Investigating the market for a new software product can be a daunting task. Sometimes it’s difficult to even uncover all of the players. There’s no shortage of rhetoric on each vendor’s web site, but how can today’s CTO get objective information about how a software package ranks against it’s peers in a given space? Every year, Gartner releases what they call a Magic Quadrant report evaluating various products in a given space.

This past week, Gartner released their analysis of products in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) arena. It is very exciting to see us in the top spot as a thought leader and for our ability to execute. If you are interested in ALM, you can read through an entire reprint of the report here. There’s plenty of new competitors listed and some of the existing competitors have shifted quite a bit.

And this comes prior to the release of Team Foundation Server 2012! I suppose with all of the new features in 2012, they could just add another square to the upper-right. It’s beyond awesome! It’s be-awesome!