Every time a new Gartner Magic Quadrant is published, I always have a flashback to the scene in the old Steve Martin movie “The Jerk” – when his character gets overly enthusiastic about seeing his name published in the new phonebook. As a software vendor, I think we sometimes look like this when the Gartner MQ is released, and everyone gets a little too excited.

Sometime ago, when I was with another software company, I was involved in a large implementation of our software. The deployment required our software to connect with a legacy customer application, so an integration between the two products had to be developed. When the Sales person put together the proposal, he quoted this integration for $0 because “it’s so simple, I could create it myself”.