Miami, Florida in April - QlikView Qonnections
April 2011: Normal high 84oF. Rainfall low. Sony Ericsson Open Tennis Tournament. Miami Beach Festival of Arts. And the QlikTech Global Partners Summit.
Heathrow T5, Friday 1st April – not a joke – I’m really on a long haul flight; arrive Miami in the evening. Adjust watch; adjust clothing; adjust vocabulary. “I’ll take that on the rocks!” Relax – then into Summit mode for the next few days.
This is the QlikView Global Partner Summit. The year is reviewed and the future direction is spelled out. I’m one of 1,100 delegates from 800 partners and OEMs, together with several hundred QlikTech staff from their global office network.
My key takeaway? QlikView continues its upward trajectory. They were rightly proud to be named in Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant of Business Intelligence as “visionaries who can deliver”. This is significant for larger enterprises who like to feel that analysts have a high level of confidence in a product and its delivery.
Gartner Magic Quadrant QlikView 2011
On the numbers side, the successful listing of QlikTech on NASDAQ late last year reflected a year in which revenues grew by 44% to over USD 225 million and an additional 5,000 clients were acquired.
I was particularly pleased to hear Lars, the QlikView CEO, emphasise that they are still a company driven by vision not numbers.
Speaking at the conference, Gartner’s BI research director indicated that the “Quick to Value” element of deploying QlikView is very important as decision making moves to users even as BI moves from a tactical to strategic part of corporate strategy. This helps the IT departments who have been caught between wanting to empower users to remove silos and to balance this with the need for corporate standards and security. Not surprisingly, this mirrors our own deployment experience at Collier Pickard. IT departments love being able to give users a product that can be configured in a matter of days and which users can grasp intuitively, very quickly, whilst at the same time being able to control “who can see what”.
At an executive level, QlikView can address the issues of Business Discovery. In the past, organisations were small enough that business managers could understand and collate their P&L more easily and they knew what the P&L truth was. Now, IT tells you what the P&L truth is!! Executive directors and managers need to ensure that there is the greatest possible degree of transparency in the compilation of figures. The theme of the Summit mirrors our experience: a properly constructed QlikView document can deliver this transparency – this traceability. In one case, where QlikView mimicked an existing report, it revealed that the final figures were based on “multiple versions of the truth”, highlighting that different units compiled the figures in different ways.
QlikView Qonnections
The Summit informs us on aspects of Business Discovery
* From the bottom up – to solve specific problems
* Lets everyone develop insight
* Reduces time to Discovery
* Leverages existing systems – you don’t need to throw away your ETL, Data Warehouse etc
* It’s Social & Collaborative – knowledge cascades across the organisation
* Available anywhere, on any platform – windows, browser & mobile
* Re-mix it! – do it on the fly
Finally, for those wedded to the iPad, the Summit is used as the platform to launch the QlikView iPad app – available on Wednesday 20th April.
As you can see, if you have got this far, I came away enthused and impressed. QlikView is managing to grow rapidly without compromising their attitudes or their product development. I think it is typical of QlikView that there is a Product Validation Group whose responsibility is to make sure that any proposed new functionality passes the “so what?” test and that R&D effort is not wasted.
I didn’t make the Tennis Tournament or the Festival of Arts. But Miami in April was great fun – I learned a lot and made some great connections.
Simon Pickard is Account Director at Collier Pickard. Get in touch if you’d like some inside stories from the summit: simon.pickard@collierpickard.co.uk
