Kea Insight / Analyst Relations
What Is a Gartner Emerging Market Quadrant?
A market can be too young for a Magic Quadrant and still be mature enough for a buyer to choose the wrong supplier. Companies are already being compared, risks are being weighed and shortlists are being drawn up. Gartner’s Emerging Market Quadrants address that stage of the decision.
A Gartner Emerging Market Quadrant, or EMQ, assesses technology providers in a market that is still taking shape. It considers their potential to disrupt that market and their potential to execute. Buyers can use the research to identify providers worth investigating for a purchase, partnership or investment.
For a technology vendor, this creates an earlier point at which analyst understanding can matter commercially. Waiting for an established category may mean waiting until other companies have helped define what buyers should look for. The first task is to establish whether the research covers the problem you solve and whether your evidence supports a credible place in it.
What an Emerging Market Quadrant Evaluates
Gartner uses EMQs where market definitions and the competitive landscape are evolving. The assessment uses up to eight weighted criteria across two dimensions: Potential for Market Disruption and Potential to Execute. These examine the capacity to change a market alongside the ability to turn that potential into a viable offering.
The current framework describes four vendor profiles. Market shapers combine disruptive potential with the ability to deliver it. Pacesetters advance the market through more incremental innovation. Pioneers have disruptive potential with a less proven ability to bring it to market. Specialists tend to be smaller providers with more incremental offerings and less proven execution.
Those profiles describe different propositions and risks; they do not provide a universal answer to which supplier a particular buyer should select. A provider’s suitability still depends on the buyer’s requirements, existing environment and tolerance for risk. Gartner presents an EMQ as a starting point for further investigation.
How It Differs From a Magic Quadrant
The distinction starts with the market being assessed. A Gartner Magic Quadrant covers an established, distinct and viable market, assessing Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. An EMQ examines potential in an emerging market whose boundaries and competitive structure are still developing.
Company size alone does not determine which format applies. Gartner can publish separate EMQs for established vendors and startup vendors within the same emerging market. Its September 2026 AI application security research, for example, included editions for both groups. A large company can therefore be relevant to an emerging-market evaluation, while a smaller company still needs to satisfy the scope and inclusion requirements of the research concerned.
A shorter research process can reduce the administrative burden, but it does not remove the need to substantiate a claim. Nor should a vendor build its plan around a universal questionnaire length or assumed quarterly publication date. Confirm the requirements, deadlines and update arrangements for the specific evaluation, and record the date of the version you are using.
Why Market Definition Deserves Leadership Attention
In an emerging category, explaining what your product does is only part of the work. You also need to explain which buying problem it addresses, who has that problem and why your approach belongs in the comparison. If your company uses a category label differently from the analyst, a technically accurate description can still leave the business misunderstood.
Consider a vendor that describes its product as an AI governance platform. If the evaluation concerns protection for running AI applications, the relevant evidence is what the product enforces in that environment. Policy documentation, model evaluation and runtime protection may contribute to a broader governance story, but they are different capabilities. A claim to cover them all needs evidence for each one.
This is a practical test for product, marketing and AR leadership. Which part of the proposition meets the research definition today? Which capability is delivered through a partner? Which remains a roadmap commitment? Answering those questions can expose a positioning problem or an evidence gap before it becomes a disagreement about an assessment.
What Vendors Should Do Before an Evaluation
Gartner’s Publication Calendar includes planned EMQ research alongside Magic Quadrants and Critical Capabilities. Start there to identify relevant coverage, then establish the exact market definition, the relevant analyst team and the edition that may apply to your business. Confirm the inclusion requirements, participation route and deadlines with the research team. Inclusion is not automatic, and Gartner states that being a client does not influence whether a provider is included or where it is positioned.
Prepare a focused evidence set around the requirements you have confirmed. For each material claim, record the capability, its current availability, the supporting documentation, the person responsible and the date checked. Distinguish what the product does from what the company expects it to do later. Where customer evidence is appropriate, agree permission and confidentiality before offering it.
Bring the people who can answer substantive questions into the preparation. AR can coordinate the engagement, but product leaders must be able to explain capabilities and limitations, and commercial leaders must be able to support the business claims being made. Our guide to building evaluation evidence before the questionnaire arrives explains how to organise that work.
If the research is not a fit, capture the reason and agree what would justify revisiting it. That gives the company a useful decision: strengthen the evidence, address a product gap, monitor a different category or focus on more relevant analysts. Chasing inclusion without resolving the scope question consumes time that could be spent improving the business’s actual position.
Keep the Evidence Current After Publication
An emerging market can change as products develop, companies enter or leave and buying requirements become clearer. Keep track of the current research version and maintain an agreed route for sharing material developments. A completed questionnaire should remain part of a working evidence record, with an owner responsible for keeping important claims accurate.
When using an EMQ in sales, explain the market, the edition and the publication date alongside what the assessment says. Follow the applicable permissions for reproducing research and graphics. A position in an emerging market does not establish that a product is suitable for every deployment, and a change between editions needs to be understood in the context of any changes to scope or methodology.
How Kea Helps Vendors Prepare
Kea helps technology companies identify relevant research, test the fit between their proposition and the market definition, and turn analyst requirements into a practical engagement plan. That includes agreeing priorities, coordinating outreach and briefings, identifying evidence gaps and keeping responsibilities and follow-up visible.
Your product and leadership teams supply and approve the facts. We help them understand what is needed, organise the material and prepare for the questions that matter. When research is published, we help interpret the result and decide what should change in positioning, evidence or future analyst engagement.
The aim is a company that can explain where it belongs, demonstrate what it delivers and respond intelligently when the market’s definition changes. An EMQ makes that work relevant earlier. The right time to begin is when the research fits your business and buyers, with enough time left to act on what you learn.
Put this into practice
Prepare for the Research That Fits Your Market
Kea helps you confirm research relevance, prepare credible evidence and coordinate analyst engagement around the decisions your business needs to make.
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