Qlik Business Intelligence and Analytics

The recent BARC BI & Analytics Survey 22, which is the world's largest survey of business intelligence and analytics users, continues to highlight Qlik as a leading force in the business intelligence and analytics community.  In the survey Qlik Sense earned six number one rankings and 45 leading positions in six peer groups in the annual survey of around 2,500 BI and analytics users. In particular the report highlights that: 

• Qlik Sense ranked again 1st in Business Value in the International BI Giants peer group.
• Qlik Sense ranked 1st for Project Length in two peer groups & rated a Leader in all peer groups. BARC notes that rapid BI implementation is a key measure of project success and that projects with rapid rollout deliver the most business benefits.
• Qlik Sense ranked 1st for Analyses in 3 of its peer groups with 86% of surveyed Qlik Sense users rating the platform's functionality as excellent or good compared to only 75% for the average BI tool.
• Qlik Sense holds a leading position for Query Performance across five peer groups. 

Qlik democratises analytics and BI so people at all skill levels can freely explore data. Qlik Sense is a powerful and complete SaaS analytics offering, powered by Qlik’s patented Associative Engine and advanced AI assistance through Insight Advisor. With Qlik, the entire workforce can uncover hidden insights, make smarter decisions and drive better outcomes through data.

If you'd like to know more about how Qlik compared to other BI & analytics platforms in the BARC Survey, you can download a complimentary copy below. 

Access BARC Qlik Survey Highlights

At Inside Info we’ve been building and deploying Qlik analytics solutions now for 18 years and as such have seen the platform evolve greatly over time.   From the initial launch of QlikView to then Qlik Sense, we’re now seeing the growth in Qlik’s cloud deployment options of Qlik Sense.  In this article we wanted to highlight Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS and what this has to offer.

Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS

As part of Qlik’s cloud first strategy Qlik have developed their own cloud service, Qlik Cloud Services (QCS), on which Qlik manages cloud editions of the product portfolio to deliver to customers as software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS is Qlik’s premium cloud solution and gives businesses analytics without the complexities of installing and managing their own deployment, with a 99.9% uptime commitment from Qlik. Based on our experiences this SaaS version of Qlik Sense Enterprise is every bit as robust as the on-premise version.

The microservice-based architecture behind Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS allows Qlik to host both Qlik Sense and QlikView® applications (apps) in a customer’s Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS tenant. This means users have a single location to open and consume their Qlik apps. In addition to hosting Qlik apps, Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS provides the ability to add links to other types of reports and assets such as documentation, providing a single portal for your users to consume all your analytics and reporting assets.

Associative In-Memory Apps

Qlik couples in-memory data storage technology with an Associative Engine that lets you analyse and freely navigate data intuitively. In its second generation, Qlik’s Associative Engine allows users to easily explore data and create visualisations based on data from multiple data sources simultaneously. These sources range from Excel and Access to databases such as Oracle and SQL Server to big data sources such as Cloudera and Redshift. Qlik Sense uses columnar, in-memory storage. Unique entries are only stored once in-memory, and relationships among data elements are represented as pointers. This allows for significant data compression, more data in RAM, and faster response times for your users. In some big data scenarios, data should remain at the source, which is why Qlik uses a built-in technique called On-Demand Application Generation. Data sources can be queried based on your users’ selections, yet still provide an associative experience to your user. Qlik’s Dynamic Views feature expands this capability further for the biggest data sources available.

User Interfaces

Access to the Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS environment is through a zero-footprint web browser interface (known as the Qlik Sense Hub). The Qlik Sense web browser interface makes all aspects of development, drag-and-drop content creation, and consumption possible. Qlik Sense features a responsive design methodology to automatically display and resize visualisations with the appropriate layout and information to fit the device — whether it is a browser on a laptop or desktop, tablet, or smartphone. Built with current standards of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and web sockets, Qlik Sense enables you to build and consume apps on any device. In addition to the web-based interface, Qlik Sense supports conversational analytics which integrates with major chat platforms such as Slack and MS Teams and data alerting capabilities to allow users to subscribe to and be notified of key changes to their data.

Notifications & Alerts

Notification capabilities allow users to configure Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS system-based events. These events include status of application reloads, and your users’ status in Spaces. Users have control over their notification subscriptions, managing which channel (e-mail or web) they would like to receive them, as well as for opting to unsubscribe at any time.

Enterprise Data Capacity

Each Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS tenant provides fully expandable storage and with a standard Qlik Sense Enterprise subscription, each Qlik Sense app can consume up to 5 gigabytes of memory. Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS scales to meet the demand that is required on system resources with no requirements on users to configure any of the infrastructure. Certain use cases may require apps that use more than 5 gigabytes of memory. Qlik provides an Expanded Apps option for applications between 5 gigabytes and 10 gigabytes in memory. For apps larger than 10GB in memory, or workloads that require even larger capacities, Qlik offers a Dedicated Capacity option.

Move Apps Through A Development Lifecycle, Not Development Servers

With Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS, apps are stored in discrete spaces. Each space has its own security settings, data connections and file storage. Customers can create as many development, test and production spaces as needed to suit their software development life cycle. This approach allows much greater flexibility, agility and reduced infrastructure expense than with a traditional on-premise setup.

Integrate On-Premise Data With SaaS

Qlik provides several solutions to integrate on-premise data sources with Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS, such as Qlik DataTransfer.  This is great for customers who do not require either a full data integration solution such as Qlik Catalog™ or a full Qlik Sense Enterprise Client-Managed deployment and do not wish to open firewalls to connect to on premise data. Qlik’s Data Integration platform which provides the ability to publish data from a wide breadth of data source end points to cloud storage locations works with Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS.  In particular Qlik Replicate (Qlik’s universal data replication and real time data ingestion), Qlik Catalog (A secure, enterprise-scale data catalog to easily find, prepare & deliver analytics ready data) and Qlik Compose (Agile data lake creation and data warehouse automation).

Qlik Sense on premise applications can be automatically synchronized with Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS, while QlikView Publisher allows QlikView apps to be published to Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS.

As you’d expect Qlik has start of the art site reliability, security and backup procedures in place as you’d expect form any enterprise level SaaS option.

For existing Qlik Sense Enterprise customers, Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS has the capability to facilitate the transition to SaaS. Customers can choose to continue reloading apps on premise, move some apps to Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS or use Qlik Data integration tools to access their data sources on-premise while moving consumption to the cloud. Integrated identity providers and flexible deployment and subscription options make this easy to manage and minimizes costs during the transition.

If you’d like to know more about Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS download the Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS Technical Overview Whitepaper below.

Download Whitepaper

A recent article by Joe DosSantos, Qlik’s Chief Data Officer, spoke about the cost of missed opportunity due to not effectively using data and the monumental impact this can have on businesses.  As businesses are amassing more and more data and adopting sophisticated data and analytics solutions, many are still struggling to convert this investment into better decision making and tangible business outcomes.  One way to improve this is to ensure that the right data feeds into these systems by investing in data and analytics pipelines such as data cataloguing, to ensure a better output.

So let’s first look at research that Qlik and IDC conducted in late 2020. This research revealed that:

Organisations with data pipelines that support the best decision-making capabilities are experiencing the greatest improvements in business value, achieving over two-times more than those with the worst decision-making capabilities (38% v 15% respectively).

While organisations have continued to invest in new solutions that promise to harness the full value of their data, what many often do not realise is that there is only so much data analytics can do. There is a finite value that can be achieved from data - if you’re not putting enough or the right data into your data pipeline, you are significantly limiting the outcomes you can achieve from it. 

How To Identify Valuable Data

Data pipelines are the backbone of modern data systems.  Finding and introducing more valuable data into your data pipeline is something that nearly all businesses are grabbling with. Among global business leaders, 96% report that identifying new data sources is challenging for their organisation. This is consistent across every industry and most regions - only companies in Japan and Germany reported a lower rate (89% respectively).

In fact, just over half (57%) of global businesses believe they have identified and captured most (70+%) of the potentially valuable data across their organisation. Business leaders report facing both technical issues of having the resources to search for and invest in the technology to create valuable data, and challenges in understanding its validity and assessing the potential ROI. It is therefore little surprise that, when asked which area of their data pipeline would receive the greatest investment over the coming 12 months, one quarter of business leaders (25%) reported focusing on identifying new data sources.

Using Data Catalogues To Improve Data Discovery

One way to support individuals in identifying the valuable data in their organisation that can be used to inform decision-making is to use a data catalogue. Data cataloguing establishes a single repository of all the data a business has available for analytics so that anyone - from data engineers to business users - can identify and access it.

An important consideration when investing in a data catalogue must be its accessibility for non-technical users. Functionalities like keyword search, which enable users to find potentially relevant data sets that can be exported into visualisations or analytics dashboards, are important so they are empowered to find the information relevant to their decision. Of course, this cannot be at the cost of privacy, so should be balanced against a common framework of security, governance, and metadata capabilities that protect data, manage user access privileges and track their activity.

Investing In Data Pipelines To Get More Out

Without the right information, it’s tough to spot trends, identify new opportunities and, most of all, be confident that you’re making the right decisions.  Inside Info can help businesses improve their data pipelines by simplifying and accelerating cataloging, management, preparation and delivery of business-ready data to analytics tools using Qlik’s approach to data integration.  It’s time that organisations recognise the benefits of investing in the beginning, as well as the end of their data pipelines. Because what you get out of it depends entirely on what you put in.

To understand more about the importance of investing in data and analytics pipelines read the IDC report below.

Download Report

Qlik Highlights Report

If you haven't already seen it, BARC released its BI Survey 19 results.  The BI Survey 19 report is a good way to find out what end users really think about the BI products they use. Based on a sample of over 3,000 survey responses, The BI Survey 19 offers user feedback on 36 leading BI solutions. We can share with you here the Qlik highlights in this report. 

Qlik was voted #1 for customer experience and performance satisfaction.

For a breakdown on Qlik's overall performance, including by Qlk Sense and QlikView, download the BARC highlight's report below. 

Download Report

Qlik have been busy making a number of product enhancements and acquisitions lately to support Qlik's strategy of strenghthening and offering an end-to-end data management & Business Intelligence (BI) platform. Here we explain the value of these acquisitions and Qlik's move into Augmented Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

The Introduction of Insight Advisor - Qlik's AI Capability

Qlik is applying a unique approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI), which bridges AI and cognitive technologies with its UX and core Associative Engine to deliver what Qlik describes as Smart Start capabilities across the entire product portfolio. Smart Start features take advantage of the new cognitive insight engine in Qlik Sense®, which works with the Qlik Associative Engine to provide context-aware insights and automations across the analytics life-cycle. Taking this approach allows Qlik to combine machine intelligence with human intuition in new and powerful ways that unlock tremendous value for users and organisations.

According to Gartner, Inc., “A new paradigm — augmented analytics — is rapidly gaining traction. Central to this development is the use of ML automation/AI techniques to augment human intelligence and contextual awareness, and to transform data management, analytics and BI as well as many aspects of data science and ML/AI model development and consumption.”*

Insight Advisor debuted as part of the June 2018 Qlik Sense Enterprise release.  Insight Advisor auto-generates and suggests the best analytics and insights to explore based on the overall data set and a user’s search criteria, making insight suggestions increasingly relevant and valuable. This was further enhanced with the November 2018 release of Qlik Sense®, where Qlik introduced new machine learning capabilities into its cognitive engine and platform as part of Insight Advisor. Precedent-based machine learning allows the Qlik cognitive engine to get smarter over time, continually learning from user interaction and feedback as well as other sources. Qlik is the first analytics company to bring AI and ML capabilities together with human intuition in a way that truly augments the user’s power to discover. Users can directly train the machine by manually creating analytics, altering what the machine suggests, and providing direct feedback. The cognitive engine also learns from additional governed and trusted sources such as business rule definitions in global libraries and Qlik artifacts.

Because the associative engine is aware of a user’s context (selection state) at each step in the exploratory process and knows all the data that is associated and unrelated to that context, this is factored into machine driven analysis and insight suggestions to make them more relevant. It’s like giving the user “peripheral vision” that guides them to hidden insights and helps them see the previously unseen.

Watch Insight Advisor Video

Qlik's Move Into Conversational Analytics

A month ago, Qlik announced its acquisition of CrunchBot and Curnch Data to expand its augmented intelligence and cognitive capabilities in the area of conversational analytics.  CrunchBot works uniquely with Qlik As a Trusted Extension Developer (TED) accredited solution, validated by Qlik for quality and functionality and built upon Qlik’s open API framework and Associative Engine.  CrunchBot enables users to:

• Ask questions in a conversational manner through the Qlik Sense UI or popular collaboration tools such as Slack, Skype, Salesforce Chat and Microsoft Teams;
• Explore and ask questions of their data through voice interaction with integration to services such as Amazon Alexa;
• Receive robust answers and insights including additional context with auto-generated charts, interpretations, key drivers, period-over-period calculations and predictions for measures;
• Seamlessly dive directly into Qlik Sense analytics apps based on the results, with the context (selection state) retained;
• Leverage unique Natural Language Processing (NLP), which automatically trains itself and tracks user inquiries over time, and Natural Language Generation (NLG) which delivers insights for not only what is happening, but also why – and where to go next. 

CrunchBot is immediately available to customers through Qlik today, and will be licensed as a value-added solution to the Qlik Sense platform. To be named the Qlik Insight Bot, this new product will be available alongside Qlik’s existing Insight Advisor capability and will be further integrated with the Qlik cognitive engine to deliver value to its customers. Here's an article we wrote recently about Conversational Analytics.

Watch CrunchBot Video

Acquisitions For Improved Data Integration & Enterprise Data Management

Podium Data - aka Qlik Data Catalyst

Last year Qlik announced its acquisition of Podium Data, an enterprise-grade data management company whose solution simplifies and accelerates customers’ ability to manage, prepare and deliver analytics-ready data to every business user across a diverse data landscape. Enterprise data strategies have evolved to rely heavily on the creation of data lakes, however businesses are realising that these and other data sources aren’t designed to easily and quickly deliver data to the business user. In many instances, data lakes have only increased customer data complexity and management headaches. According to Gartner Inc., “Through 2018, 90% of deployed data lakes will be rendered useless, as they’re overwhelmed with information assets captured for uncertain use cases.” (Gartner. Derive Value From Data Lakes Using Analytics Design Patterns. 26 September 2017).

With Podium Data, Qlik provides customers with an expanding enterprise data management solution to transform their raw data into a governed, analytics-aware information resource. Qlik have re-branded this capability to be called Qlik Data Catalyst - a data management solution that simplifies & speeds up how you catalogue, manage, prepare & deliver trustworthy data. Qlik's Data Catalyst builds a secure, enterprise-scale repository of all the data your business has available for analytics, giving your data consumers a single, go-to catalogue to find, understand and gain insights from any underlying data source. The solution's data preparation and metadata tools streamline the transformation of raw data into analytics-ready assets, while the product's Smart Data Catalogue and graphical user interface help people easily discover and select whatever data they need. Built on a platform of hardened data security and featuring governance capabilities, you can easily integrate Qlik Data Catalyst with any of your other data management tools. Qlik Data Catalyst provides:

• Intelligent Data Profiling and Onboarding: Ability to profile and register data from any source or location throughout the organisation, providing a comprehensive understanding of every data element, with applied pattern matching, rules based metadata enrichment, and auto obfuscation rules to protect sensitive data.
• Automated Data Quality: Inspecting, improving and documenting the quality of incoming data through validation, formatting and encryption.
• Data Preparation and Publishing: Enriching and transforming data without additional programming, with the ability to publish data to downstream systems and be consumed by a broad base of users, including data scientists, analysts and business intelligence users.
• Smart Data Catalogue: A searchable data catalogue organised with tags, business definitions and data lineage that makes it fast and easy for business users to find, understand and “shop” for data.

Data Catalyst 4.0 released in January this year further broadens support for data sources beyond Hadoop to further unify enterprise data managemetn wherever data resides.  

Watch Qlik Data Catalyst Video

Attunity

Building on Qlik’s recent acquisition of Podium Data and the introduction of Qlik Data Catalyst, Qlik announced just a few days ago, its intention to acquire Attunity for its market leading data integration & big data management capabilities. Attunity provides cross-platform data streaming capabilities to support a shift to cloud and real-time analytics. This acquisition further differentiates Qlik by providing an expanded breadth of enterprise data management capabilities and will enable real time data delivery across complex cloud environments.

*Gartner: Augmented Analytics Is the Future of Data and Analytics, 31 October 2018 - ID G00375087