How to bake a Magic Quadrant cake (free iBPMS report included in recipe)

Here’s how to create a culinary masterpiece, just remember to offer the scraps and let those less fortunate lick the spoon when you’re done.

1. Plant a few seeds in advance. About a year should do it, it’ll allow them to germinate. Remember to be creative here, it’s more fun to watch your seeds try to match your imagination.
2. Notice that the tin you’ve bought to bake the cake in is smaller this year. That’s ok, less is the new more anyway and too many ingredients will take too long to mix and cook.
3. Nurture those seeds with a few blog posts, allow the first shoots to appear and slowly bend the little leaves of their marketing to your soothing messages.
4. Watch how more buds spring out of the ground all eagerly displaying the same colours now. Shame you’ll cut them down in their prime for the cake.
5. Grab a few random ingredients. Taste doesn’t matter here, people will swarm to your baking anyway. Now mix it all up, including those tasty little seeds you planted a year ago but don’t break a sweat. You could ask others to mix it for you, they’ll gladly pay for the privilege.
6. Pour the mix into the tin. If you have too much mix just ditch the rest, nobody wants to know.
7. Slap it into the oven, gas mark 4 should be good enough for 6 months.
8. Once the cake has risen partially pull it out and let it stand, remember that the cake is only supposed to be half-baked.
9. Garnish the top with a tiny sprinkle of something bitter-sweet, use the same topping you’ve kept in the cupboard for about 4 years now, no-one will notice.
10. Your Magic Quadrant is finished. Now sit it on the window sill and let them eat cake.

(Warning: Cake will taste stale)

Oh, right, you came here only for the free report…..who am I to disappoint then: iBPMS2012MQ

Remember: no-one said you had to eat it……there are over 100 vendors in the market today, enforced segmentation or not, they all deserve to be seen. Making up a new market term doesn’t raise the bar (just a larger invoice) but creates another set of divisions and another set of headaches for people looking to enter the BPM arena and for those trying to understand it.

Footnote: Gartner analysts conducted only 14 in-depth vendor reviews during January, February and March 2012 to produce this report. Of course 3 months is representative of the entire year, and 14 is representative of the entire vendor market, iBPMS ringfence or not. They must have worked very hard for the rest of the year to miss out the rest. 37 end-user interviews were conducted during April and May 2012 to review how organizations were using these vendor’s offerings. 37……

Like Seth Godin said today “Denying the truth about relative market share, imperial power or the scientific method helps no one.”

Isn’t it about time you stood up to be counted and demanded a different format.

For more analysis on the Tragic Quadrant report visit Adam Deane’s blog here: Magic Quadrant Analysis