Qlik Sense
Qlik, originally founded in 1993 in Lund, Sweden, moved its headquarters to the United States in 2005 after raising funds from several venture capital firms. It is currently owned by the private equity company Thoma Bravo after its acquisition in 2016. Since then, the vendor has made a number of acquisitions to create a robust cloud platform that delivers the data integration and analytics organizations need to transform raw data into informed action.
Qlik Cloud, the vendor’s main SaaS offering, is a compelling portfolio of data integration and analytics services. In the area of data integration, several services for data ingestion and transformation, catalog features and automation services are available. Qlik Cloud includes Qlik Sense, which provides enterprise-level BI and analytics capabilities, supporting a broad spectrum of analytics use cases. Qlik Cloud is a full SaaS platform, and customers can also deploy a hybrid cloud by combining Qlik Cloud with a client-managed Windows-based deployment.
Qlik Sense is powered by Qlik’s associative engine and offers flexible and fast access to analyzed data. In 2022, the vendor started to provide direct query capabilities to query live data from cloud databases, including Snowflake, Google BigQuery and DataBricks. Qlik Sense includes product features that support business users from data preparation to the creation of interactive applications. Data preparation, which is traditionally script-based in Qlik, can be conducted in a visual interface for most data transformations but still generates code that can be changed directly or optimized by developers if required. These improvements make data preparation more accessible for business users and at the same time satisfy the needs of developers. Qlik also has plans to take this a step further by integrating LLMs to convert comments to code and to explain code.
Augmenting the user experience with helpful and guiding functions is at the core of Qlik’s vision to reach more users with well thought-out BI and analytics capabilities. During data preparation, joins and default aggregations are suggested for measures. Qlik Sense offers further guidance and automation for data visualizations to benefit data consumers by actively recommending suitable visualizations to users based on fields selected and their metadata.
AI and ML power the suggestion of insights for consumers in ‘Insight Advisor’ and NLQ. Insight Advisor is an AI assistant that auto-generates insights with advanced analytics, assists with analytics creation and data preparation, and supports natural language interaction including search-based discovery and conversational analytics. Qlik AutoML supports the automated creation of machine learning models, predictive analytics and scenario analysis, specifically designed for analytics users and teams that want to apply ML to a broad set of use cases. In addition, third-party data science and ML platforms can be integrated to allow decision-makers to explore calculations in real time through visual dashboards.
A further component of Qlik Cloud is Qlik Application Automation®, a visual, no-code facility to automate tasks and workflows within Qlik Cloud and in conjunction with third-party applications. For example, Qlik Application Automation can be used to create custom publishing routines for reports or to send notifications and insights to chat applications.
Recently, the vendor has optimized its dashboard development environment, integrated AutoML and enhanced Insight Advisor within Qlik Sense, as well as introducing publishing capabilities to Microsoft PowerPoint as part of its cloud reporting capabilities.
User & Use Cases
This year we had 81 responses from Qlik Sense users. At the time of the survey, 46 percent of them were using version 2022, 45 percent 2023, 4 percent 2021, 3 percent 2019 and 1 percent were running version 2020.
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BARC’s Vendor Performance Summary contains an overview of The BI Survey results based on feedback from Qlik Sense users, accompanied by expert analyst commentary.
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