What we learned from Qlik Qonnections 2018

Qlik’s new CEO Mike Capone keynoted the recently held Qlik Qonnections 2018, with some interesting feature rollouts and announcements. He also shed light on the evolution of Qlik’s two premium products - Qlikview and Qlik Sense, and shared their roadmap for the coming year. Close to 4000 developers and Business Intelligence professionals were in attendance, and were very receptive to the positive announcements made in the keynote.

Let us take a quick look at some of the important announcements:

Qlik continues to be the market leader

Capone began the keynote by sharing some of the interesting performance metrics over the past year, which have led to Qlik being listed as a ‘Leader’ in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2017. One of the most impressive achievements among all is the impressive customer base that Qlik boasts of, including:

• 9 out of the 10 major banks
• 8 out of the 10 major insurance companies
• 11 out of the 15 major global investment and securities companies

With an impressive retention rate of 94%, Qlik have also managed to add close to 4000 new customers over the last year and have also doubled the developer community to over 25,000 members. These numbers mean only one thing - Qlik will continue to dominate.

Migration from Qlikview to Qlik Sense

There has been a lot of talk (and confusion) of late about Qlik supposedly looking to transition its focus from Qlikview to Qlik Sense. In the keynote, Capone gave us all the much needed clarity on the licensing and migration options for those looking to move from Qlikview’s guided analytics features to Qlik Sense’s self-service analytics. These are some of the important announcements in this regard:

Migration from Qlikview to Qlik Sense is optional: Acknowledging some of the loyal customers who don’t want to move away from QlikView, Capone said that the migration from Qlikview to Qlik Sense is optional. For those who do want to migrate, Qlik have assured that the transition will be made as smooth as possible, and that they would be making this a priority.

Single license to use both Qlikview and Qlik Sense: Qlik have made it possible for customers to get the most out of their products without having to buy multiple licenses for multiple products. With just an additional maintenance fee, they will be able to enjoy the premium features of both the tools seamlessly.

Qlik venturing into cognitive analytics

One of the most notable announcements of this conference was incorporating aspects of Artificial Intelligence into the Business Intelligence capabilities of the Qlik products. Qlik are aiming to improving the core associative engine that works with the available data smartly. Not just that, they have also announced the Insight Advisor feature, to auto-generate the best possible visualizations and reports.

Hybrid and multi-cloud support added

Qlik’s vision going forward is quite simple and straightforward - to support deployment of their applications and services in a hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud environment. Going forward, users will be able to move their Qlik Sense applications that run using a microservices-based architecture on Linux, in either public or private clouds. They will also be able to self-manage these applications with the support features provided by Qlik.

New tools for Qlik developers

Qonnections 2018 saw 2 important announcements made to make the lives of Qlik developers easier. Along with Qlik Branch - a platform to collaborate on projects and share innovations and new developments, Qlik also announced a new platform for developers called Qlik Core. This new platform will allow Qlik developers to leverage the offerings of IoT, edge analytics and more to design and drive innovative business models and strategies. Qlik Core is currently in the beta stage, and is expected to be generally available very soon.

Interesting times ahead for Qlik

In recent times, Qlik has faced stiff competition from other popular Business Intelligence tools such as Tableau, Spotfire, Microsoft’s very own Power BI - apart from the freely available tools which are easily available to customers for fast, effective business intelligence. With all the tools delivering on a similar promise and not coming out with any groundbreaking blue ocean features, it will be interesting to see how Qlik’s new offerings will fare against these sharks.

The recent restructuring of the Qlik management and the downsizing happening over the past few years can make one wonder if they are struggling to keep up. However, the announcements in Qonnections 2018 indicate the company is indeed moving in a positive direction with their products, and should restore the public faith and dispel any doubts Qlik’s customers may have.

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