Presenting to over 1200 attendees at its Global Partner Conference, Anthony Deighton, chief technology officer of Qlik, a leader in user-driven business intelligence (BI), announced that the company will release a free desktop version of QlikView.Next via Personal Edition download early in third quarter of 2014.

Qlik will also offer a free cloud service for small group sharing of analysis built in this desktop client.

Personal Edition business analytics users will be able to leverage QlikView.Next’s intuitive features to build a customised app in minutes by just dragging and dropping, experiencing many of the Natural AnalyticsTM user interface capabilities before the server and enterprise functionality of the complete platform is expected to be generally available in second half of 2014.

While presenting to Qlik’s global partner community at the general session, Deighton commented that QlikView.Next’s unique ability to connect more than one data source and data model on the fly to uncover associations in the data is a crucial capability that customers now demand.

He says, “Business people are getting more sophisticated with data and want more than a one dimensional visualisation that answers a single question. They want to answer every question.”

To enable sharing of apps created from this Personal Edition, Qlik will offer a free hosted cloud site for small groups of users on a limited basis.

This release builds on Qlik’s phased approach by expanding the QlikView.Next beta program from customers and partners to the general public, who can gain meaning and make decisions from data they have access to on their desktop. The product will be available as a Free Personal Edition Download from the Company’s Web site.