QlikTech Brings Business Intelligence Capabilities to the Business User
by Bill Ives
Traditional BI software can be difficult to use, is often expensive to maintain, and can force users through pre-determined thought paths. QlikTech is taking an alternative approach. I recently spoke with Erica Driver, Senior Director of Global Product Marketing at QlikTech. She said that QlikTech turns this traditional BI approach upside down, putting data where users can explore it, share it, and combine it at will to find new opportunities and make better decisions. Instead of pushing insights from the top down, QlikTech’s software enables users to discover insights on their own, anywhere in the organization, as well as anywhere outside it.
Erica talked about business discovery as a new BI approach that puts business users in total control. It enables them to create tailored insights that meet their individual needs and timelines so they can solve specific business problems. It provides instant answers, and also delivers live data and analysis on any mobile device, so users know what’s happening in real-time.
Erica noted that we make decisions based on multiple sources of insight: data, people, and places. QlikTech has made investments in each of these three areas. For data they offer an enterprise platform with rapid analytics and comparative analysis. For the people component that have now added social business features and they have developed mobile capabilities to address the location aspect.
Before we got into discussing the five themes Erica walked me through some QlikView basics focusing on the associative experience. QlikView maintains all of your relevant data and the associations within in it so you can drill down any way you want to depending on the questions you are asking. For, example you can bring down sales data by regions, products, customers, sales reps and other factors, as well as combinations of these. For example you can see sales data by customers and sales reps on a global basis as shown below.
Then you can drill down all the way to an individual customer in Europe as shown below. The drill down and aggregations are done on the fly. You cold also explore individual sales reps, for example.
QuikVew has also added social capabilities so you can add a chat session directly into the report. Below you see a chat session added to the data in the first image. This allows the conversation to take place where the data is located. As I have written many times, social capabilities need to be integrated into work processes to have a lasting impact (see Putting Social Media to Work). This is a great example.
You can then always go back to see the data as shown when the conversation took place. This view is not a screen shot so you can also see the same data filters over time. The social capabilities also allow you to do real time sharing for increased collaboration. Erica showed a demo where she and I both had real time access to the same data and took turns filtering it. This was quite powerful as it increased the speed of our exchanges. We did not have to toss control back and forth as we both had it at the same time.
In addition to building collaboration capabilities into QlikView, the ability to integrate with other enterprise collaboration tools is also offered so you take QlikView to where people are working such as within SharePoint or Salesforce Chatter.
QlikView also provides comparative analysis. You can create your own groupings and then make comparisons as shown below. In this case two food product groups are being compared to see patterns and relationships.
QlikView looks at structured company data like the examples we have just seen but it can also look at unstructured content like the Twitter example below.
There is also support for many mobile devices and a version that is optimized for smart phones. Their rapid analytics platform allows you to build custom reports with selected subsets of the your data. Their enterprise platform capabilities give business users control over what they do while also giving IT the ability to maintain overall control for such issues as security, scalability and reliability.
I was very impressive with the comprehensive set of features and their accessibility. This could be a breakthrough offering in the business discovery space. Gartner has placed QlikView in its upper right quadrant for business intelligence as an industry leader with the ability to execute. Gartner also noted that “ease of use” now surpasses “functionality” for the first time as the dominant BI platform buying criterion. They also note a new group of data discovery tools led by small vendors. This is all to QlikView’s advantage.
