Don’t mislead your analysts

Recently, I was in a vendor briefing in which I was shown the graphic below as part of a slide titled “An Industry Recognized Leader”. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the vendor in question was Informatica, given that it is both circled in red on the pictured Magic Quadrant, and (literally!) pointed out as a leader.However, this briefing was emphatically not given to me by Informatica, but by Solix Technologies, who you will notice are also present on the Magic Quadrant, slightly below Informatica. Neither was this image used by Solix to sing their competitor’s praises (as if). Rather, it was used in exactly the way you would expect a vendor to use it: to big up their own product. Given that context, the slide’s title, and the difficulty of making out the image’s text at a low resolution, the slide heavily implies that the circled dot is Solix Technologies, and not Informatica.

This kind of misleading marketing is appalling, particularly since I can only assume that this slide was not created exclusively for my benefit. If this was a mistake, it should have been caught long ago; if it was intentional, Solix should be ashamed of themselves.