Gartner's Magic Quadrangle for DevOps: Finally Sniffing the Money or Just Lost in a Maze?
The analyst firm released their first magic quadrant for DevOps platforms
I saw that Gartner released a magic quadrangle for DevOps platforms. They must smell the money in that market, finally.
Over my years writing about the DevOps market and speaking to vendors and readers, I’ve come across *zero* Gartner influence, so the news of a DevOps platform magic quadrant was a bit of a surprise.
As an industry analyst firm, Gartner is best known for analyzing ERP, CRM, and large-scale digital transformation, where CxOs need “blame as a service” when they invest in the wrong solution. Analyst coverage of DevOps is a mixed bag from my vantage point. The Gartner reports about DevOps I’ve read thus far never seemed entirely focused, lacking original thought, or showing enough detail, making me think it was more of an academic exercise for some junior analysts that weren’t fully client-billable yet. I just assumed it was because there wasn’t enough money in the DevOps market to make it worthwhile for Gartner to devote senior analysts to the topic.
On the other hand, I’ve read Forrester analyst reports about DevOps and found them to contain some original thinking. I’m sure other analyst firms are also doing useful work in the DevOps space.
Looking at the quadrant, I agreed wholeheartedly with GitLab as a leader. On the other hand, Atlassian’s much-maligned Jira and Confluence do not a DevOps platform leader make. Microsoft also appears in the Leaders quadrant. I’m guessing they’re probably there because of their GitHub acquisition and not Azure DevOps.
Red Hat is a quizzical choice as a challenger. I understand that they’ve put much work into Ansible. Unfortunately, the IBM acquisition of Red Hat is finally boiling over IBM Blue as the shuttering of Opensource.com and their tightening of the reins over the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code show. I predict more such moves in the future that’ll isolate the company and its products from the DevOps community.
VMware is another odd choice as a challenger. While their acquisition of Pivotal became Tanzu, I haven’t seen them as part of the DevOps discussion. As they get sucked into Broadcom, I can’t see DevOps being even close to a priority for a chipmaker, not to mention the brain drain that comes with such major acquisitions—the end of a challenger.
Their recent win at United shows Harness may have more to show than just their overvaluation. The visionary to watch is AWS because some of their moves in the last 12-18 months telegraph a move to a DevOps platform for customers. While a CSP is a natural fit to become a DevOps platform, I see a lot of business and marketing challenges due to the open source and multi-cloud nature of DevOps today. AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure will face the same obstacles to build out, market, and extend their platforms further into the development environment.
DevOps platforms are a future eventuality for commercial and public sector organizations. It’s the next natural step in the maturation of the DevOps continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline, especially as cybersecurity and software supply chain security challenges continue to mount in business and government.
There’ll always be executives -- especially the high ego, low technology acumen types -- who need Gartner and other analyst firms to validate their decisions personally. At the same time, I see the decision to move to a DevOps platform as more collaborative. While CTOs may lay down the order, developers still need to play the same role as ever when introducing and piloting DevOps tools. We’re in an era of easy pilots and proofs of concept that can show your team what they need to know, unlike when introducing an ERP or CRM platform, so I have a hard time seeing Gartner adding a lot of value in this space.