Data has nowadays become so important, that some have even termed it as the ‘new oil’ (Clive Humby). Although it might not have been valued before as it is today, governed data has always been shared in the form of reports. Nowadays the reporting trend has shifted from static to more advanced self-service data analytics where business users are capable of discovering insights without being exposed to the underlying data complexity, or without requiring any IT or data science skills. These requirements need Business Intelligence (BI) platforms that can be rapidly implemented in a decentralised model.
The latest Gartner report highlighted how with the evolution of cloud computing (BI) trends are also moving to private, public or hybrid clouds. This is especially important for those businesses that already operate or have data on the cloud. The Gartner report also mentioned how BI platforms need to be able to “scale and perform for larger amounts of diverse data” and “to bridge decentralized business-use-led analytics deployments with those centralized to server the enterprise”.
The Gartner report has once again put Qlik as a market leader in data discovery within the 2015 Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform Magic Quadrant report. This designation marks the fifth consecutive year that Qlik has been positioned in the Leaders Quadrant based on completeness of vision and ability to execute.
With the two BI products that Qlik sells, Qlik covers all kinds of users both through guided analytics (QlikView) and self-service analytics (Qlik Sense). Both of these products work with an in-memory associative search engine. QlikView, which is now mature, will be upgraded with the second generation engine used by Qlik Sense in the second half of this year. Qlik offers free versions of its desktop products, where users can try out the products risk-free.
The position of Qlik in the Magic Quadrant has been determined by a number of strengths. Qlik provide a fast and interactive dashboard development platform, while leaving IT with “the ability to govern, manage, scale and embed” dashboards. Qlik also continued to strengthen its product base by acquiring NComVA, DataMarket and NPrinting.
It has also been reported how implementations done with Qlik products require much less time and effort, particularly when compared with traditional BI platforms. Qlik products are also easy to use and help users “conduct a broader range of more complex types, of analysis – through intuitive interactive discovery – than most vendors in this Magic Quadrant”.
Another strong competitive fact about Qlik is the wide availability of “documentation, online training, tutorials, user communities [particularly Qlik Community] and conferences, and for wide availability of skills.” Qlik also provides open APIs that “expand the opportunities for partners to build value-added applications with the platform.” It is also considered as “the top five in terms of being deployed broadly across departments and enterprise-wide.”
Over these years of continued innovation and changing the face of BI, Qlik maintains its commitment to become the de facto global standard for how people gain insight from their data. With Qlik’s patented core technology, associative experience, and collaboration and mobile capabilities, users can ask and answer streams of questions on their own or in teams and groups, wherever they happen to be working. Users can continue to explore information freely rather than being confined to a predefined path of questions and they gain rapid time to value in deployments that can be productive in just days or weeks.
If you’re interested to learn more about Qlik products and how they can help you gain valuable insight from your data, just get in touch, we’ll be more than happy to help.
The full Gartner report is available for download from http://www.qlik.com/mq2015.
