Gartner, MEAP and RIM

Posted: May 11, 2011 | | Categories: BlackBerry

In my role at AT&T I work with customers looking to mobilize Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) applications using Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (MEAP). MEAP is a term I believe was coined by Gartner a few years back and since it's their term, their publications on MEAP are the industry's reference on the topic.

In December, 2009 Gartner published a MEAP Magic Quadrant document that talked about the different MEAP vendors, their capabilities and how they were faring in the market. It wasn't until April, 2011 that the next edition of that publication was published and it contained some interesting information.

First of all, for those of you who understand Garter's Magic Quadrants, any vendor wants to be in the upper right corner of the quadrant. That's the place for the movers and shakers, the innovators and the ones to watch. For this year's MEAP Magic Quadrant, the upper right corner is empty.  Yep, empty. None of the MEAP vendors are perceived by Gartner to be leaders in the space. I thought that was weird. How can you have 10 or so vendors and none of them being leaders?

Anyway, the thing that caught my attention was how out of touch Gartner is about what RIM is doing in the market. In the 2011 MEAP Magic Quadrant document (Magic Quadrant for Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms) and another document I just read this morning called Critical Capabilities for Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (ID #G00212257) Gartner refers to the RIM MDS Runtime client and development tools. The interesting thing about that is that RIM discontinued the MDS Runtime development tools and runtime client in December 2009. So in this case, Gartner is making statements and assessing RIM's capabilities using products that RIM discontinued about 18 months ago.

How can Gartner be effective and accurate if they base their analysis on products that are no longer even produced or supported by the vendors? That makes no sense to me. The MDS Runtime tools were great and I am disappointed that they're no longer available, but they're gone now – never to return. Gartner needs to pay attention.

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