationship with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) enables joint sales motion and co-
development of industry-specific applications.

■ High-touch customer service: DataRobot’s AI Success Plan provides a proven structured

delivery approach focused on providing business value. The Customer-Facing Data Science and
AI Success teams, repeatable playbooks and user training accelerate delivery of a pipeline of
prioritized use cases and help customers achieve value quickly.

■ Acquisitions and key developments to fill gaps and link to business value: The acquisition of
Paxata, a company focused on data preparation, is the most recent example of DataRobot’s use
of acquisitions to fill functionality gaps in its platform. Paxata and all previous acquisitions
were quickly incorporated. AI applications and the Use Case Value Tracker help track the value
achieved by models.

Cautions
■ Increasing complexity of product portfolio: DataRobot’s offering now consists of multiple
components, including those for data preparation, model development and MLOps.
Understanding and using the various components, the capabilities included within each, and
their interoperability becomes increasingly complex as the portfolio grows.

■ Resource-heavy onboarding: DataRobot’s AI Success Plan and Customer-Facing Data Science

and AI Success teams provide an approach that some believe is difficult to scale. In addition,
this approach must specifically address and demonstrate the ability to lead clients to self-
sufficiency quickly. DataRobot’s new self-service program offers customers a simpler way to
get started.

■ Capability gaps: Although it is strengthening its capabilities in areas such as model

management and data access, DataRobot still has capability gaps in areas such as other
advanced analytics, including decision modeling and precanned solutions.

Domino
Domino is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its core product is the Domino Data Science
Platform, which is supported by Domino Model Monitor to provide end-to-end DSML capabilities in
the cloud or on-premises.

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Domino’s operations are primarily in North America and EMEA. The vendor has a significant
presence in the banking, financial services, manufacturing and life sciences sectors, but its
platform is used in most industries.

The introduction of Domino Model Monitor in 2020 shows this vendor’s clear commitment to
enterprise MLOps. Domino’s market positioning is deliberate and R&D for its platform will remain
focused on large, code-first data science teams.

Strengths
■ Support for large, expert data science teams: Domino’s focus on large, code-first data science
teams gives it a deep understanding of emerging enterprise needs and challenges. The
platform is well liked by chief data and analytics officers — roles that many organizations will
add or expand in the near future to set up systems that can orchestrate and govern an entire
firm. Collaboration capabilities remain among the best.

■ MLOps capabilities and maturity of vision: Domino released Domino Model Monitor in 2020 to
supplement the MLOps capabilities of its core platform. The product supports enterprise
MLOps, where models are monitored across different teams, deployment infrastructures and
languages. The platform’s highly auditable workflows enable rapid and targeted responses to
deteriorating model health.

■ On-premises, hybrid and multicloud support for modern ML deployment: Domino Data Science
Platform is the rare code-focused platform that offers a first-class experience both on-premises
and in the cloud. Domino is among the best options for supporting complex hybrid and
multicloud model development and deployment. Domino provides support for all major cloud
providers’ versions of Kubernetes, and the vision for the platform’s future is cloud-agnostic.

Cautions
■ Support for small and immature data science teams: An organization that does not plan to
expand past 20 data scientists on its staff should not consider Domino. Typical Domino
deployments involve more than 25 data scientists and ML engineers. The platform is designed
to support a highly interactive community of data scientists, not just a few loosely connected
individuals or people who depend on augmented approaches to ML.

■ Low visibility: Judging from client inquiry levels and gartner.com searches, interest in Domino is
consistently low in this market. Additionally, requests for Domino experience appear in only a

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small number of data science job postings, compared with competing vendors.

■ Increasing flexibility and openness of most vendors: Domino helped transform the definition of
DSML platforms into what it is today, with vendors providing curation and optimization of open-
source technologies in addition to proprietary functionality. However, a highly flexible, OSS-
fueled collaboration hub is now a common platform vision. Domino still receives a top score for
flexibility and openness, but differentiation in this area is narrowing.

Google

Google is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. It offers the Google Cloud AI Platform as its core
DSML platform. The platform has an expanded suite of components that includes Cloud Data
Fusion, Cloud AutoML, BigQuery ML, AI Platform Notebooks and TensorFlow. Google will launch
its unified AI Platform in the first quarter of 2021 (after the cut-off date for evaluation in this Magic
Quadrant). Key features and services that will be released with this new platform include AutoML
tables, XAI, AI platform pipelines and other MLOps services.

Google is geographically diversified and its client base spans many industries and various
business functions.

Google’s Completeness of Vision is boosted by thought leadership in ML research and responsible

AI, as well as by the roadmap for its unified AI Platform. The coherence of, and learning curve for,
Google’s platform are key aspects to monitor in the coming year.

Strengths
■ Responsible AI vision and capabilities: Google has taken a clear thought leadership position in
the area of AI explainability and responsibility. Google shares and productizes its learnings on
these subjects through responsible AI practices, fairness best practices, technical references
and other materials.

■ Research contributions and impact: Google’s leadership in AI research includes the prominent
work of Google Research, Google Brain and DeepMind, as well as ongoing significant
contributions to scholarship, open-source projects and communities — TensorFlow,
Kubernetes/Kubeflow and Kaggle stand out.

■ Consolidation, cohesion and simplification: Google has made a significant effort to reorganize
and redesign not just its DSML platform, but also the way it releases software. The unified AI

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Platform will seek to address past issues of coherence, interoperability and ease of use. Google
has also introduced simplified New Product Introduction (NPI) stages to provide more
predictability and transparency about launch timelines.

Cautions
■ Transition of portfolio: Google is developing capabilities for data science professionals at a
rapid pace. This means a period of transition and learning for the market in general and
adopters of its unified AI Platform in particular. Google’s new product release standards and
timelines will be put to the test in 2021.

■ Steepness of learning curve: Although Google has made improvements in terms of

accessibility and augmentation, its platform presents a steep learning curve and requires
technical expertise. Supplementary tools for citizen data scientists and developers new to ML
may be necessary.

■ Maturing on-premises, hybrid and multicloud support: The majority of Cloud AI Platform
customers operate in purely cloud environments. Some capabilities of the Cloud AI Platform
change and may become more complicated in hybrid, multicloud or on-premises environments.
Multicloud support is evolving, and today most customers manage data, models and ML
workloads within Google Cloud. New services like BigQuery Omni for viewing data across
clouds are indicative of Google’s next steps in the multicloud field.

H2O.ai

H2O.ai is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. H2O Driverless AI is this vendor’s commercial
product, for which there are additional modules such as MLOps and AutoDoc. H2O.ai also offers
open-source products with optional enterprise support, such as the H2O 3 platform and AutoML
for ML, Sparkling Water for Spark integration, and Wave for app development. H2O Driverless AI
can be extended and customized with open-source or custom-made “recipes.”

H2O.ai is geographically diversified. About one-third of its customers can be found in the financial
services sector. Other industries are represented more or less equally among the company’s client
base.

H2O.ai’s roadmap and innovation earned it the highest overall score for Completeness of Vision.
H2O.ai is a thought leader in the automation and augmentation of DSML, including time-series

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analysis.

Strengths
■ Vision for value creation: In addition to its vision for democratizing AI through automation and
augmentation, H2O.ai has extended its offering with Wave, an open-source product for building
AI apps. Wave appeals to the corporate developer community and integrates with H2O AI
Hybrid Cloud, Driverless AI and other components. This reflects a strong vision for streamlining
value creation with AI, and this vision is further highlighted by H2O.ai’s contributions to AI for
Good and investments in responsible AI capabilities.

■ Extensive augmentation (automation): H2O Driverless AI eases the adoption of DSML by

offering augmentation in multiple areas: in addition to augmented feature engineering, model
selection and parameter tuning, the company stands out for its sophisticated automation of
time-series modeling. In the past year, H2O.ai has invested significantly in augmentation and
automation for innovative natural language and image processing.

■ Rich XAI: H2O.ai offers multiple explainability capabilities throughout the ML life cycle, not just
for modeling but also for feature engineering. Supported methods include K-LIME, LIME-SUP,
Shapley, decision tree surrogates, causal graphs, NLP explainability and more.

Cautions
■ Lack of certain data access and preparation capabilities: H2O.ai has room for improvement in
terms of data access and aspects of data preparation. These include data refresh, data lineage,
access governance, metadata management and data catalogs.

■ OEM partner strategy: H2O Driverless AI’s capabilities for augmentation and automation
depend on OEM partnerships with other DSML vendors. If those vendors’ platforms outperform
H2O’s in terms of capabilities for data preparation, for example, then potential customers may
be less inclined to select H2O.ai’s.

■ Collaboration and cohesion: Expert data scientists, citizen data scientists, developers and other
personas may all use different products from H2O’s growing portfolio of commercial and open-
source products and modules. Despite shared projects and a common recipe catalog, the
platform could benefit from more attention to cross-product, multipersona collaboration and a
more cohesive portfolio structure.

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IBM

IBM is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its core product for this evaluation is IBM Watson Studio
on IBM Cloud Pak for Data, a modular, open and extensible platform for data and AI that combines
a broad set of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive capabilities

IBM is geographically diversified, and its client base spans many industries and various business
functions.

Revamping its offering has taken several years, and competition will remain fierce for IBM. Still,
IBM now delivers a modern and comprehensive solution that draws on its roots in SPSS, ILOG
CPLEX Optimization Studio and earlier products, and that benefits from a stream of innovations
from IBM Research. These reflect a well-rounded vision.

Strengths
■ Multipersona support: IBM Watson Studio offers a visual workflow interface or “graphic
canvas,” as well as a choice of notebooks, thus enabling data engineers, expert data scientists
and citizen data scientists to work together on the same project. ML pipeline activities, from
data acquisition to operations, are supported by AutoAI and collaboration, including a catalog
for sharing and reusing (meta)data and models.

■ Composite AI vision: The modular structure of the IBM Watson Studio platform contains, or can
be extended by, multiple components for decision augmentation or automation. These
components include several ML and other AI frameworks, optimization features, spatio-
temporal and graph analytics, natural language features and video/image/audio analysis (in
batch or streaming mode). In addition, by including IBM Decision Optimization, the platform
supports decision modeling and decision management or rules processing.

■ Comprehensive attention to responsible AI and governance: IBM offers extensive support for
explainability, bias, fairness, accuracy and drift monitoring, synthetic data and differential
privacy. Its platform also provides strong governance (and optional risk management) support,
with lineage, policies and rules in its catalog, as well as adversarial security.

Cautions
■ AutoAI scope: IBM Watson Studio offers automation and augmentation of multiple activities in
the ML pipeline, including data selection, imputation, visualization, feature transformation and

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modeling. However, a few competitors also augment time-series analysis by, for example, using
recurrent neural networks and long short-term memory models.

■ Brand restoration: With its improved Watson Studio, IBM has caught up with and, in some
cases, even surpassed its competitors. Nevertheless, data and analytics leaders may still find
their ML experts skeptical about the innovativeness of Watson Studio and IBM’s ability to keep
pace in a dynamic and competitive market.

■ Product-bundling clarity: Although the cohesion of the modular Watson Studio on IBM Cloud
Pak for Data has improved, there remains confusion among potential customers as to which
products and licenses are needed for which configurations. This increases concerns about
licensing costs.

KNIME

KNIME is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its open-source offering, the KNIME Analytics
Platform, focuses on the authoring of DSML workflows and projects. A commercial product,
KNIME Server, focuses on automation, deployment and orchestration capabilities.

KNIME is globally diversified, with a strong presence in Europe and the U.S. Its client base spans
all industries and company sizes.

KNIME continues to evolve and to develop its vision for bridging the gap between development
and production and offering new ways for data scientists and end users to collaborate.

Strengths
■ Breadth and depth of DSML capabilities: KNIME has been incrementally building its product for
over 10 years, and this shows in the wide range of capabilities provided by the platform. It has
almost 4,000 nodes for connecting to different types of data source, transforming and
preparing data, ML and other advanced techniques. Very few DSML tasks are not supported by
KNIME’s platform.

■ Commitment to open-source platform: The KNIME Analytics Platform is not a limited or

restricted version of a full product. Most of the library of components are available for use in
the platform at no cost. This provides an ideal way to experiment with DSML projects — to test
and learn — without upfront investment in a particular technology. Scalability can then be
achieved through use of the KNIME Server product.

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■ Coherence of visual workflow: The basic building blocks within the KNIME Analytics Platform
are nodes, components and workflows. Everything within the platform, including AutoML, data
visualization, interactive apps and deployment models, is built using these blocks and can be
broken down into individual components and nodes, with associated metadata, for full
transparency.

Cautions
■ Limited customer support for enterprise deployments: KNIME has not expanded as
aggressively as other DSML vendors. Although there is an active community answering
questions about functionality, enterprise deployments typically require specialist services to
increase adoption and ensure the product meets expectations. KNIME relies on partners to
deliver these services.

■ Vision for responsible AI: KNIME provides a plethora of components for XAI, such as SHapley
Additive exPlanations (SHAP), Partial Dependence Pre-processing (PDP) and Individual
Conditional Expectation (ICE). However, frameworks, guidance, best practices and research that
can be applied by all disciplines within a data science team are lacking.

■ Low market traction and sales innovation: The visibility of KNIME to DSML platform buyers
remains low. Prospective customers may therefore shortlist newer vendors with more
prominent sales and marketing campaigns.

MathWorks
MathWorks is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its two major products are MATLAB and Simulink,
but only MATLAB met the inclusion criteria for this Magic Quadrant.

MathWorks is geographically diversified. Its clients are primarily engineering and asset-centric
organizations.

MathWorks demonstrates a clear vision and thought leadership in asset-centric industries. Its
innovations are applied, at scale, for large use cases intended to solve real-world problems.
MathWorks is one of the few vendors in the DSML market that can handle large, distributed, real-
time IoT implementations with a continuous environment from the edge to the cloud, and from
development to simulation and operationalization and back.

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Strengths
■ Robust composite AI capabilities: MATLAB is among the most advanced DSML platforms for
developing, integrating and deploying ensembles of AI techniques within a single solution (an
approach that Gartner calls composite AI). MathWorks combines these techniques in a flexible
infrastructure that supports largely distributed environments, from the edge to the data center
and the cloud.

■ Integrated domain knowledge: MathWorks benefits from deep domain expertise, which it
integrates into its DSML platform. From predictive maintenance to fleet analytics,
manufacturing process analytics and risk management, the company handles domain-specific
idiosyncrasies within its platform, while developing technologies and application-specific
toolboxes.

■ Verifiable and reliable ML: Safety is typically critical in the asset-centric domains in which
MathWorks is active — they have no tolerance for unreliable operations. Beyond interpretability,
MathWorks enables engineers to interact with models through either web applications or
simulation environments.

Cautions
■ Interface democratization: MATLAB remains the preserve of data-science-initiated engineers
and scientists, who essentially use notebooks to develop models. To widen the appeal of its
powerful platform to citizen data scientists and business and operations specialists,
MathWorks will have to modernize its UI and provide visual development features.

■ Interpretable AI: MathWorks remains behind many of its competitors, especially those in the
Leaders quadrant, when it comes to model interpretability and fairness management. Even its
asset-centric audience will soon require better capabilities, so the company will have to start
focusing on this issue.

■ Augmented DSML capabilities: Despite progress in 2020, MathWorks remains behind many of
its competitors when it comes to expanding its augmented DSML functions, particularly for
feature engineering and deployment optimization.

Microsoft
Microsoft is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. The core product considered in this Magic
Quadrant is Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML). The supporting portfolio of products for Azure

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ML includes Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Catalog, Azure HDInsight, Azure Databricks, Azure
DevOps, Power BI and other components.

Microsoft is geographically diversified, and its client base spans many industries and various
business functions.

Microsoft earns the highest Ability to Execute score of the large cloud providers. Microsoft has a
strong combination of vision and tailored functionality for the full spectrum of data science
professionals who contribute to multifunctional teams.

Strengths
■ Azure stack support for enterprise DSML: Azure ML and its supporting portfolio offer strong
capabilities for the needs of enterprise data science. MLOps capabilities include a registry of
packages and models and support for streamlined creation of reproducible ML pipelines. Azure
ML comes with differentiated security and governance capabilities and, combined with Azure
Cloud management services, supports compute quota and cost management capabilities.

■ Multipersona vision and offering: Microsoft’s vision and current offering for multipersona data
science is stronger than those of its closest competitors. Azure ML provides augmented DSML
and a drag-and-drop designer for citizen data scientists, and flexible notebook and SDK options
for expert data scientists. Microsoft’s suite of ancillary products provides a strong environment
in which data engineers, ML engineers and architects, corporate developers and others can
contribute to the DSML workflow.

■ Openness and partnerships: Microsoft goes beyond widespread support for popular OSS by
investing in and contributing to a number of prominent projects (such as, Open Neural Network
Exchange [ONNX], InterpretML and MLflow). The Azure Databricks product and partnership has
been successful for both partners. Azure will also be the preferred cloud provider for the SAS
Viya platform, which will be integrated with Azure and Azure ML services.

Cautions
■ Requirement for Azure services commitment and expertise: Azure ML relies on a variety of
Azure services and modules and can work with data from any source. Azure ML customers
typically use Azure Data Factory for integration and transformation, Azure Data Catalog for
governance, and any DevOps system (often Azure DevOps or GitHub) for integration within web
services and other services. Supporting this portfolio requires significant technical expertise

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and understanding of the Azure ecosystem.

■ Evolving on-premises, hybrid and multicloud support: The majority of Azure ML customers
operate in purely cloud environments. Some capabilities within the Azure ML portfolio change
or become more complicated in hybrid, multicloud or on-premises environments. Microsoft’s
multicloud support is evolving, however, and most of its customers manage data, models and
ML workloads within Azure.

■ Augmented DSML: Microsoft delivers solid support for citizen data scientists and likely lower
total cost of ownership (TCO) for augmentation capabilities, but still has room to improve,
compared with vendors that focus solely on data science. Organizations seeking to broaden
their data science talent base need to understand how much augmentation is offered by the
visual designer in Azure ML, as opposed to the SDKs and Power BI.

RapidMiner
RapidMiner is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. RapidMiner Studio is the vendor’s primary model
development tool and is available as both a free edition and a commercial edition. For the
enterprise, offerings can be extended through the RapidMiner AI Hub, which includes collaboration
and governance capabilities, as well as RapidMiner Go and RapidMiner Notebooks, which are
model development experiences for novices and coders respectively. Turbo Prep, Auto Model and
Automated Model Ops are augmented features of the platform, while the RapidMiner AI Cloud
offers flexible, cloud-based deployment options.

RapidMiner is geographically diversified and has a strong presence in many industries, but
especially manufacturing, life sciences, banking, insurance, energy, business services, government
and education.

RapidMiner’s latest capabilities and roadmap exemplify key market trends, such as multipersona
collaboration, XAI and model governance.

Strengths
■ Multipersona collaboration: RapidMiner makes it easy for expert data scientists and citizen
data scientists to work on its platform collaboratively and to manage end-to-end data science
pipelines. The vendor offers a certification program through its RapidMiner Academy to help
those who are not data scientists understand the product, model development

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operationalization and governance.

■ Clear vision and delivery of aligned features: RapidMiner has made significant changes to its
product portfolio during the past year. Particularly strong new capabilities are FeatureMart and
Feature Catalog, which enable users to perform automated feature engineering, and share and
store features across an organization, thus enhancing reusability and reproducibility.

■ Explainable, governed and secured AI: RapidMiner provides features that enable users to
explain and govern their models in development and production, thus giving them greater
transparency and more control over insights. Additionally, features such as single sign-on and
strong identity and access management capabilities help secure the AI pipeline.

Cautions
■ Growth rate and outreach: RapidMiner has grown slowly, relative to other vendors with
comparable value propositions and the overall market. Although RapidMiner’s retention rate
remains competitive, existing and prospective customers should check that RapidMiner
continues to match the relentless pace of innovation in this market.

■ Market-standard advanced analytics capabilities: RapidMiner has market-standard

functionalities built in for use cases involving reinforcement learning, generative adversarial
networks, small data ML, geospatial analytics and agent-based modeling.

■ Perception as an academic platform: RapidMiner’s strong presence in the academic world

continues to cultivate a large user community, with many young and talented data scientists
attracted to the free version of its platform. Prospective enterprise customers should not
overlook RapidMiner or dismiss its capabilities as an enterprise platform provider in favor of
newer vendors that market products solely to enterprises.

Samsung SDS
Samsung SDS is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Brightics AI is the end-to-end analytics and
data science platform evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. Samsung SDS offers Brightics Standard
and Enterprise editions and an open-source tool, Brightics Studio. The Standard edition is a
lightweight version of the Enterprise edition, with support for only Python. The Enterprise edition
offers support for Python and Spark and enables distributed processing of ML workloads.

Samsung SDS has global operations. Its customer base is concentrated in Asia, especially in the

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manufacturing and financial services industries.

Brightics AI is an easy-to-use platform for both experts and citizen data scientists. Its focus on
data management also enables other roles, such as data engineers and industrial users, to work
with it.

Strengths
■ Comprehensive ecosystem vision: The Brightics AI platform represents one of Samsung SDS’s
five key technology areas — AI, blockchain, cloud, data analytics and security (ABCDS) — which
comprise its Digital Transformation Framework. The vendor aims to provide a holistic solution
by complementing Brightics AI with other Samsung SDS offerings, such as Samsung Cloud and
Brightics IoT.

■ Data capabilities: Samsung SDS helps clients achieve more value through its focus on the data
life cycle. Data access, preparation and visualization are strengths of the Brightics AI platform.
It offers good support for semistructured and unstructured data, with capabilities like automatic
data labeling and an automatic schema builder.

■ Ease of use and collaboration: Samsung SDS’s platform provides an intuitive, easy-to-use
interface for both coders and noncoders. It supports multipersona collaboration through a
wizard for data scientists, apps for business users and APIs for application developers. It
provides a container-based personal sandbox environment for each user that allocates server
resources for experimentation.

Cautions
■ Need for expansion into new markets: Although Samsung SDS has offices and global delivery
centers in many countries, the clients it serves currently are mostly in Asia. Prospective
customers should closely examine whether Brightics AI would be a good choice for the parts of
the world where they operate.

■ Gaps in product vision: Brightics AI is behind competing offerings in areas like composite AI
and decision intelligence. Although Samsung SDS has increased its focus in areas such as
collaboration and augmented DSML, current capabilities and planned innovations need
strengthening to respond to the demands of a rapidly evolving market.

■ Limited support for ModelOps and explainability: Brightics AI lacks key capabilities like A/B

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testing, rollback automation and certain model telemetry features. It currently offers low model
explainability, and support for certain key features such as Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic
Explanations (LIME) and SHAP is still on the roadmap. Given the market’s focus on robust
operationalization of ML models and XAI capabilities, prospective customers should look for
clear improvements in these areas.

SAS
SAS is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning (VDMML)
is the core product evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. As part of the SAS Viya portfolio, VDMML is
included in various product bundles on SAS Viya, namely SAS Visual Machine Learning, SAS Visual
Data Science, SAS Data Science Programming and SAS Visual Data Decisioning.

SAS is geographically diversified, and its client base spans many industries and various business
functions.

SAS is the longest-standing Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It maintains a strong and adaptive
position, given its keen understanding of the market and its thought leadership in key areas such
as composite AI, MLOps and decision intelligence. The company recently announced a
partnership with Microsoft to support closer integration with Azure.

Strengths
■ Market understanding and presence: SAS’s long standing and experience in this market have
earned customers’ trust. SAS offers enterprise-grade platform capabilities and support, coupled
with a robust vision for key market trends, including composite AI, decision intelligence and
MLOps. The domain expertise embedded in its products and consulting services enable
customers to derive value from the entire analytics life cycle.

■ Cloud-native architecture and open-source integration: The latest release of SAS Viya offers a
fully cloud native approach. SAS customers can now leverage all Viya capabilities in a flexible
container-based architecture that runs in the cloud. SAS offers innate integrations with popular
open-source tools and languages for data, modeling and model management.

■ Automated feature engineering and modeling: SAS provides differentiated automated feature
engineering and automated modeling capabilities through automated pipeline generation.
Experimentation is supported through utilities such as the Data Science Pilot Action Set and

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other modules. For automated hyperparameter tuning, Model Composer uses a patented hybrid
search strategy.

Cautions
■ Perceived high costs: SAS’s pricing remains a concern for many customers, who therefore
investigate less-costly alternatives. VDMML has historically been priced by the core, but a new
pricing model has eliminated the core capacity restriction and pricing is now based on type of
user. SAS customers should work with the vendor to determine whether the new pricing model
is more suitable for their requirements.

■ Product bundling: Although SAS has streamlined its product portfolio, with more “fit for use”
product bundling replacing “a la carte” selection, SAS Viya’s full suite of products and add-ons
remains complex for users to navigate. However, to make navigation easier, SAS VDMML is now
part of product bundles that offer programming-only interfaces, as well as bundles that offer
both programming and visual, drag-and-drop interfaces.

■ Marketing strategy: SAS needs to work on the perception of its product portfolio. Despite clear
modernization, SAS is still frequently perceived as a vendor of legacy software and traditional
advanced analytics. Small and midsize companies should explore case studies from customers
in similar segments to understand current usage of SAS products.

TIBCO Software
TIBCO Software is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. After tightly stitching together various data
and analytics software and platforms, TIBCO is fulfilling its “Connected Intelligence” vision. That
vision is embodied at its core in TIBCO’s Data Science platform, along with TIBCO Spotfire and
TIBCO Streaming and a robust data and process infrastructure.

TIBCO is geographically diversified and present in many industries. but has a stronger presence in
asset-centric industries, given its science and engineering focus, especially on edge computing.

The company’s origins in the middleware sector give TIBCO an edge when it comes to model
deployment and production, in any environment, centralized or distributed, across a wide variety of
use cases.

Strengths

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■ Leading-edge DSML capabilities: From innovations like dynamic learning on event streams to
integration with popular edge platforms like those of Microsoft and AWS, TIBCO delivers
leading IoT capabilities on its TIBCO Data Science platform. Through its TIBCO LABS program,
the company has launched initiatives like Project Air, streamlining IoT solutions from the edge
to the cloud.

■ Hyperconvergence and integration: TIBCO extends its Data Science platform from both an
infrastructure perspective (in relation to edge analytics, for example) and from an analytical
angle through its business intelligence (BI) and strong visualization capabilities. TIBCO has a
leading vision for the colliding worlds of data science and analytics.

■ Support for collaboration and applied analytics: TIBCO is a strong choice for analytical teams
that span a wide range of functions across an organization. That strength extends beyond the
integrated technical environment where analytical assets can be shared to the capture of
domain expertise — the results of collaboration with subject matter experts can then be
embedded within integrated applications.

Cautions
■ End-to-end ModelOps capabilities: TIBCO has made important progress toward achieving
robust ModelOps capabilities with functions such as those of TIBCO Artifact Management
Server and improvements to its ML pipeline capabilities. But it needs to provide a more
comprehensive and approachable ModelOps capability in order to manage the full life cycle of
AI models.

■ Citizen data science support: Despite the capacity of TIBCO’s portfolio to unify technical and
operational talents, the Data Science platform still needs a more approachable interface for
citizen data scientists. The canvas interface, combined with simplified AutoML functions, forms
a solid base, but TIBCO Data Science is still aimed at data scientists with significant ML
experience — support for citizen data science continues to rely on other parts of the portfolio.

■ Financial growth in 2020: Like many organizations, TIBCO had a challenging 2020 in terms of
licensing revenue, while the difficult economic conditions impacted its subscription business.
The company will need to make strong and continuous development investments in this fast-
moving market in order to stay ahead of well-funded competitors. Before investing in TIBCO’s
technology, organizations should compare their requirements with the vendor’s technology
roadmap.

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Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added
■ Alibaba Cloud

■ Amazon Web Services

■ Cloudera

■ Samsung SDS

Dropped
None

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Gartner Magic Quadrants identify and analyze the most relevant providers in a market. By default,
an upper limit of 20 vendors is imposed to enable identification of the most relevant providers. On
some specific occasions, however, this upper limit may be raised when the Magic Quadrant’s value
to clients would otherwise be diminished.

The inclusion criteria represent the specific attributes necessary for inclusion in this Magic
Quadrant. They were applied progressively, in sequence and in cumulative fashion to aid
identification of the most relevant providers.

Inclusion Criterion 1: Data Science and Machine Learning Platform

As noted earlier in the Market Definition/Description, a vendor`s DSML platform had to:

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■ Offer a mixture of the basic and advanced functionality essential for building DSML solutions
(primarily predictive and prescriptive models).

■ Support the incorporation of these solutions into business processes, surrounding

infrastructure, products and applications.

■ Support the sustainable consumption of insights derived from the platform and offer
functionality to quantify and track the value of data science projects.

■ Support variously skilled data science professionals (“data scientist” is an inconsistently

applied job title and professional distinction — a DSML platform’s user base is often made up of
professionals with diverse technical and business backgrounds).

■ Support multiple tasks across the data science life cycle, including:

■ Problem and business context understanding

■ Data ingestion

■ Data preparation

■ Data exploration

■ Feature engineering

■ Model creation and training

■ Model testing

■ Deployment

■ Monitoring

■ Maintenance

■ Data and model governance

■ Explainable AI (XAI)

■ Business value tracking

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■ Collaboration

Additionally, a vendor had to be able to provide technical support for its DSML platform directly
and/or via commercial support partners.

Inclusion Criterion 2: Revenue and Growth

A vendor’s core product had to offer one or more common license models:

■ Perpetual license model

■ SaaS subscription model

■ Consumption-based model or other type of model

The following information for the core product was considered:

■ Revenue, in U.S. dollars, generated from perpetual licenses during 2019., This included software
license, maintenance and update revenue, but excluded hardware and professional services
revenue.

■ Annual contract value (ACV), in U.S. dollars, generated from SaaS subscriptions in 2019,
excluding any professional services included in annual contracts. For multiyear contracts, only
the contract value for the first 12 months was used for this calculation.

A vendor needed to have either:

■ At least $75 million in combined perpetual license revenue and ACV for 2019

Or:

■ At least $10 million in combined perpetual license revenue and ACV for 2019 calendar year AND
at least 18% in combined revenue growth, compared with 2018

Only core products that passed Inclusion Criterion 2 were considered for Inclusion Criterion 3.

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Inclusion Criterion 3: Customer Counts

Vendors that satisfied the requirements of Inclusion Criterion 2 were next evaluated on their
customer counts. We required significant cross-industry and cross-geographic traction for each
core product under consideration. Counts included only active unique customer organizations
using the latest version of the core product or a version released in the 12 months prior to August
2020.

Cross-Industry Customer Count

We assessed counts of the number of active unique customer organizations (logos) using each of
the DSML platforms under consideration in production environments. For each core product, we
required at least 10 unique organizations (logos), which had to have data science solutions in
production environments and which had to come from at least four of the following major industry
segments:

■ Banking and securities

■ Communications, media and services

■ Education

■ Government

■ Healthcare

■ Insurance

■ Manufacturing and natural resources

■ Retail

■ Transportation

■ Utilities

■ Wholesale trade

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Cross-Region Customer Count

In addition, there had to be at least two active customer organizations (logos) in each of the
following:

■ North America

■ European Union, Norway, Switzerland and U.K.

■ Rest of the world

Only core products that passed Inclusion Criterion 3 were considered for Inclusion Criterion 4.

Inclusion Criterion 4: Market Traction

A vendor’s market traction was evaluated using a composite metric. This metric drew on internal
Gartner data and other external sources of information to assess the level of market interest in,
and the momentum of, each vendor and its DSML platform. Inputs included:

■ Gartner client inquiries

■ Gartner.com search volume

■ Volume of job listings and headcount trends

■ Internet search volume and trend analysis

■ Frequency of mention as an evaluated competitor from July 2019 to July 2020

■ Growth in new customers

Inclusion Criteria 5: Product Capability Scoring

If more than 20 vendors met the first four criteria, only the vendors with the top 20 market traction
scores advanced to the full Magic Quadrant evaluation.

Honorable Mentions
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The following list includes notable vendors, in alphabetical order, that either did not meet the
inclusion criteria or whose eligibility for inclusion we were unable to verify due to a lack of
information:

■ 4Paradigm provides 4Paradigm Sage EE, which enables enterprises to build AI applications. It
uses a large-scale distributed architecture to optimize offline and real-time computing to enable
data processing, model building, application development and governance in the AI pipeline.

■ Activeeon provides ProActive Machine Learning (PML), an open platform that enables users to
build scalable ML pipelines using its GUI and supports enterprise-scale automation of the ML
life cycle on any existing infrastructure and ML tools. PML also supports governed
operationalization, augmented ML and incremental AI, and provides flexibility with notebook
integration.

■ Algorithmia provides ModelOps in a single environment for continuous integration/continuous

delivery (CI/CD) of AI models in on-premises and multicloud environments, with strong
governance and security features across infrastructure, data and model resources for the end-
to-end ML life cycle.

■ dotData, which provides the dotData Data Science Platform and AutoML software through its
dotData Enterprise Edition, automates the full ML life cycle, including feature discovery and
evaluation, data ingestion, model development and operationalization.

■ Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE’s) Ezmeral software portfolio includes Data Fabric, ML Ops
and Container Platform, with orchestration to increase agility, cost-efficiency, security and
delivery for data-intensive AI and ML projects.

■ Iguazio offers the Iguazio Data Science & MLOps Platform, which enables enterprises to
develop, deploy and manage AI applications at scale and in real time. It comes with an
integrated feature store that enables users to develop, use, and share real-time and offline
features across teams and applications, thus reducing development time and integration effort.

■ Oracle provides Oracle Machine Learning and a broad suite of data and analytics products.
These support data preparation, visualization, augmented analytics, model development and
deployment, and other stages of the data science life cycle, with SQL, R and Python APIs.

■ SAP has revamped its DSML platform (SAP Data Intelligence) with a focus on enterprise
readiness, data management and governance, and integration with SAP’s numerous data,

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analytics and AI solutions.

■ Teradata, which offers Teradata Vantage, facilitates a unified view of enterprise data and
empowers users to perform predictive and prescriptive analytics, as well as autonomous
decision making and ML at scale.

■ World Programming provides WPS Analytics, a flexible platform that supports analytics
development, governance, and deployment with visualization and programming tools for
Python, R, SQL and SAS.

Evaluation Criteria
The Ability to Execute criteria used in this Magic Quadrant are as follows (for the sources of
information that informed Gartner’s evaluations using these criteria, see the Evidence section).

Product or service: Core goods and services that compete in and or serve the defined market.
This includes current product and service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on. These
can be offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships, as defined in the market
definition and detailed in subcriteria.

Overall viability (business unit, financial, strategy and organization): This criterion includes an
assessment of the organization’s overall financial health, as well as the financial and practical
success of the business unit. It also assesses the likelihood of the organization continuing to offer
and invest in the product, as well as the product’s position in the current portfolio.

Sales execution/pricing: This criterion assesses the organization’s capabilities in all presales
activities and the structure that supports them. Included are deal management, pricing and
negotiation, presale support and overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market responsiveness/record: This criterion assesses a vendor’s ability to respond, change

direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act,
customers’ needs evolve and market dynamics change. It also considers a vendor’s history of
responsiveness to changing market demands.

Marketing execution: This criterion assesses the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of

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programs designed to deliver the organization’s message in order to influence the market,
promote a brand, increase awareness of products and establish a positive identification in the
minds of customers. This “mind share” can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional,
thought leadership, social media, referrals and sales activities.

Customer experience: This criterion assesses products, services and/or programs that enable
customers to achieve anticipated results with the products evaluated. Specifically, it considers the
quality of supplier-buyer interactions, technical support and account support. Ancillary tools,
customer support programs, availability of user groups and SLAs may also be evaluated, among
other things.

Operations: This criterion assesses the organization’s ability to achieve its goals and fulfill its
commitments. Factors considered include the quality of the organizational structure, skills,
experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate
effectively and efficiently.

Ability to Execute

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing Low

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Low

Customer Experience Medium

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Operations Medium

Source: Gartner (March 2021)

Completeness of Vision
The Completeness of Vision criteria used in this Magic Quadrant are as follows (for the sources of
information that informed Gartner’s evaluations using these criteria, see the Evidence section).

Market understanding: This criterion assesses a vendor’s ability to understand customers’ needs
and to use that understanding to create products and services. Vendors that have a clear vision of
their market, and that listen to and understand customers’ demands, can shape or enhance
market changes.

Marketing strategy: This criterion looks for clear, differentiated messaging that is consistently
communicated internally, and externalized through social media, advertising, customer programs
and positioning statements.

Sales strategy: This criterion looks for a sound strategy for selling that uses appropriate networks,
including direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication networks. It also
considers partners that extend the scope and depth of a vendor’s market reach, expertise,
technologies, services and customer base.

Offering (product) strategy: This criterion looks for an approach to product development and
delivery that emphasizes market differentiation, functionality, methodology and features as they
map to current and future requirements.

Innovation: This criterion looks for direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of
resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or preemptive purposes.

Note that geographic strategy is not evaluated separately in this Magic Quadrant because global
presence is an inclusion criterion and regional strategies and strengths are captured in other areas
of evaluation.

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Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding Medium

Marketing Strategy Low

Sales Strategy Low

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model NotRated

Vertical/Industry Strategy NotRated

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy NotRated

Source: Gartner (March 2021)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders
Leaders have a strong presence and significant mind share in the DSML market. They
demonstrate strength in depth and breadth across the full data exploration, model development
and operationalization process. While providing outstanding service and support, Leaders are also
nimble in responding to rapidly changing market conditions. The number of expert and citizen
data scientists using Leaders’ platforms is significant and growing.

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Leaders are in the strongest position to influence the market’s growth and direction. They address
the majority of industries, geographies, data domains and use cases, and therefore have a solid
understanding of, and strategy for, this market. Not only can they focus on executing effectively,
based on current market conditions, but they also have solid roadmaps to take advantage of new
developments and advancing technologies in this rapidly transforming sector. They provide
thought leadership and innovative differentiation, often disrupting the market in the process.

Leaders are suitable vendors for most organizations to evaluate. They should not be the only
vendors evaluated, however, as other vendors might address an organization’s unique needs more
precisely. Leaders provide a benchmark of high standards against which others should be
compared.

Challengers
Challengers have an established presence, credibility, viability and robust product capabilities.
They may not, however, demonstrate thought leadership and innovation to the same degree as
Leaders.

There are two main types of Challenger:

■ Long-established DSML vendors that succeed because of their stability, predictability and long-
term customer relationships. These vendors need to revitalize their vision to stay abreast of
market developments and become more broadly influential and innovative. If they simply
continue doing what they have been doing, their growth and market presence may be impaired.

■ Vendors established in adjacent markets — such as the analytics and BI, data and analytics
service provider, and developer tool markets — that are entering the DSML market with
solutions that extend their current platforms. These vendors provide a reasonable option not
only for existing customers but also for new customers. As these vendors prove they can
influence this market and provide clear direction and vision, they may develop into Leaders.
However, they must resist the temptation to introduce new capabilities quickly but superficially.

Challengers are well-placed to succeed in this market as it is currently defined and are operating
effectively within current market conditions. Their vision and roadmap, however, may be impaired
by a lack of market understanding, excessive focus on short-term gains, strategy- and product-

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related inertia, and a lack of innovation. Equally, their marketing efforts, geographic presence and
visibility may not be on a par with that of Leaders.

Visionaries

Visionaries have not only a strong vision, but also a solid supporting roadmap. They are innovative
in their approach to addressing the market’s needs. Although their offerings are typically
innovative and solid in terms of the capabilities they provide, there are often gaps in their
completeness and breadth.

Visionaries are worth considering because they may:

■ Represent an opportunity to jump-start an innovative initiative

■ Provide some compelling, differentiating capability that offers a competitive advantage as

either a complement to, or a substitute for, existing solutions

■ Be more easily influenced with regard to their product roadmap and approach

Visionaries, however, also pose a potentially riskier choice for buyers. In today’s highly competitive
DSML market, Visionaries may also struggle to gain momentum, develop a presence, increase
their market share, fulfill their vision and execute their roadmap. They may also be targets for
acquisition.

As Visionaries mature and prove their Ability to Execute, they may eventually become Leaders.

Niche Players
Niche Players demonstrate strength in a particular industry or approach, or pair well with a
specific technology stack. They should be considered by buyers in their particular niches.

Some Niche Players demonstrate a degree of vision, which suggests they could become
Visionaries. Often, however, they are struggling to make their vision compelling, relative to others
in the market. They are considered more followers than leaders in terms of driving and defining
the market. They may also be struggling to develop a track record of innovation and thought
leadership that could give them the momentum to become Visionaries.

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Other Niche Players could become Challengers, if they continue to execute in a way that increases
their momentum and traction in the market.

Context
The DSML market is simultaneously more vibrant and messier than ever. Vendors weave together
rapidly evolving proprietary solutions with numerous open-source components and increasingly
complex partnership networks. Movement in this market is rapid and multidirectional. The
adversity of the past year has done little to slow the rapid pace of innovation or the ambitious
growth strategies presented by many vendors.

Readers of this Magic Quadrant should understand the following:

■ This market features a diverse range of vendors serving different requirements and
preferences: Gartner invited a wide range of DSML platform vendors to participate in the
evaluation process for potential inclusion in this Magic Quadrant. Users of these platforms have
different requirements and preferences for UIs and tools (see Navigating Differentiated
Features in Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms). Expert data scientists prefer to
code data science models (typically in Python or R) and often build and run data models in
notebooks. Other users are most comfortable building models by using a drag-and-drop UI to
create visual pipelines. Many members of emerging citizen data science communities favor a
much more augmented approach (often called AutoML). This uses AI/ML techniques to guide
and accelerate practitioners through the model building and operationalization process (see
How Augmented DSML Makes Data Science Projects More Efficient). Some expert data
scientists prefer an augmented approach, which enables them to navigate the model-building
and operationalization process more efficiently and productively. Increased collaboration
between these personas is driving vendors to develop functionality to support a broad mix of
users and team types.

■ Not all organizations build their DSML models from scratch or entirely on their own: Some
need assistance getting started with or extending their DSML initiatives. Although this Magic
Quadrant does assess the availability of some prepackaged content, such as templates and
samples, it does not assess service providers that can help jump-start or extend DSML projects
throughout an organization. Nor does this Magic Quadrant assess specialized vendors of
industry-, domain- or function-specific solutions.

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■ A Leader may not be the best choice: There is a wide range of DSML products available, all of
which offer a breadth and depth of capability and varied approaches to developing,
operationalizing and managing models. It is therefore important to evaluate your specific needs
when assessing vendors. A vendor in the Leaders quadrant, for example, might not be the best
choice for you. Equally, a Niche Player might be the perfect choice. For an extensive review of
the functional capabilities of each platform, see Critical Capabilities for Data Science and
Machine Learning Platforms. Bear in mind that this Magic Quadrant includes only a small
selection of the myriad vendors offering DSML solutions.

■ Only vendors with commercially licensable products are included: Pure open-source platforms
are excluded from evaluation in this Magic Quadrant. Only commercially licensed open-source
platforms are evaluated. We do, however, recognize the well-established trend of commercial
platforms using open-source components and libraries. Vendors take different approaches to
including and supporting open-source elements. Open-source solutions represent an
opportunity for both users and vendors to get started with DSML with little upfront investment
(see Note 1). Innovation is fast-paced within the open-source community, and determinants of
the success of new technologies are highly democratic. In addition, many users of DSML
platforms are either already proficient in or can easily learn and apply open-source
technologies. Open-source technologies have also become ubiquitous in university data
science curriculums. Leveraging open-source technology through collaborative or orchestrated
integration with commercial offerings also reduces the need for vendors to recreate specific
capabilities. Vendors can incorporate the best elements from a fast-changing landscape of
algorithms and techniques, leaving more resources to focus on other areas of differentiation for
their platforms. However, a platform’s ease of use and coherence may suffer if its vendor does
not account for the needs of all types of users.

■ Platforms must support not only model building but also model operationalization: The full
benefit — including business value — of DSML will not be achieved unless models are both: (1)
embedded in business processes and decision environments; and (2) maintained, monitored
and managed over time. There have been numerous recent advances in technology, process
and talent development. However, a stubborn and alarming percentage of models developed
with the intention of full deployment are never actually operationalized. Another major problem
is that operationalization takes too long. There are many reasons for this, but a crucial one is a
lack of tools to enable and facilitate operationalization. Operationalization (often referred to as
MLOps) extends to ongoing review and adjustment of models to ensure their relevancy over
time as the business and its objectives change. MLOps also includes key functionality such as

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drift detection, catalogs, governance, explainability and business impact analysis.

■ AI is still overhyped but the COVID-19 pandemic has made investments more practical: All
DSML can be classified as AI, but not all AI concepts should be called DSML. Still, DSML
platforms cannot avoid being swept up in the sustained hype around AI. The semantics are
unlikely to ever be agreed upon and are not worth fighting over. AI hype brings undoubtedly
valuable attention and enthusiasm to the data science space. But without education, discipline
and reasonable expectations, that hype can do far more harm than good. The experience and
challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have led many data and analytics leaders to be more
pragmatic with their data science initiatives. The vendors in this Magic Quadrant have done an
admirable job of championing effective ways to use data science to directly combat the
pandemic and to become more agile and proactive in uncertain times.

The diversity of DSML platforms largely reflects the wide range of people that use them. This
Magic Quadrant is therefore aimed at a variety of audiences:

■ Expert data scientists: These are the highly sought-after individuals who possess the skills and
knowledge to understand and engage with all stages of the data science life cycle. Most expert
data scientists spend the largest share of their time and energy on model creation, with
supporting roles such as data engineers and ML engineers taking on data pipelining and MLOps
responsibilities. Tenured experts can move into data science manager roles, using platforms to
gain visibility into a team’s full portfolio of projects and facilitating collaboration and timely
delivery of value. Some expert data scientists work mostly independently on “point” solutions
and rarely collaborate much with other data scientists or departments within their organization.

■ Citizen data scientists: Increasingly, citizen data scientists are building DSML models. These
are people who need access to DSML capabilities, but who do not have the advanced skills of
expert data scientists. Citizen data scientists can come from roles such as business analyst,
LOB analyst, data engineer and application developer. They need to understand the nature of
the DSML market and how it differs from, but complements, the analytics and BI market (see
Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms). Citizen data scientists do
not replace expert data scientists, but instead work in collaboration with them.

■ Supporting roles: These include data engineers, developers, ML engineers and other roles.
While not responsible for model building, training and testing, the supporting cast in data

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science teams is vital for validating models, scaling operations, and ensuring data quality and
consistent model accuracy.

■ LOB data science teams: Typically, these are sponsored by a LOB executive and charged with
addressing LOB-led initiatives in areas such as marketing, sales, finance and R&D. These teams
focus on their own and their department’s priorities. Levels of collaboration with other LOB data
science teams vary. LOB data science teams can include both expert and citizen data
scientists. Supporting roles may reside in the LOB or be assigned from IT or other areas.

■ Corporate data science teams: These have strong and broad executive sponsorship, and can
take a cross-functional perspective from a position of enterprisewide visibility. In addition to
providing model-building support, they are often charged with defining and supporting an end-
to-end process for building and deploying DSML models. They often work in partnership with
LOB data science teams in multitier organizations. In addition, they might provide assistance
for LOB teams that do not have their own data scientists. Corporate data science teams
typically include expert data scientists. Supporting roles may reside in the corporate data
science team or be assigned from IT or other areas. The role of chief or managing data
scientist is emerging within many corporate data science teams.

The long-expected gigantic presence in this market of Google and Amazon is now easily felt as
they compete with Microsoft for supremacy in terms of DSML capabilities in the cloud. The
longest-standing big names in this sector, IBM, MathWorks and SAS, are, however, holding their
ground in their established areas of success and innovating with modern offerings and adaptive
strategies. Numerous smaller and midsize vendors are in sustained periods of hypergrowth. Other
long-standing and admired brands are demonstrating exciting innovations and reporting healthy
financial results. The growing size of the market feeds startups at all phases of the data science
life cycle.

As in the previous edition of this Magic Quadrant, vendors are heavily focused on innovation and
differentiation, rather than pure execution. Innovation remains key to survival and relevance. This
is an adolescent market, where lagging or incomplete visions do not thrive, whereas differentiated
vendors find ample revenue and funding opportunities. Although the market has many established
and thought-leading vendors, countless new DSML startups with diverse products and value
propositions continue to emerge. The select group featured in this Magic Quadrant have all
established strong customer bases, financial performance and technology.

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Merger and acquisition activity in this market has been regular but moderate. Vendors in this
Magic Quadrant will likely continue to acquire interesting companies to round out their platforms,
and major, transformative acquisitions are always possible.

Data and analytics leaders still need to work hard just to keep up with developments and new
products in this market. End-user organizations need to increase their engagement just to stay
reasonably up to date. Leaders should focus on developing new use cases and applications for
DSML — ones that are highly visible, deliver real business value and build momentum for future
initiatives. At this stage, data and analytics leaders should also be expanding upon successful
early projects and investing resources to scale promising DSML initiatives. In addition, they should
look to extend access to the market’s technologies to nontraditional roles and develop significant
internal education programs.

The proliferation of augmented analytics capabilities has been drawing the analytics and BI and
DSML platform markets closer together, so that the two fields are now colliding. Analytics and BI
platforms increasingly include functionality to perform augmented DSML tasks, where predictive
models are executed behind the scenes, and insights are surfaced within the analytics and BI
process flow. DSML platforms increasingly feature enhanced data transformation and discovery
capabilities, such as data visualization, that, historically, were more characteristic of analytics and
BI platforms. Traditionally these have been discrete markets with different buyers, but that
situation is changing.

To achieve fully mature, advanced analytic capabilities, organizations must plan for and invest in
the end-to-end data science life cycle. This includes processes for accessing and transforming
data, conducting analysis and building analytic models, operationalizing and embedding models,
managing and monitoring models over time to reassess their relevancy, and adjusting models to
reflect changes in the data and business environment. As DSML capabilities are increasingly
adopted across enterprises, cross-departmental work is important to avoid excessive
fragmentation and a lack of common standards. Otherwise, individual departments may adopt
different platforms and processes — a situation that leads to operational and maintenance-related
problems.

Whether beginning or extending their journey in the field of DSML, organizations need not travel
alone. Data and analytics service providers offer guidance, a structured approach and reduced risk
of failure. They also help ameliorate the common challenges of recruiting and retention data

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science talent (see Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Service Providers).

Market Overview
The DSML market has shown great resilience in the past year, in terms of vendors’ performances
as businesses and ability to sustain high levels of innovation during trying times. The broad mix of
vendors offers a wide range of capabilities, with solutions appropriate for most levels of maturity.
The definitions and parameters of data science and data scientists continue to evolve, and the
market is dramatically different from how it was in 2014, when we published the first Magic
Quadrant on it.

Even more vendors are aiming for a sweet spot with their platforms in order to appeal to both
expert data scientists and citizen data scientists. Vendors are adding more capabilities designed
for data engineers, developers and ML engineers, as participation by a supporting cast in the data
science life cycle becomes more common. Vendors that previously catered only to expert data
scientists are adding augmented capabilities and improved interfaces to appeal to citizen data
scientists. Vendors want to expand the footprint and availability of their solutions to maximize
customers’ return on platform investments.

There remains a glut of compelling innovations and visionary roadmaps, as indicated by the
positioning of many vendors to the right on the Completeness of Vision axis. Though many
elements of vendors’ visions and value propositions overlap, key areas of differentiation continue
to emerge. These include the UI, augmented DSML (AutoML), MLOps, performance and scalability,
hybrid and multicloud support, XAI and cutting-edge use cases and techniques (such as deep
learning, large-scale IoT and reinforcement learning).

Many organizations are starting DSML initiatives using free or low-cost open-source and public
cloud service provider offerings to build up their knowledge and explore possibilities. They are
then likely to adopt commercial software to tackle broader use cases and requirements for team
collaboration, and to operationalize their deployment and management of models. While
enterprise data science success with a purely open-source stack is possible, the vast majority of
mature and impactful data science teams have invested in a commercial platform.

Overall revenue from DSML platform software grew by 17.5% in 2019 (down from 24.3% in 2018)
to represent the second-fastest-growing segment of the analytics and BI software market (behind

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modern BI platforms at 17.9%). The segment’s revenue for 2019 was $4 billion (up from $3.4
billion in 2018). Its share of the overall analytics and BI market grew from 15.1% in 2018 to 16.1%
in 2019. Several of the smaller and younger vendors in this market are sustaining hypergrowth.
Growing at the rate of the market is actually to grow slowly, compared with the growth rates of
many vendors in this Magic Quadrant.

Those interested in this market should monitor and regularly assess the following trends:

■ The analytics and BI platform sector and the DSML platform sector continue to coalesce and to
influence one another. More vendors in the analytics and BI sector are offering predictive and
prescriptive capabilities, often through augmented vendors. For their part, data science vendors
are adding more robust data transformation and data visualization capabilities to their
platforms, while making their environments more hospitable to individuals without traditional
data science backgrounds.

■ Although new vendors are entering the market, “legacy” vendors remain highly relevant. Many
traditional vendors in the DSML sector have firmly established new products, or are revamping
and modernizing their approach, or are expanding through strategic partnerships, mergers and
acquisitions. Big names continue to offer new capabilities and approaches. At the same time,
they are enabling existing customers to continue benefiting from investments they have already
made and from technology stacks they are used to working with.

■ The open-source ecosystem and community is as vibrant as ever. Python is firmly established
as the dominant language for DSML, and the R community continues to grow. OSS enables
organizations to jump-start or extend DSML initiatives with little upfront or additional
investment. Additionally, the ecosystem is open to — and supported by — vendors that provide
commercial platforms in the DSML market. It is now common for DSML platform vendors to
serve as curators and optimizers of OSS.

■ Algorithm building blocks are often used to create models. This trend will continue as models
continue to be abstracted and packaged for specific domain and industry problems.

■ Packaged models are increasingly available through APIs that can easily be integrated with, and
consumed in, applications (see Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services). Many cloud
service APIs are highly focused on specific domain and industry problems. This approach can

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reduce or even eliminate the need for organizations to build models themselves.

The DSML market’s pace of change and innovation is likely to continue to accelerate. Some final
areas that data and analytics leaders should study and evaluate are:

■ Componentization: Platforms composed of multiple components have become the norm as

vendors develop their own components, use OSS or partner with other vendors to expand their
offerings. Vendors increasingly provide a heterogeneous collection of tools, as opposed to
native integrations within a single product. The definition of a DSML platform has been
significantly updated to reflect this development.

■ Open-source acceptance: All DSML platforms use and incorporate OSS, although to varying
degrees. Some provide APIs to access common open-source libraries. Some build open-source
technologies into capabilities accessible within their own platforms. Others offer the ability to
use analytic artifacts created within their platform within the open-source ecosystem. Still
others provide more of a wrapper for working natively with open-source tools in a consistent
environment that also enables operationalization. Supporting open-source platforms and
frameworks through various collaborative and orchestrated approaches has become the
standard. These adaptive platforms increase support for new capabilities and increased
workloads while reducing the need for users to switch platforms for different contexts. Using
OSS enables vendors to keep pace with new developments and tap into the expertise of
contributors to the open-source community.

■ Platform coherence: Increased componentization and open-source incorporation creates more

potential for fragmented, awkward solutions. The need to access multiple components and
platforms for full, robust capabilities must be balanced against the desirability of accessing all
functionality in a seamless and cohesive manner. As offerings embrace a heterogeneous
environment, cohesion becomes increasingly important. As offerings expand to provide more
capabilities and keep pace with emerging technologies, it is crucial that they support the ability
not only to manage multiple components, but also to access them easily and seamlessly from
within the platform.

■ Model and data repositories: There is a trend for providing means of tracking and sharing both
the data and the analytic artifacts generated as part of the model development and deployment
process. This is vital for deduplication of efforts, governance and enterprise scalability of data
science initiatives. It also supports the ongoing freshness of analytical assets in use and

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provides critical transparency into data science operations.

■ Collaboration: As access to DSML platforms becomes democratized and more types of users
work together across the analytic pipeline, the need to be able to collaborate easily and
seamlessly increases significantly. As platforms become more accessible to new types of
users, these products must enable people to work together and share in real time throughout
the data science life cycle. DSML platforms are also facilitating vital collaboration between data
science teams and IT, and between data scientists and LOB leaders.

■ Extension into decision management: Increasingly, DSML platforms are extending beyond
operationalization to support collaboration, which, in turn, fuels interest in decision
management capabilities as analytics tools move beyond prediction to explicitly drive business
decisions.

Evidence
Gartner’s assessments and commentary in this Magic Quadrant draw on the following sources:

■ Instruction manuals and documentation of selected vendors. We used these to verify platform
functionality.

■ A questionnaire completed by the vendors.

■ Vendor briefings, including product demonstrations, about individual vendors’ strategies and
operations.

■ An extensive RFP inquiring how each vendor delivers specific features that correspond to 15
critical capabilities (see Toolkit: RFP for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms).

■ Prepared video demonstrations of how well vendors’ DSML platforms address specific
functionality requirements across the 15 critical capabilities.

■ The Gartner Peer Insights platform.

■ Interactions between Gartner analysts and Gartner clients who are deciding their evaluation
criteria, and Gartner clients’ opinions about how successfully vendors meet these criteria.

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Note 1: Definitions of Open-Source Platform and XOps

Definition of an Open-Source Platform

The open-source approach is becoming more common throughout the DSML platform market. It
enables people to innovate collaboratively, each contributing their own perspective in a way that
shortens time to market.

The open-source approach is quickly becoming a mainstream way to introduce new capabilities.
Many such capabilities are evaluated in this Magic Quadrant.

The most common examples of OSS in the DSML platform market are components, such as:

■ Open-source programming languages like Python and R

■ Open-source libraries and frameworks like scikit-learn and TensorFlow

■ Open-source visualizations like D3 and Plotly

■ Open-source notebooks like Jupyter and Zeppelin

■ Open-source data management platforms like Apache Spark and Hadoop

A platform is considered open — but not open-source — if it offers flexibility and extensibility for
accessing open-source components. In addition, a platform can itself be open-source, which
means that its source code is made available for use or modification.

OSS is usually developed with public collaboration and made freely available. However, only open-
source platforms that also have commercially licensable products were eligible for inclusion in
this Magic Quadrant.

Definition of XOps

The term XOps encompasses the various technologies, processes and people involved in the
combined practices of DataOps, MLOps, ModelOps, AIOps and Platform Ops for AI (see
Demystifying XOps: DataOps, MLOps, ModelOps, AIOps and Platform Ops for AI).

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Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This
includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether
offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and
detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization'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, will continue offering the product and will advance the
state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that
supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the
overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve

competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and
market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver
the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase
awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and
organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity,
promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be

successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive
technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include
the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and

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other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing
basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to
translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen
to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added
vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated

throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs
and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth
of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current
and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet
the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or

capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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