The old legacy database vendors might still be the top dogs when it comes to data analytics, but their Hadoop-wielding rivals are hot on their heels, according to Gartner Inc.’s latest magic quadrant for Data Warehouse and Data Management Solutions for Analytics.

In its latest analysis, Gartner closely examined the solutions of 17 analytics vendors, and came to the conclusion that IBM, Oracle Corp. and Teradata Corp. were still the leading lights, with Hadoop platforms Cloudera Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc., named alongside cloud giant Amazon Web Services as the closest challengers.

In a summary of its findings, Gartner noted that the data warehouse has expanded to include a much broader range of data types, processing engines and repositories in 2015. “We now see a much wider separation in the Leaders quadrant. Enterprise architects and data warehouse managers must work with their CIOs to address the new demands and solution options,” the analyst firm said in a statement.

Gartner added that businesses require solutions that are able to manage and process external data in combination with internal sources of data, and that for many firms this includes data from the Internet of Things. As such, this is leading to new demands from customers “for broader data management solutions for analytics, with features and functionality that represent a significant augmentation to existing enterprise data warehouse strategies”.

Few will argue with that summary, and there are plenty of companies striving to meet these new demands, chief among them Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft and SAP SE, which were also named as “leaders” by Gartner. Here’s Gartner’s full take on the state of play:

The full report can be downloaded from here courtesy of MapR Technologies.

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