Whenever Gartner cranks out another of its famous Magic Quadrants, we inevitably see the vendors in that prized top-right quartile cranking out press releases announcing their success. Sometimes they even purchase reprint rights to the Quadrant itself, which gives us all a peek at the outcome.Today SAS sent word that it's in the leader's quadrant in the Q1 2007 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, and it was nice enough to send along a link to the report. Of course we've also heard from Business Objects and Hyperion about the same report, and the former included a downloadable PDF version of the report.

The thing to remember about these Quadrants is that there are often many different perspectives on many of the same vendors. Depending on your priorities, you should also consider the Corporate Performance Management Quadrant as well as those for Data Integration Tools, Data Warehousing DBMSs, Customer Data Mining, Customer Data Integration, Data Quality Tools, BI Implementation Services and… you get the idea. There are leaders in every Quadrant (with 95.999% certainty) and you're seldom buying into just one discreet category. You can also talk to customers and look at other analyst research, but sooner or later in comes down to you and your team to pick the product that fits your environment and circumstances.Whenever Gartner cranks out another of its famous Magic Quadrants, we inevitably see the vendors in that prized top-right quartile cranking out press releases announcing their success. Sometimes they even purchase reprint rights to the Quadrant itself, which gives us all a peek at the outcome.