- Gartner made made a mess of defining critical tech at the heart of Industry 4.0
- Latest "Magic Quadrant for 5G and 5G Private Mobile Network Services" omits leading players, including Huawei and Samsung
- The report also missed significance of 5G’s cloud-native differentiator
What on earth was Gartner thinking? The market research firm’s recent publication of its first “Magic Quadrant for 4G and 5G Private Mobile Network Services” makes a dog’s dinner out of the private network market and has triggered perplexity in the comms industry.
The main issue with Gartner's methodology in creating its Magic Quadrant is that it conflates vendors of 4G and 5G technology with service providers that purchase these products. This mishmash of distinct groups — vendors like Ericsson and Nokia treated as challengers alongside their service provider customers — is confusing [see chart below].
Additionally, Gartner includes system integrators in the analysis but relegates them to the bottom left "you-know-you're-shit" corner of the Quadrant. This is misleading, as integrators are often crucial in delivering the private network services touted by the leading telcos in the top right "congrats-and-would-you-like-to-purchase-some-copies-of-the-report" corner. Distinguishing between these roles is essential for a clear understanding of the competitive landscape.
Gartner’s methodology doesn’t deliver apples-to-oranges comparisons — it's worse than that, more like pineapples-to-pogo-sticks. In reality, these three different types of company are all part of the same private network ecosystem and work together to build private cellular networks for enterprise companies and vertical industries.
4G isn’t the same as 5G
I would further argue — and I would win this argument — that blending analysis of 4G and 5G into a single 12,000-word report is a mistake. 4G is a two-decade-old bandwidth-boosting technology. Mobile operators use it to, well, to increase the speed of their mobile services to make more money – primarily from video.
5G is a cloud-native technology. It’s faster than 4G, but that’s not its raison d’être.
5G’s cloud capabilities equip it to act as an essential border between old networks - focused on capacity - to a new world of virtualised API-incepted, AI-enabled, automated services that ride over them [see the better Smart Cloud Model figure below].
That’s important, especially for private networks, which rely on those higher-level functions to support the requirements of Industry 4.0 and enable higher performance, more efficient, more secure, and more profitable businesses.
You could use 4G to support a private network, but depending on your use case, that could be a genuinely terrible idea, because 4G is not cloud native. At all.
If you are an important analyst firm advising companies on private networking strategy, pointing out the difference between 4 and 5G should be job 1. By not doing so, Gartner risks perpetuating the errors made by 5G first movers like Deutsche Telekom, which Gartner has identified as a leader in its new quadwangle, and is one of the CSPs that made the mistake of choosing to deploy fake 5G networks without a cloud-enabled 5GSA core.
Unlucky No.7
Gartner’s Quadrant is also guilty of the sin of omission. Five companies lead the private 5G network market: Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, Samsung, and ZTE. Everyone I know knows this. Challengers include Cisco, IBM, Juniper, and Mavenir (though none of them make their own 5G chips or have the same level of 5G juju as the 5G Big 5).
Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant omits six (!) of these vendors, including Huawei, whose technology underlies literally hundreds of private 5G networks.
This is a horrendous oversight that does a disservice to anyone who wants to determine which companies can help them develop a digitalized industrial strategy.
Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant has seven authors. I don’t understand how it is possible that they all nodded at the final draft and said, ‘Yeah, good, send it.’
One explanation is that Gartner continues to organise its army of over 2,000 analysts into different technology silos. That’s the exact opposite of the direction being pursued by the industry it covers, where vendors and service providers are eliminating the traditional stove-piped departmental approach in their businesses to provide horizontal, integrated cloud-based tech solutions. (If there was a Magic Quadrant for how to organise an analyst business, Gartner would be in the extreme bottom left corner).
We’ll have to wait for the Gartner crew to have another run at this particular Magic Quadrant to see if they can make a better fist of it.
Note: Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant report can be downloaded here from Verizon’s Website — but do keep in mind that it’s really not very good at all. Caveat lector.