Founded in 1993 from Sweden,
QlikTech International developed QlikView, a point-and-click data analysis tool. Presenting are
Anthony Deighton, SVP Products and Strategy (remotely via Webex),
John Trigg, Global Product Manager (also remotely),
Brian Wahl, Solution Engineer, and
Tony Setter, Account Executive. They have been noted as a fastest-growing BI vendor with $120 M in revenue, 50% growth in 2008. They have 530 employees in 22 offices in 12 countries. Now, QlikTech has over a half million users in 11,500 customers in 95 countries.
Deighton started with the argument that traditional BI is dead due to commodity consumer software, technology savvy of users, and anger of business managers. He refers to this trend as the consumerism of enterprise software from easy-to-try, easy-to-buy, scales and UNsupported. In another slide, Deighton notes from surveys (2004-2006) that .
The market opportunity lies in simplifying analysis for both trained analysts and untrained masses, as shown
here. It seems that many vendors make the same claim. I would like to see a deeper statement about learning process of untrained masses and the like.
QlikTech claims that their approach is a fundamental difference from other vendors with patented in-memory associative technology. As Curt Monash
noted a year ago, the use of "associative" is unclear in this context. So do not think of associative in a technology sense, but in a psychological sense.
Wahl started demo of sales by customer, products, region, sales rep, etc. A few interesting points: can move/copy analysis objects from QlikView to Excel/PPT. smart cache of dynamic aggregation as use clicks with sharing among users,
Deighton remarked, "Advantage comes when you are solving a business problem and you can do it with speed. Scalability to many TB does have limited; however, those limits are increasing over time. Almost all users are server-based, rather than client-based."
Final comments about QlikView 9 launch... has instance running on Amazon EC2 so that a server can be deployed "within 15 minutes", has iPhone and Java Mobile clients, and a free developer tool for personal use.
My Take... A 16-year old company who has not only survived the tech wars but has flourish in recent years. Although many other vendors make the same claims in the same market segment (pervasive enterprise analysis tool), QlikTech has carved a niche for itself within the international arena with a proven mature product. I like the 'consumer' flavor to this enterprise tool as a mechanism for maturing the user base. An issue is whether the depth is sufficient for the power users. I would recommend BI professionals invest the time to download the
free version and apply it to a nontrivial problem.
