As Greil Marcus said of Bob Dylan, somewhere between Nashville Skyline and Blood on the Tracks: what is this shit? Because the newest ‘magic quadrant’ study from Gartner, which holds a Bob-like influence in the heritage pop canon of telecoms and IT research (partly because of these SWOT analysis releases), looks like a miss-step and a screw-up. It is a head-scratcher and a head-shaker, which muddies Gartner’s own record. And a busy industry of network vendors and system integrators (and rival analyst firms) must surely have responded in kind: what is this shit? Which is a shame, because the private 5G market deserves a proper magic quadrant review.
It deserves its own Blonde on Blonde, and not this Self Portrait – of telecoms analysts writing about telecoms providers. Which is the problem: this new review, which ranks providers of ‘4G and 5G private network services’, appears to see the new telecoms industry through the eyes of the old telecoms industry. It places mobile operators, used to running large-scale public networks, at the heart of it – all bunched together in the top-right quadrant as ‘leaders’, as the best to deliver small-scale private networks. When the whole market – including most operators, by now – has, on paper, accepted this Copernican view that 5G is not at the centre of the universe.
Which is a quote from rival analyst firm Appledore Research, by the way. Set the controls for the heart of the enterprise-sun (to mix pop metaphors) and staff your ship with a rogue’s gallery of change specialists, drawn from a rag-tag of tech disciplines, and you’ll be golden – is the hard-won message from the private 4G/5G supplier market. It is a team sport, a speculative endeavour. It is what the IoT crowd learned long ago, at great cost; it is what vendors and integrators in the private 4G/5G space have preached about for years, waiting for operators to climb down off their high horses. Which they have started to do, in the last 12 months, to join this Industry 4.0 caravan.
So it is weird that Gartner has elected to rank operators, vendors, and integrators in the same review, and weirder still that it has polled the supplier industry in such depth (200 questions, 4,000 entries; a year in the works) and concluded that operators, so late to limber up, are the top picks; that they should be the first names on the team sheet – all of them, together, selected individually and collectively ahead of perceived rivals for their ‘vision’, ultimately. It’s not even weird; it is just wrong. And it must be troubling for the vendors and integrators that opened and worked this seam for years before operators pitched up, to be called ‘challengers’ and ‘niche players’, respectively.
Because that’s what Gartner calls them. A reminder, as below: Gartner’s magic-quadrant calculation plots ‘completeness of vision’ along the x-axis and ‘ability to execute’ along the y-axis, and places suppliers into four quadrants accordingly – as ‘leaders’ and ‘visionaries’ (top and bottom right), and ‘challengers’ and ‘niche players’ (top and bottom left). In this messy early-1970s Dylan version, a gang of all-European telcos (plus Verizon in the US) are placed furthest along and closest to an x=y line on the diagonal, as ‘leaders’. All the vendors (actually, only three are properly mentioned) are placed into the top-left quadrant as ‘challengers’.
A penny for their thoughts. Worse, almost all the integrators (only six) are boxed-in at the bottom as ‘niche players’; NTT Data is conspicuous as the standalone ‘visionary’, on its own in the bottom-right. First point: nothing should be taken away from ‘Vodafone’ and ‘Verizon’ (Vodafone Business and Verizon Business, if we are splitting hairs, which we are – because, confusingly, Gartner includes Orange as ‘Orange Business’), which rank first and second among peers and rivals in the review. As an aside, RCR Wireless would probably rank the SI-divisions (!) of mobile operators similarly, possibly with the top-two reversed, and more distance to Deutsche Telekom.
But then we haven’t asked 4,000 questions of them; actually, maybe we have. Vodafone Business and Verizon Business have rightfully stuck out press notes to mark their successes (see here and here) – but both, for our money, would also acknowledge the wider review is screwy. Meanwhile, AT&T’s absence is telling – against it. So is BT’s. But as a further aside, the fact these five operators are bunched together so closely says there is not much in it, generally – and, therefore, that mobile operators are doing much the same with their private 4G/5G services. Which says the research has not resulted in very much – except to paint differences between different supplier disciplines, which must be bridged in the supply of final solutions to enterprises, anyway.
But second point: on what planet can any of these operators be ranked ahead of equipment vendors and system integrators for ‘completeness of vision’? I mean, the likes of Nokia and Ericsson (and Athonet / HPE) pioneered this market, mob-handed with integrators. Right? Huawei, similarly, has been building private cellular networks for three decades, and doesn’t feature. Celona and Druid Software, not mentioned either, have busted down Industry 4.0 doors with 3GPP tech. Maybe it is just a badge, but it seems like a wrong one – or else this magic-quadrant terminology doesn’t work for private 5G (slash enterprise networks, slash Industry 4.0).
Even if the Gartner review comes down to directly-supplied end-to-end (yuck) services and customer fulfilment (yuck) – which service providers are geared for – then these other companies are pulling solutions together. You just have to consider Nokia’s work in the space with network roaming, spectrum compatibility, enterprise blueprints, edge computing, industrial devices, drone fleets, artificial intelligence, enterprise apps – and so on – to reckon it is a genuine innovator (‘visionary’ and ‘complete’). However you cut it, these quadrants are scrambled. It does not serve to crow-on about Nokia (which has misses among its hits), but you have to ask how it feels.
You have got to imagine that every company placed outside of that top-right box – including those that are not even featured – disagrees with this result. Ericsson? How is its technology vision not a north star for Verizon and Vodafone, and the like? NTT Data? How is its ‘ability to execute’ in any industry in any market not higher, in the context? Kyndryl? How is its essential coal-face integration, in global markets, not best-in-class? Boldyn Networks? How is its old Ukkoverkot business not the smartest in the market? Celona? Druid Software? How are their innovations not opening new markets for reseller companies? Why are these companies not even here? Where is Huawei? Where is DXC?
In the end, private 5G is an OT exercise, first and foremost; yes, IT should be engaged and invested, but its functionality – where 5G works like nothing else – is mostly for mission-critical applications. Even when private 5G goes outside of hard-nosed Industry 4.0, into hospitals and stadiums and universities, it is for doctors and coaches and professors, and the like. There is no point to attach a five-nines connectivity technology to a two-nines cloud compute engine – which is why the OT-angle is all-important, why isolated on-edge installations rule, and why the likes of AWS and Microsoft have failed in this market (and are absent from this review).
Private 5G is not an IT technology, even if IT departments tasked with procuring and managing technologies for OT departments are part of the deal. Which, again, is why this back-end chain of vendors and integrators is so important to the supply mix, even if sometimes mobile operators are increasingly well-placed, and well-disposed, to yank the chain in service of enterprises. And ultimately, the ‘vision’ and ‘execution’ of operators in this market is determined by vendors and integrators, respectively – engaged to inform their strategies and do their work for them. That is the truth of it, surely? This magic quadrant sucks.
Word is Gartner is readying another version, led by its enterprise division. Perhaps it has a proper Blood on the Tracks for the private 5G market in it, yet.
