Forget Gen 1 and Gen 2. Next Gen business intelligence has landed in the market, and Sigma is leading the way.
Sigma recently joined the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence. This is notable for two reasons:
- They’re the first platform to join that started as warehouse-native.
- They also earned the highest debut position in terms of ability to execute on this Magic Quadrant (MQ) in the last 15 years.
This high debut reflects Sigma’s ability to execute in a crowded, established market dominated by mega-vendors. The last time a new player landed so high on the analytics and BI Magic Quadrant was 2010, when Tableau took off.
In fact, except for Tableau’s debut, you’d have to go back 24 years to find another vendor that scored higher on the “ability to execute” axis for their first-time appearance. The vendor at that time? Cognos (at the time a 32-year-old company), in 2001.
Clearly, the market is ready for a shake-up. And Sigma is here to deliver.
Why Sigma stands out on the 2025 MQ
Until this year, the Magic Quadrant has reflected two traditional modes of BI:
- Gen 1
- Focused on reports and metrics
- Ex: SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Oracle, Qlik, MicroStrategy
- Gen 2:
- Focused on dashboards and ad-hoc exploration
- Ex: Tableau, Power BI, Looker, ThoughtSpot
While these platforms unlock numerous benefits for their customers, they also come with tradeoffs. Gen 1 platforms are restrictive on who can access data, and they’re difficult to stand up. But they’re part of an ecosystem that’s tightly integrated with business planning tools, so you can make updates in the BI platform and have it flow to other applications.
Gen 2 platforms offer beautiful visualizations and make data more accessible to a broader audience, but they’re difficult to integrate with the other apps and processes that are used to run the business. So while more people can view more data, they can’t do much else with it (except download the dashboard as a CSV to run their own analysis in Excel).
Sigma stands out on the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant because it doesn’t fit squarely into Gen 1 or Gen 2. Sigma offers the capabilities of both BI modes while extending beyond analytics to make data actionable for everyone, regardless of their existing skillset.
In other words, Sigma is not only Gen 1 or Gen 2 BI. It’s Next Gen BI, and it’s the first platform of its kind to land on the Analytics and Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant.
What is Next Gen BI?
Next Gen BI is the new wave of business intelligence, built for the cloud and thoughtfully designed for every person who works with data. It includes:
The best of Gen 1 BI:
- Reports and metrics
- Integration with other apps
The best of Gen 2 BI:
- Interactive dashboards
- Ad-hoc exploration
Plus, new capabilities unique to Next Gen BI:
- Data apps
- AI apps
- Writeback
- Cloud-native size, speed, and security
- Flexibility to work with data in many (governed) ways:
Spreadsheets, SQL, Python, AI, and natural language - Multi-player edit mode
Next Gen BI is purpose-built for a cloud computing world. It inherits the security, scale, speed, and innovation of the cloud data warehouse, without any of the on-prem architectural baggage that older platforms deal with.
The fundamental difference between Next Gen BI and its predecessors, however, is not architectural. It’s philosophical.
Next Gen BI makes data actionable for every single person who needs to work with data, in a governed and more secure environment. Anyone—even people with view-only access—can drill down into data and save their explorations as bookmarks (no need to download to Excel here!). Or, builders can use UI components, action triggers, and writeback capabilities to build custom data apps that replace typical spreadsheet workflows.
In other platforms, data work ends at the dashboard. But in Next Gen BI, the dashboard is just the starting point.
Writeback & Data Apps: Pushing the boundaries of BI
We were also pleased to see data apps get a callout on the Magic Quadrant this year. Data apps are made possible through writeback—and currently, Sigma is the only BI platform that offers data writeback out-of-the-box, without the need for an integration or 3rd-party tool.
This is what it looks like to move beyond the restrictive modes of Gen 1 or Gen 2. BI. In Next Gen BI, you can still create all the dashboards, metrics, reports, and visualizations that you’re used to—in a more secure, accessible, and performant environment—while also unlocking new outcomes with data apps and writeback.
See the Sigma roadmap—and the future of analytics
Don’t just take our word for it, though. See for yourself how Next Gen BI taking off at the upcoming Aimpoint + Sigma virtual event, Rewriting the rules of BI: Sigma’s Roadmap & Vision on July 16.
At this virtual event, Tai Abukasis (Head of Data Analytics, Aimpoint Digital), will discuss the evolution of business intelligence and how cloud warehousing has unlocked new capabilities for data.
There’s a better way to work with data, and we're delivering it to our clients. Join us and see the next wave of BI for yourself.
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