Gartner Critical Capabilities

How do I use a Gartner Critical Capabilities?

Review the Critical Capabilities and the companion Magic Quadrant note together to gain a holistic view of the vendors in a market and the positioning of providers’ product and service offerings. You can easily compare product and service offerings against a set of critical differentiators to support your strategic decisions.

For example, you can simply select various common usage scenarios based on how you will be using the technology or service and see which product or service offerings best fit based on your needs and requirements. 
 

Producing event-driven off-cycle updates for each product or service as needed

Gartner is producing off-cycle updates to its Critical Capabilities research to reflect the latest material changes to a product or service’s capability score or use case suitability in rapidly iterating markets. These updates highlight only major changes most relevant to technology portfolio decisions.

Analysts decide whether product/service changes materially affect the capabilities or fit for use case and update the named vendor scoring and profile if necessary. Updated capability scores and analysis feature in interactive and static Critical Capabilities. Gartner’s annual refresh cycle defines market scope, inclusion criteria, use cases, scoring norms and weightings.
 

How do Gartner Critical Capabilities work?

A Critical Capabilities document is a comparative analysis that scores competing products or services against a set of critical differentiators identified by Gartner. It shows you which products or services best fit in various use cases to provide you actionable advice on which products/services you should add to your vendor shortlists for further evaluation.
 

Gartner Critical Capabilities and Magic Quadrants together offer powerful insights

Critical Capabilities research complements a Gartner Magic Quadrant by allowing deeper insight into the providers’ product or service offerings by identifying which ones best fit various use cases. Magic Quadrants position vendors in a market, while Critical Capabilities allow you to dive deeper into the providers’ product and service offerings. Magic Quadrants contain a broader analysis of the vendors in a market, while the companion Critical Capabilities directly focuses on the product/service offering. As companion research notes, they offer a market and product/service view that provides powerful insight when making technology decisions.

Read more about Critical Capabilities

Critical Capabilities help you:

• gain deeper insights into vendor product and service offerings
  
• understand which products and services best fit common usage scenarios
  
• conduct strategic planning and develop your RFP with the input of a comparative analysis of key software, technology or service offerings