Qlik Technology (Qlik) was originally founded in 1993 in Lund, Sweden, and moved its headquarters to the United States in 2005 after raising funds from several venture capital firms. In 2010 Qlik went public on NASDAQ. On June 2, 2016, Qlik entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by leading private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo, LLC. which took Qlik private in 2016.
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Qlik was, until the general availability of Qlik Sense in 2014, a one product software company. Today, Qlik pursues a platform approach to visual analytics. Qlik’s products use a common ‘associative’ engine called QIX (Qlik Indexing Engine) including Qlik Sense and QlikView, which was upgraded to the second generation QIX engine in release 12 in the final quarter of 2015.
Today the vendor offers a portfolio of visual analytic products including Qlik Sense (Enterprise and Desktop), Qlik Analytics Platform, Qlik Sense Cloud, Qlik NPrinting, Qlik DataMarket and QlikView.
Qlik Sense is positioned as Qlik’s next-generation visual analytics offering. It addresses a mixture of use cases from self-service data visualization to building guided apps to reporting to embedded analytics. It has been supplied with some enterprise features such as centralized libraries for metadata (however currently tided to one application and has to be reused in others), policy-based security, and open APIs.
User & Use Cases
Qlik Sense was introduced in 2014 and attracted an impressive total of 43 responses in this year’s BI Survey.
The product is mostly used for dashboard creation, basic data analysis and ad hoc query. 58 percent of users use Qlik Sense for standard/enterprise reporting. This may change with version 3, in which printing and layout capabilities have been extended with the NPrinting component, enabling users to create print-oriented reports.
Qlik Sense is used by a median of 100 users, the same as the combined average of all products in The BI Survey 16. A much higher mean figure shows that Qlik Sense is also used in larger mid-sized scenarios with over 500 users.
Current vs. planned use
N = 43
5 products most often evaluated in competition with Qlik Sense
N = 323
Percentage of employees using Qlik Sense
N = 41
Licensing models
N = 42
Number of users using Qlik Sense
N = 38
Tasks carried out with Qlik Sense by business users
N = 39
Company size (number of employees)
N = 42
Summary of Qlik Sense highlights
Launched in 2014 and appearing in The BI Survey for the first time, Qlik Sense receives excellent customer feedback. Although the technology is still relatively young, the product convinces customers by yielding business benefits and delivering fast project implementation cycles. Qlik Sense customers see the solution as innovative and give it very good marks in ‘Innovation’ categories such as cloud BI, mobile BI and location intelligence.
Customers use the product mainly for ad hoc querying and data analysis, including data modeling and visualization using dashboards. The median number of users in a Qlik Sense environment is 100 – similar to the QlikView median – while the mean figure of 551 shows it is also capable of performing in mid-sized deployments with 500 or more users.
Business value – Top ranked
Peer group: large international BI vendors
Project success – Top ranked
Peer group: large international BI vendors
Customer experience – Top ranked
Peer group: large international BI vendors
Product satisfaction – Top ranked
Peer group: large international BI vendors
Performance – Top ranked
Peer group: visual discovery-focused products
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Contains a product review by BARC's analyst team plus user ratings from The BI Survey 16
