David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

The analytics and business intelligence market landscape continues to grow as more organizations seek robust tools and capabilities to visualize and better understand data. BI systems are used to perform data analysis, identify market trends and opportunities and streamline business processes. They can collect and combine data from internal and external systems to present a holistic view.

BI systems offer numerous benefits, from fast insights to enhanced operational efficiency. However, implementation of BI tools comes with various challenges that depend on a variety of factors like industry, scope and training. Our research found that organizations have to tackle many hurdles with analytics and BI, including difficulty integrating with other business processes, flexibility issues and challenges accessing data sources.

Qlik is a self-service BI software company that offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions. Last year, we published the Value Index for Analytics and Data, where Qlik was categorized as an Exemplary Vendor. Qlik was also a finalist for the 2022 Digital Innovation Awards in Analytics for Qlik Active Intelligence.

Qlik Cloud is its cloud platform for data and analytics services that supports various use cases across the life cycle, from data integration to insight generation. It offers cloud-agnostic and hybrid deployment options where workers can deploy, store and analyze data across one or multiple clouds. A key feature of this platform is the ability to horizontally scale up as workloads increase, and scale back down as they reduce. It utilizes Docker and Kubernetes to manage the scaling dependencies of the platform.

Qlik recently held its annual virtual user conference – QlikWorld 2022 – where it demonstrated its suite of capabilities and feature improvements across its platform. It introduced new Direct Query capabilities that enable users to directly query cloud databases like Snowflake using SQL-based pushdown through visualizations and user filtering. Qlik also recently introduced AutoML to its portfolio, enabling users to create machine learning models and predictive insights using a code-free experience. For more sophisticated requirements, data scientists can also integrate their ML pipelines of choice on third-party platforms through Qlik’s Advanced Analytics Integration.

Real-time insights are critical for a data-driven organization. Users need robust data integration and agile analytics solutions to make fast decisions and drive greater business value. Our research shows that data preparation can be the most time-consuming step in the analytical process. Qlik Sense is Qlik’s data analytics platform and offers a range of capabilities, including augmented analytics, visualization and dashboards, natural language analytics, predictive analytics, custom and embedded analytics, mobile analytics, reporting and alerting. It can be deployed as a software-as-a-service solution or self-managed in the cloud and/or on-premises. Workers can connect and combine data from various sources and generate insights through a variety of analyses and visualizations. It also offers the capability to combine real-time data pipelines with analytics to create live insights.

Qlik Data Integration platform enables IT to bring data from multiple sources for data analysis and BI. It can automate real-time data streaming, cataloguing and publishing. It can move data to and from applications, data warehouses and data lakes located on-premises or in the cloud. Qlik Application Automation offers a no-code visual interface that enables actions by pushing information to business applications.

Qlik continues to invest in its products, enhancing capabilities and adding new features across its portfolio. It has a broad library of interactive and responsive visualizations, and offers a comprehensive set of data analytics capabilities. I recommend that organizations looking for a cloud-native data analytics platform that supports a range of analytics and BI use cases evaluate the capabilities of Qlik. Its platform is scalable and offers open application programming interfaces and centralized management and governance to meet various requirements.

Regards,

David Menninger