QlikTech and QlikView
Analysis of QlikTech (now called Qlik Technologies), vendor of the memory-centric QlikView business intelligence products. Related subjects include:
Analytic trends in 2012: Q&A
As a new year approaches, it’s the season for lists, forecasts and general look-ahead. Press interviews of that nature have already begun. And so I’m working on a trilogy of related posts, all based on an inquiry about hot analytic trends for 2012.
This post is a moderately edited form of an actual interview. Two other posts cover analytic trends to watch (planned) and analytic vendor execution challenges to watch (already up).
QlikView 11 and the rise of collaborative BI
QlikView 11 came out last month. Let me start by pointing out:
- As one might expect, QlikView 11 contains fairly leading-edge stuff, but also some “better late than never” features.
- The leading-edge stuff is concentrated in the general area of “collaboration”.
- Additionally, QlikTech is always pushing the QlikView user interface ahead in various ways.
- The “Well, it’s about time!” feature list starts with the ability to load QlikView via third-party ETL tools (Informatica now, others coming).
- QlikTech is generally good at putting up pretty pictures of its product. You can find some in the “What’s New in QlikView 11″ document via a general QlikView resource page.*
- Stephen Swoyer wrote a good article summarizing QlikView 11.
*One confusing aspect to that paper: non-standard uses of the terms “analytic app” and “document”.
As QlikTech tells it, QlikView 11 adds two kinds of collaboration features:
- Integration with social media, which QlikTech calls “asynchronous integration.”
- Direct sharing of the QlikView UI, which QlikTech calls “synchronous integration.”
I’d add a third kind, because QlikView 11 also takes some baby steps toward what I regard as a key aspect of BI collaboration — the ability to define and track your own metrics. It’s way, way short of what I called for in metric flexibility in a post last year, but at least it’s a small start.
Eight kinds of analytic database (Part 1)
Analytic data management technology has blossomed, leading to many questions along the lines of “So which products should I use for which category of problem?” The old EDW/data mart dichotomy is hopelessly outdated for that purpose, and adding a third category for “big data” is little help.
Let’s try eight categories instead. While no categorization is ever perfect, these each have at least some degree of technical homogeneity. Figuring out which types of analytic database you have or need — and in most cases you’ll need several — is a great early step in your analytic technology planning. Read more
Updating our vendor client disclosures
From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below. To be clear:
- This is a list of Monash Advantage members.
- All our vendor clients are Monash Advantage members, unless …
- … we work with them primarily in their capacity as technology users. (A large fraction of our user clients happen to be SaaS vendors.)
- We do not usually disclose our user clients.
- We do not usually disclose our venture capital clients, nor those who invest in publicly-traded securities.
- Included in the list below are two expired Monash Advantage members who haven’t said they will renew, as mentioned in my recent post on analyst bias. (You can probably imagine a couple of reasons for that obfuscation.)
With that said, our vendor client disclosures at this time are:
- Aster Data
- Cloudera
- CodeFutures/dbShards
- Couchbase
- EMC/Greenplum
- Endeca
- IBM/Netezza
- Infobright
- Intel
- MarkLogic
- ParAccel
- QlikTech
- salesforce.com/database.com
- SAND Technology
- SAP/Sybase
- Schooner Information Technology
- Skytide
- Splunk
- Teradata
- Vertica
The underlying technology of QlikView
QlikTech* finally decided both to become a client and, surely not coincidentally, to give me more technical detail about QlikView than it had when last we talked a couple of years ago. Indeed, I got to spend a couple of hours on the phone not just with Anthony Deighton, but also with QlikTech’s Hakan Wolge, who wrote 70-80% of the code in QlikView 1.0, and remains in effect QlikTech’s chief architect to this day.
*Or, as it now appears to be called, Qlik Technologies.
Let’s start with some quick reminders:
- QlikTech makes QlikView, a widely popular business intelligence (BI) tool suite.
- QlikView is distinguished by the flexibility of navigation through its user interface.
- To support this flexibility, QlikView preloads all data you might want to query into memory.
Let’s also dispose of one confusion right up front, namely QlikTech’s use of the word associative: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Database compression, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView | 25 Comments |
Intelligent Enterprise’s Editors’/Editor’s Choice list for 2010
As he has before, Intelligent Enterprise Editor Doug Henschen
- Personally selected annual lists of 12 “Most influential” companies and 36 “Companies to watch” in analytics- and database-related sectors.
- Made it clear that these are his personal selections.
- Nonetheless has called it an Editors’ Choice list, rather than Editor’s Choice.
(Actually, he’s really called it an “award.”)
Research agenda for 2010
As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting less research/analysis in November and December than during some other periods. In no particular order, reasons have included: Read more
Business intelligence notes and trends
I keep not finding the time to write as much about business intelligence as I’d like to. So I’m going to do one omnibus post here covering a lot of companies and trends, then circle back in more detail when I can. Top-level highlights include:
- Jaspersoft has a new v3.5 product release. Highlights include multi-tenancy-for-SaaS and another in-memory OLAP option. Otherwise, things sound qualitatively much as I wrote last September.
- Inforsense has a cool composite-analytical-applications story. More precisely, they said my phrase “analytics-oriented EAI” was an “exceptionally good” way to describe their focus. Inforsense’s biggest target market seems to be health care, research and clinical alike. Financial services is next in line.
- Tableau Software “gets it” a little bit more than other BI vendors about the need to decide for yourself how to define metrics. (Of course, it’s possible that other “exploration”-oriented new-style vendors are just as clued-in, but I haven’t asked in the right way.)
- Jerome Pineau’s favorable view of Gooddata and unfavorable view of Birst are in line with other input I trust. I’ve never actually spoken with the Gooddata folks, however.
- Seth Grimes suggests the qualitative differences between open-source and closed-source BI are no longer significant. He has a point, although I’d frame it more as being about the difference between the largest (but acquisition-built) BI product portfolios and the smaller (but more home-grown) ones, counting open source in the latter group.
- I’ve discovered about five different in-memory OLAP efforts recently, and no doubt that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
- I’m hearing ever more about public-facing/extranet BI. Information Builders is a leader here, but other vendors are talking about it too.
A little more detail Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Business intelligence, Information Builders, Inforsense, Jaspersoft, QlikTech and QlikView, Scientific research, Tableau Software | 8 Comments |
Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence
A few days ago I tore into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS. Well, the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms is out too. Unlike the data warehouse MQ, Gartner’s BI MQ clusters its “Leaders” together tightly. But while less bold, the Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant’s claims are just as questionable as those in data warehousing.
February, 2011 edit: Here’s a partial link that works right now.
Of course, some parts do make sense. E.g.: Read more
Extensive QlikView coverage from a big fan and reseller
David Raab is a reseller and great fan of QlikTech’s QlikView. His recent lengthy post about the product (I hesitate to call it “detailed” only because he rightly complains that QlikTech is in fact stingy with technical detail) is positive enough to have been recommended by the company itself. Specifically, it was cited in the comment thread to my recent post on QlikTech, where David himself also addressed some of my questions.
But of course, no technology is perfect, not even one as great as David thinks QlikView is. Read more