Technology

FourKites’ exit from Gartner visibility assessment highlights changing market

By Eric Johnson

Two seemingly unconnected events within the transportation visibility sector— Fourkites withdrawing from Gartner’ s“ Magic Quadrant” reports and a new product integration from Gnosis Freight— may be signs of a larger shift, or even a market bifurcation between standalone, smaller vendors and larger vendors offering much broader platforms.

Sending freight technology tongues wagging, FourKites in February announced it was withdrawing from consideration for the real-time transportation visibility provider( RTTVP)“ Magic Quadrant” reports from technology advisory firm Gartner. The quadrant compares supply chain logistics software to help customers find the best fit for their needs.

“ Visibility alone is insufficient— actionability is essential.”

FourKites asserted it was due to its own changing business model focused on control tower technology, a model that wouldn’ t be represented effectively by Gartner’ s RTTVP criteria.

A week later, Gnosis Freight announced a product integration with logistics payment vendor PayCargo and ocean carrier Hapag-Lloyd. This integration connects shipper and forwarder payments to the liner with reduced dwell times and faster cargo release.

Ultimately, FourKites’ decision has sparked a debate around the visibility market as it currently exists and whether it is well-captured by a report that focuses on pure transportation visibility data vendors mostly catering large organizations with large software and data spend. In this context, the Gnosis-PayCargo announcement during the Journal of Commerce’ s TPM25 conference in early March shows the way the market is trending.

Broader implications

Much of the debate around Gartner’ s Magic Quadrant( MQ) and its applicability is inexorably tinged by a vendor’ s reliance on visibility data as a core revenue driver( for whom there is big product differentiation) or a value-add component for customers( who regard it as an undifferentiated product).

38 Journal of Commerce | April 7, 2025

For shippers, the new trend means that they will require visibility providers to proactively manage shipments across modes and not be“ a glorified data aggregator... and merely repeat carrier-provided data,” according to Brian Schultz, chief growth officer at control tower provider Paxafe and a veteran of visibility vendor Shippeo.

“ Visibility alone is insufficient— actionability is essential,” Schultz wrote in a March 6 blog post.

Gnosis’ s announcement aims in that direction. And this may be why Gnosis has not made it into the Gartner Magic Quadrant. It was likely too small, had customers in too few geographical markets and didn’ t have complete enough modal coverage to qualify for the MQ, which makes sense because Gnosis isn’ t even really an RTTVP vendor, anyway.

Gnosis started providing ocean and intermodal visibility data almost by accident, a consequence of building execution software that covers those modes and not being satisfied with the data provided by specialists. It now supplies that data to other software vendors, some of whom occupy lofty positions on the MQ.

In a sense, Gnosis is the perfect example of how the market moves ahead of where somewhat static metrics could possibly cover. And it raises questions about the future of pure play visibility providers that have raised huge sums of external capital— mostly via venture funds— in a context where the total addressable market may have been overestimated, according to some analysts.

email: eric. johnson @ spglobal. com

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