QlikTech has announced the company’s strategic roadmap to once again disrupt the business intelligence (BI) industry with its next-generation platform to enable better decision making.
QlikView.Next is designed to expand on QlikTech’s focus of filling the gap between visualisation or dashboard solutions and complex BI platforms tied to report-centric ways of doing business.
As Business Discovery is being adopted as an alternative BI platform, QlikView.Next will give users the immediate insights they need and IT professionals the enterprise manageability and governance they require. Fundamental to making next-generation BI accessible and useful for a broad range of users is QlikView’s Natural Analytics approach, which taps into the natural human ability to process complex information.
It supports the way human curiosity naturally searches, filters, questions, and finds associations in data to find meaning in information – more easily revealing insights and enabling decisions in the process.
“Customers want to move from passively receiving reports to actively participating in analysis. These evolving requirements lead them to replace traditional BI with QlikView to put knowledge in the hands of those making decisions, increasing competitive agility and creating demand for Business Discovery as their core platform,” says Anthony Deighton, CTO and senior vice president, Products at QlikTech.
“We built the category for user-driven, self-service BI and now we continue to expand the market by creating an extensible platform that companies can consider the centrepiece of their actionable intelligence strategy.”
QlikView.Next’s key value as an alternative BI platform is in its use of Natural Analytics which places data into the natural flow of how people think as they make decisions. Natural Analytics enables anyone to explore complex data, making and sharing discoveries using natural human abilities.
It enables people to:
* Discover through association and comparison – supporting natural human curiosity, Natural Analytics helps people progress from a single data point to make connections to other data points. It intuitively guides users toward the answers they’re looking for, while uncovering new and unanticipated data relationships. Users easily see connections or uncover disconnects or surprises.
* Decide through collaboration and Data Dialogues – people can engage in interactive, live discussions around data and decision paths instead of static data or predetermined decision paths. These Data Dialogues help create consensus as multiple people make, mark and share discoveries and work together through collaborative sessions. In this way, Natural Analytics enables truly social BI.
* Do through persuasion and action – natural analytics enables people to easily show the data relationships behind their conclusions, and to interactively explore contrary points of view in the data as decisions are considered.
There is no longer a need to “take a discussion off-line” to allow time for new reports or visualisations to be developed, because questions can be answered and answers validated immediately in a discussion or presentation.
QlikView.Next goes beyond feature upgrades to deliver a newly envisioned platform with the powerful QlikView associative search engine at its core. To enable a smooth transition to this next generation in customer deployments, the QlikView.Next Limited Availability, GA-quality release will be used by early adopter customers in a production environment in 2013.
QlikTech will work closely with these customers to experience this next-generation platform in production before making it generally available in 2014.
With more than 29 000 customers around the world using QlikView and organisations recognising every day that QlikView is the best fit for their future BI strategy, QlikTech is taking a strategic phased approach to roll out QlikView.Next.
QlikView 11 customers will be supported for at least three years after QlikView.Next’s general availability. This gives customers the flexibility to transition at their own pace to QlikView.Next in alignment with their business goals.
In addition to introducing a new platform, QlikTech is introducing a significant change to how it ships software. Customers transitioning to the QlikView.Next platform will benefit from its iterative new product release cadence.
Customers choosing a BI platform generally balance between two choices: the need for mission critical, enterprise-class stability and predictability and the desire to continuously adopt new functionality for advantage.
QlikView.Next will ship on a new release cadence to suit both of these often contradictory requirements. Customers with lengthy internal processes or other enterprise requirements can select a major upgrade annually. Customers who like to see new functionality more frequently can enjoy three feature upgrades a year.
To support customers’ path to progressively optimise how they use data more strategically, QlikTech has developed an ecosystem of people, services, and technology.
This Qlik Customer Success Framework surrounds the QlikView Business Discovery platform to optimise effectiveness and accelerate time to value. This can optimise each customer’s journey, starting with foundational system design and progressing through application development, enterprise integration, education and adoption, and ongoing support.
