Make Qlik a Bigger Part of Your Data & Analytics Strategy

I’ve been working with Qlik since the beginning when it was only one product, QlikView. QlikView was aimed at consuming data, and it did just that. It didn’t matter what you threw at it; QlikView treated the data as if it was from one source, allowing you to transform it in so many ways through a common language. The platform changed the way many did their job at the time. But Qlik did not stay stagnant—since its introduction to the BI landscape, Qlik continues to evolve its offering beyond a singularly-focused BI tool.

Qlik’s formative years of growth in the BI industry are marked by some major advances in their offering, including:

• NPrinting (2015): In the early days, printing a physical report meant you needed your laptop (because the software was installed on your machine), or you used a clunky web interface and Wi-Fi (not as ubiquitous and not always reliable).  NPrinting allowed users to take reports and visualizations from their QlikView dashboard and print to various formats to take into the boardroom.
• Qlik Sense (2015): Qlik released Qlik Sense, an evolution on Qlik’s vision of offering a self-service BI tool. Qlik Sense made development simpler and more accessible to less technical users, becoming an industry standard for robust self-service BI.
• GeoAnalytics and Insight Bot (2018): These two acquisitions bolstered the Qlik platform with the ability to analyze data in the context of its location and implement conversational analytics.

This additional functionality, along with continuous enhancements that allow for larger and larger data queries, make Qlik Sense and QlikView an attractive BI tool. However, Qlik recognized that they were one solution fulfilling one need in an overarching data analytics strategy.

Instead of focusing on the best software to fix their data problems, a more holistic approach to data and analytics alleviated this customer’s current issues and set them up for future success.

Read about how a data strategy helped them remain competitive

Qlik Can Now Play a Bigger Role in Your Data Strategy

While technology is a great enabler, there are other aspects of a data strategy that must be addressed for businesses to truly leverage their data as an asset. Qlik’s latest offerings go beyond BI and address some aspects of a modern data strategy that companies across all industries should be planning for.

• Data Governance with Qlik Catalyst: While great at guiding users to insights from the data provided, BI tools operate on a few assumptions:
  • The business knows all of the data they have at their disposal
  • They know what data has value
  • IT understands business user needs, and business users understand IT constraints.

This is rarely how things work. The Qlik Catalyst feature was the first time Qlik went beyond traditional BI by placing focus on data governance: making the data transparent, trustworthy, and ready for discovery before consumption by a BI tool. Data Catalyst provides a common ground for IT to deliver tested and curated data sets to the end user, regardless of the system or end visualization tool. With no technical expertise required, users access their data marketplace like they would Amazon: search and find datasets, read reviews, decide if it meets their needs, and ‘get’. ‘Get’ means check it out for use (no purchase necessary since it’s your data).

• Data Replication with Qlik Data Integration (formerly Attunity): Before Qlik Data Integration (QDI), Qlik assumed that the data source was a safe place to consume from; but reporting on transactional data is often difficult and dangerous to operational stability. QDI bridges the gap between a transactional system and a data warehouse and moves data to a safe environment to run memory and CPU intensive queries without affecting day-to-day business. Whether you are moving data on premise or to a cloud provider like Snowflake or Redshift, this feature simplifies the move. And again, QDI does not care what tool you are using to visualize your data.

Plan Your Strategy 

With Qlik’s broader focus on end-to-end data and analytics solutions, they can play bigger part of your data strategy. If you already use Qlik, there are possibilities to get more from your investment. If you are seeking out data and analytics tools, Qlik is a strong contender for more than just BI. No matter your situation, you should have a plan in place that defines the people, processes, and technology to your solve your data challenges.

Trey Bayne

Trey is a Senior Sales Engineer at Analytics8. He specializes in application development in a variety of business applications, including QlikView, Qlik Sense, AWS and SharePoint. He's very interested in projects that he can carry from solution research to a business-changing product.

• QlikView
• Qlik Sense
• Data & Analytics Industry
• Data Strategy
• governance