The Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms presents a global view of Gartner's opinion of the main software vendors that should be considered by organizations seeking to develop business intelligence (BI) applications. Buyers should evaluate vendors in all four quadrants -- those from the Niche Players and Visionaries quadrants are driving innovation in areas such as interactive visualization, in-memory data analysis, real-time dashboards, wizard-based application development and spreadsheet-based reporting. The scores and commentary in this document are based substantially on three sources: customer perceptions of each vendor's strengths and challenges derived from BI-related inquiries with Gartner, an online survey of vendor customers conducted in late 2007, and a vendor-completed questionnaire about their BI strategy and operations.