Acknowledged as a leading innovator in user-driven business intelligence (BI), Qlik will continue to advance a pioneering tradition with the beta release of its next version, QlikView.Next.
Speaking at the recent ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit, John Sands, product sales enablement manager for Qlik (EMEA), said the next version will up the ante with easy-to- use “natural analytics”, mobile and touch interface innovations as well as HTML 5 support for a fluid experience across devices.
Gartner puts Qlik among the leaders in its 2014 Magic Quadrant for BI and analytics, citing Qlik’s completeness of vision and ability to execute. Speaking on the side-lines of the conference, Sands said this confirms the platform’s ability to meet current and future enterprise requirements.
Gartner’s market analysis further singles out “data discovery as a dominant purchasing requirement”. Qlik introduced the concept to buyers a few years ago as “business discovery”, and it remains one of its most seminal developments over the past years, says Sands. “QlikView has had a significant hand in shaping the modern BI arena.”
Davide Hanan, MD of QlikView South Africa, says “this latest Gartner report vindicates everything that we have been saying for so many years”, and details a litany of other technology and user-centric innovations that have together given shape to the concept of business discovery.
Qlik introduced its patented Associative Query Language in 1993, allowing data associations to be mapped and for those associations to show up on selection of data elements. This revolutionised the way in which business users worked and interacted with data.
QlikView was one of the first BI platforms with extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities that allowed data to be fetched from multiple sources, thereby eliminating the need for data warehouses as a pre-requisite for BI.
Qlik also patented a unique in-memory data model, which, combined with associative technology and an agnostic approach to data federation, allowed for rapid-fire calculations. This eliminated the need for cubes with pre-aggregated data and dramatically increased the speed and agility with which IT could deliver data to business users.
QlikView is designed for the business user as its primary target. Qlik pioneered the concept of self-service BI by offering the required flexibility to business users without compromising on the governance and control needed by IT.
“Our success in that space is reflected in the growth that we are achieving within our existing user base and outside that base. It is well beyond the reported industry averages,” says Hanan.
Collectively, these innovations have given QlikView a reputation as a disruptive force. This has given it a sizeable and growing proportion of the business discovery market it created (42% in a recent survey).
“These innovations have come to be recognised as the standard in their respective spaces,” says Hanan. “On the face of it there are currently a lot of competitors in the market, but most are in catch-up mode.”
Like QlikView, many, for example, have great visualisations. “But unlike QlikView, theirs isn’t necessarily backed by powerful analytics, whereas QlikView’s gorgeous visualisations are backed by genius at the backend,” Hanan says.
As an experienced innovator with staying power, Qlik knows it can’t rest on its laurels. “We have based our strong position on innovation, not just in a technological sense, but also from the user’s point of view,” says Sands.
QlikView.Next delivers the core strengths of the QlikView engine and platform, while providing a next-generation user experience, new data visualisation capabilities, a simplified developer experience, and unmatched extensibility in a governed, enterprise-class platform.
Sands say the platform’s forays into credible new directions were prompted by users’ experience and market developments. “We think they will ensure that QlikView continues its progressive leadership in a user-defined market.”
