MathWorks by sennchi
MathWorks is a privately held company headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts, U.S. Its two major products are MATLAB and Simulink, but only MATLAB met the inclusion criteria for this Magic Quadrant.
MathWorks remains a Challenger. Its Ability to Execute is aided by its sustained visibility in the general advanced analytics field, a significant installed base and strong customer relations, but impaired by average scores from reference customers for critical capabilities. Its Completeness of Vision is limited by its focus on engineering and high-end financial use cases, largely to the exclusion of customer-facing use cases like marketing, sales and customer service.
STRENGTHS
**Presence and user loyalty: **Despite the rapidly growing popularity of open-source technologies, MathWorks remains one of the most prominent vendors in the data science sector. The company has decades-long relationships with many customers, and its long-standing users are generally pleased with its stability and with MATLAB's reliability.
**Customer success stories and availability of toolboxes: **MathWorks can point to strong customer success stories in its areas of strategic focus, particularly engineering, manufacturing and quantitative finance. Toolbox extensions offer different types of user the functionality they need for individual projects, such as machine-learning, optimization, computer vision and robotics projects.
**Communication, account management and support: **Reference customers gave MathWorks excellent scores for sales relationship and account management. MathWorks maintains a strong global presence, and customers also gave it outstanding scores for onboarding and troubleshooting and overall service and support. They are also very pleased with their product evaluation and contract negotiation experience.
CAUTIONS
**Customer-facing use cases: **MathWorks' vision for data science does not focus on marketing, sales or customer service. Data science teams using MATLAB for engineering and scientific work should consider alternatives for marketing, sales and customer service use cases.
**Lateness to include open-source innovations: **Although MATLAB remains a pre-eminent data science platform for engineering problems, and now has the ability to call and be called from Python, MathWorks has not joined the movement to provide first-class support for open-source languages. MathWorks remains committed to serving its large core of loyal users, but a new generation of data scientists and statisticians prefers to work with the evolving open-source ecosystem. In addition, MathWorks does not natively support deep-learning packages such as Caffe and TensorFlow. Instead, it offers functionality to import those packages into its own deep-learning framework. Still, the benefits of native support should not be dismissed.
**Inclusion of product enhancements requested by customers: **MathWorks has added new capabilities relating to the industrial IoT, edge analytics and popular cloud performs. However, MathWorks' reference customers gave it among the lowest overall scores for inclusion of requested product enhancements into subsequent product releases. MathWorks needs to prioritize carefully the diverse and highly technical evolving needs of a demanding customer base
