Niche Player: Altair

Altair ranks in last place for both vision and execution on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. The Troy, Mich.-based company offers a suite of products called Altair Knowledge Works, although the core product Gartner evaluated is the Altair Knowledge Studio. The Knowledge Works suite includes Knowledge Studio for Apache Spark, Knowledge Hub, Panopticon and Monarch. Knowledge Studio’s capabilities for automated ML, explainable AI and enhanced open-source integration have strengthened, but it’s still behind other vendors in terms of native capabilities for delivery, deployment and model management.

Strengths: Altair Knowledge Studio offers strong capabilities for augmented data preparation. Integration with advanced data preparation tools enables semi-structured data to be easily extracted and included in ML modeling.

Weaknesses: Altair needs to strengthen its decision modeling and composite artificial intelligence capabilities, Gartner said. Although Altair focuses on both service- and asset-centric industries, its product marketing needs improvement to resonate with a wider set of customer needs.