Shawn Rogers: July 2009 Archives

Beautiful morning here in Boulder warm and sunny. Glad to have QlikTech here today. Anthony Deighton Senior VP of Products and Chief Strategist, Neil Florio Director of Marketing, John Trigg Global Product Manager joined us by phone. (Shame they were too busy to attend in person) and Brian Walh Sr. Sales Engineer and Tony Setter District Manager from the Denver market attended in person and seemed to enjoy meeting everyone.

The company was founded in 1993 and according to IDC was the world's fastest-growing BI Vendor in 2006, they have 11,400+ customers, 500,000+ users in 95 countries. 800 global partners. QlikTech aims to fill the need around simplicity and OLAP style powered reporting. They leverage in-memory technology coupled with processor power to drive performance. By storing the atomic data in memory calculating and aggregating on the fly. Many of the views are stored so they can be reused for others that ask the same questions of the system.

Development, Deployment Analysis and Collaboration are the steps that the QlikView solution takes and enables the user to control. The Analysis and Collaboration side is very easy to use and intuitive. Offers a wide range of dashboard options and configurations. The solution provides aggressive data compression so that everyone who is hitting the data can hit it at the same time. Version 9 of QlikView has real-time capabilities to make sure your data is up to the minute.

The Development and Deployment side of the solution is easier to use than many solutions I've seen but it still requires IT to get involved. I can see why the Data Admin's would like QlikView for how fast and easy it is to get data into the solutions and to leverage it. As the data becomes easier to get to the QlikTech solutions will need a governance side to control data, access and to insure that the users see data the same way. The deployment side is nice, you can deploy on mobile, cloud, On-premise or laptop.


You can find some very nice demo's on QlikView at http://demo.qlikview.com/

Big group today for BIRST full house here in Boulder and on the conference line today. Looks like the trend continues that SaaS based solutions have a great buzz around them. I was fortunate to meet the BIRST team in San Francisco a while back and found the product to be very interesting and robust. The executive team is Ex Siebel, Oracle, Hyperion, Cognos MicroStrategy and SAS people. Strong funding as well from Sequoia Capital the product was launched in September of 2008 and is serving 1000's of users and they have dozens of customers.

Brad Peters, CEO and Stefan Schmitz, Sr. Dir of Product Mgt are visiting today. The company viability issue came up early today in the wake of Lucidera closing down so we were interested in how the stability of BIRST is being effected. The good news is that they have 1/2 their VC funds still in the bank, a multi-year run rate and expect to go profitable next year.

BIRST is focused on integration, information delivery and analysis and feels they bring a more substantial infrastructure to the market then the remaining SaaS business intelligence competition. I like the aim at the smaller market. They will find better traction with clients that are sub-terabyte in needs and provide BI between the big stack guys and excel spreadsheet BI users in the market.

The interface of the BIRST solution is very elegant and does a good job of leveraging advanced features for web based applications. Overall the features in BIRST seem well positioned to serve the needs of 80% of most BI users I think this is a positive. Its not cluttered with stuff that only the highest end power users demand but easily delivers the features most users would need. The ability to dive in and customize is impressive and very intuitive.

We were briefed on future road map for the product and the new features coming down the line will move BIRST forward in a strong way....sorry NDA no more details.