“What is Qlikview?,” asked someone who knows that I am passionate about it. A great question indeed. Is it a business intelligence tool? I am not sure.

We’ve spent years building pervasive BI — now we need to put some work into building persuasive BI,” — Donald Farmer, VP of Product Management at Qliktech  

We have been fortunate to see the evolution of decision support systems in the last 15 years. During this time, we have witnessed massive growth in both structured and unstructured data. In fact, amount of data worldwide is doubling every 2.5 years. That’s incredible.

With such a rapid data growth, and increasing consumer influence through social media, most enterprises have to deal with the biggest challenge not only to gather data that supports better decision-making process but also to make that information available to executives in real-time.

Collecting and transforming critical data is the first step, but having that data at executive’s disposal is the key for the long-term viability and profitability of any enterprise. In a nutshell, Qlikview facilitates better decision-making process by allowing executives not only to visualize the strength but also enterprise’s Achilles’s hill(by showing outliers).

WHAT IS QLIKVIEW?

Traditional Business intelligence applications are IT centric: Users have to rely on information technology professionals to create a decision support system for the enterprise.

Proliferation of information on the Internet and how Google, Facebook and other social media enable consumer to seek and retrieve data in real time has changed the landscape of the decision support systems.

Qlikview provides in-memory Business Discovery platform to an enterprise to perform quick data discovery and make decisions as fast as Google allows its consumer to do so.

1. Businesses need smarter analytics.

No business can survive the brutally competitive, global landscape by creating reports that are lacking the intelligence needed for the business to adapt to dynamic changes as and when needed.

As depicted below, a research by IBM concluded that enterprises that seek and share business insight more freely outperform their competitors both in revenue and EBITDA growth.

Qlikview is at the crossroad of inability of standard reports to provide better insight and a degree of freedom Excel provides to explore data in more meaningful way.

It’s associative, in-memory engine makes all data available to its users all the time with the intent to show associated data without ignoring non-associated data. In fact, its ability to show non-associated data plays a crucial role in the entire data discovery space.

Qlikview shows selection in Green, associated data in white and non-associated data in Grey. This has been the hallmark of its power to provide better insight.

Unlike other tools, Qlikview has ETL(Extract, Transform and Load) tool built into its application. Its built in ETL capability takes focus off from building a data mart to building an application that supports business critical information process.

Qlikview takes IT centric Business intelligence environment and transforms it into a user driven Business intelligence and insight sharing across the enterprise based on multiple sources of insight.

2.  Qlikview Community

Qlikview community is a vibrant community of Qlikview developers who are willing to share their knowledge selflessly to quickly make you awesome as a developer.

Learning any new tool takes time and persistence. Qlikview community makes your learning a collaborative experience by allowing you to ask questions that are relevant to an application that you are building at work.

Qlikview community also has plethora of articles that you can explore and enrich your knowledge once you are armed with the basics of the tool.

3.  Big Data is here to stay

In 2011,  global businesses collected  1.8 Zetabyte(Yes, that’s 1 billion TB).  Facebook collected over 100TB per day and Twitter collected over 8TB per day to give you an idea of how important it is for an enterprise to know, understand and build smart intelligence by leveraging this big data.

Hadoop echo system has enabled businesses to get access to this massive data. The cat is out of the bag. Data is increasingly how consumers and enterprises make smart decisions, and Qlikview leads the pack of business discovery tools that empower businesses to make sense of data.

Tableau is another tool gaining momentum in the business discovery segment due to its superior visualization capabilities, but Qlikview still dominates this niche with its unique in-memory, associative architecture.

Elsewhere:

Really, is Qlikview a BI tool? via Bi-Review

 photo by: Muzzafer Yontem