BI Scorecard Blog

QlikTech Acquires Expressor, Aims to Improve Data Load Process

Yesterday QlikTech announced it has completed the acquisition of privately-held integration vendor Expressor.  Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Is this move a shift in QlikTech’s focus to enterprise ETL? I don’t think so, and in meeting with Donald Farmer, VP of Product Management, and Jeff Boehm, VP of Product Marketing in New York, they were quick to confirm that QlikTech is not pursuing the ETL space. Instead, it’s about meta data re-usability and data governance.

Currently, one of the biggest short comings in QlikView and one in which they lose deals to competitors such as Tableau or TIBCO Spotfire is lack of a meta data layer. The process to extract data from source systems or a data warehouse and load into QlikView’s in-memory engine is based on scripts. Calculations (which QlikView refers to as expressions) beyond the scripts are specific to each sheet within a dashboard application. So if the extraction,  transformations, and calculations for a widely used measure such as “Customer Churn”  change,  that can be a lot of scripts and sheets a designer must touch. Some designers have been able to foster re-usability through shared scripts (shared QVD files), but it’s a work around.

Expressor brings a graphical user interface to the data extraction process. QlikTech is positioning Expressor as a way of doing data modeling in process, iteratively while simultaneously building the ETL and the business application. Keeping in mind that ETL is not my core coverage area, when I visited with Expressor at QlikTech’s conference earlier this year, I was impressed by its ease of use, not sacrificing simplicity for functionality. However, maintaining calculations beyond the initial load is a challenge that QlikTech must still address, one that Tableau took steps to address in its version 7 release last fall. TIBCO Spotfire, meanwhile, has had a meta data layer for years, with its Information Links. Neither competitor has the same degree of scripting and ETL capabilities that QlikView has, giving QlikView a leg up when accessing complex, disparate data, but can be a challenge for less sophisticated users trying to access a single source.

While I think the Expressor acquisition is a good one for QlikTech, the company needs also to address the following challenges:

• Ease of use and maintenance, particularly for the designer. QlikTech has been emphasizing this as a theme in its next version.
• Inability to articulate and position its data marting capabilities, while also allaying IT’s concern about data chaos.
• When to leave data on disk or in a data warehouse versus loading into in-memory; QlikView’s approach is currently all or nothing.

While the Expressor acquisition is a smart-move, it is one that will require QlikTech to address concerns about moves into the broader ETL space and not alienating its larger data integration partner Informatica.

For more detailed reviews and side-by-side comparisons of any of these BI tools, visit BI Scorecard  Also, be sure to take the 2012 Successful BI Survey that tracks BI adoption, causes for success and failure, with analysis by BI tools used.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson,

BI Scorecard

 

 

 

 

QlikTech Shares Future Product Plans for QlikView

Last week, at its annual partner summit in Miami Beach, Florida, QlikTech laid out its themes for its future product release, currently dubbed QlikView.next.

Over 900 partners were in attendance at the vendor’s annual conference. It is however, the first time that QlikTech invited key analysts to the event, a reflection of both the organization’s growing prominence in the BI space, but also, the vendor’s maturing organization in its ability to respond to requests for information and constructive criticism.

In some respects, the conference was also a who’s who in the BI industry as a number of long-time industry veteran’s have flocked to this fast-growing vendor, in part a reflection of the brain drain at other companies, and in part a reflection of QlikTech’s attracting top talent in the BI space.

Donald Farmer, formerly of Microsoft and now VP of Product Management at QlikTech laid out five themes in the next QlikView product release: gorgeous and genius, collaboration, mobile and agile, open platform, and enterprise ready. While I have worked with Donald in his past role at Microsoft and he’s participated in some TDWI bake-offs, it’s the first time I have heard him deliver a keynote. I was impressed by how inspiring he was, with a rare ability to convey abstract, potentially mundane technical concepts with humor and insight.  For example, in talking about the goal of making QlikView both gorgeous and genius (terms not typically applied to a BI tool), he compared QlikView to Hedy Lamarr, a classic beauty and MGM actress who also invented wireless communications technology.

While QlikView 11 is primarily IT-developed applications and dashboards, the demo of QlikView.next had a greater concept of business-user assembled dashboards. QlikView 11 introduced collaborative features (see the BI Scorecard in-depth review) but QlikTech wants to make collaboration more pervasive in the next release.

With the ongoing uptake in tablet devices (Apple sold 3 million iPad3s in the first three days of that product launch), it’s not surprising that mobility is a key theme for the next release. What was surprising, though, is that QlikTech gave a nod to Windows 8 impact on both the desktop experience and mobile, whereas most other BI vendors seem to have largely dismissed Microsoft’s influence on mobile.

As QlikTech has grown as a company and QlikView applications have grown in scale, QlikView.next will bring more open API’s for partners to develop applications. It was noteworthy that this was the first partner conference that included an exhibit hall of technology partners such as Panopticon and Expressor. The Panopiticon integration, for example, brings real-time streaming into a QlikView dashboard. The Expressor and Informatica integration brings data integration and more robust ETL than what is currently available in the QlikView scripts.  Other planned improvements to enterprise administration include better tools for IT to manage large QlikView applications.

Noticeably absent from QlikTech’s future product strategy were plans for cloud or big-data, at least in terms of Hadoop integration—scalability of QlikView applications was a theme in a number of track sessions.

QlikTech’s partner network, with numerous resellers that account for half the company’s revenues, is a competitive differentiator versus chief competitor Tableau, who only recently began focusing on growing such a network. It also is a differentiator versus mega BI vendors who have often failed to nurture such relationships, particularly post industry consolidation. As one partner said at this conference, “with SAP we are a pawn, and they are the king. With QlikTech it’s (the relationship is) direct, fair, and customer centric.”

 

Managing the Mayhem of Mobile BI & QlikTech's New Approach

In-memory and dashboard vendor QlikTech did an about face on its mobile BI strategy last month: one of the first BI vendors to natively support iPad and Android devices, QlikTech is now taking a device- agnostic approach, relying instead on the browser.

QlikTech isn’t the only vendor avoiding native mobile apps, with Information Builders and LogiXML sticking to their more browser-oriented approach. There are, however, some notable differences, and indeed, QlikTech is one of the few to have changed its mobile strategy.

Then there are other BI vendors, such as MicroStrategy and specialty vendor RoamBI who have native apps for Apple and BlackBerry devices. SAP BusinessObjects takes a similar approach but with their dashboards relying on Flash (which Apple does not support), the question with SAP becomes not only which device and which approach, but also, what content. IBM Cognos uses an app approach for BlackBerry’s and a browser approach for Apple, for now. Actuate also uses an app approach. Tibco Spotfire offers a native iPad app as well.

Why the difference and what should a customer do?

The tantalizing vision for browser-based Mobile BI is that it works on all devices. That’s great for vendors who don’t want to develop device-specific apps when tablet and smartphone vendors are still battling for market leadership. As Howard Dresner, author of a study on Mobile BI said, “It’s in the interest of the vendors to write the code once.” It’s also a help to customers who lack smartphone and tablet standards. The other appealing aspect is that nobody wants to develop reports and dashboards for every device.

That’s the vision. Reality, though, is quite different.

What’s good for vendors is not always best for customers. Currently device-specific apps promise a richer user experience, with faster performance via device-based caching. In theory, an HTML5-based solution could take advantage of smartphone features like location awareness and device-based caching, but they don’t necessarily do this. QlikView 10 mobile, for example, does not. Instead, it has optimized its current AJAX viewer to be touch-aware. This certainly means that an iPad user gets the full QlikView experience of searching, filtering, changing the chart display, and so on. I could not, however, use the iPad gestures to enlarge a chart, and the chart quality was not as rich as BI products that use native apps.  Performance was at the mercy of my network.  In part, this has as much to do with QlikView’s architecture as with its browser-based approach.

Information Builders mobile, for example, leverages the vendor’s Active Report technology along with an optimized WebApp based on HTML5. Active Reports provides users with interactivity while caching data locally for offline use and better performance.

As for the whole theory of not having to redesign reports for particular devices, i think it's currently a false hope. Tablets and smartphones have such drastically different screen sizes that report authors have to take that into consideration. Ideally, mobile BI apps (or optimized webApps) will sense the device and re-render the same report for that device, but again, that direction is still a work in progress for most BI products.

The arguments for and against browser versus device-specific apps will continue to rage (see last year’s blog). Greater adoption and use of HTML5, which supports device-based caching and location awareness will add intensity to the debate.  It’s too soon to tell, though, how well mobile BI WebApps that use HTML5 will compare to native apps. Independent analyst Mike Ferguson who  will be speaking on Mobile BI at TDWI Munich, says, “HTML 5 is not as effective as a native app for exploiting the device cache,” due to the smaller size of the cache and how its managed.

With the technology in a state of flux, here are my recommendations for managing Mobile BI:

• Agree on which devices are more important in your company. I won’t even say “set a standard” because the tablet market in particular is changing too rapidly
• Know what approach your vendor uses today, for which devices, and what their strategy is for the future
• Evaluate functional differences between a general browser client, optimized WebApp client, and native app. In all cases, focus on the information consumer role, not the author.
• Be aware of development and redesign efforts for rendering content on specific devices
• Be prepared for change.
• Make Mobile BI a priority. Just because there is change and risks with Mobile BI, it’s not a reason to delay or ignore it.

Have you taken this year’s Successful BI Survey yet? Tell us how important Mobile BI is to your BI success here.

For QlikView customers, to take advantage of this new mobile approach, you need to upgrade to QlikView 10. QlikView has stated it will continue to support the current device-specific apps for those customers who have deployed them.  For more information on QlikView 10, purchase our in depth product review here.  

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

New Tools, New Rules

BIScorecard just posted an evaluation of QlikTech’s QlikView, and I confess, this review has befuddled me more than others.

The challenge with new and emerging technologies is in trying to figure out where they fit and whether or not they really are that different. So I find myself thinking about cars and bikes and QlikTech.

When cars first came on the scene, bike enthusiasts were disgusted with those smoke- spewing machines that suddenly stopped working when cars ran out of gas (interesting that bikes are making a comeback in some cities). Sometimes innovations call for new evaluation criteria – with bikes and cars, features like pedals and gears simply don’t translate against miles per gallon. So does “in-memory” BI make criteria like SQL-generation less relevant? Why do you need a data warehouse at all if you can load a full Terabyte of data in-memory?

In talking with QlikTech customers, all enthusiastically declare they have waited years for this level of empowerment from either their central IT group or from other BI tools they’ve tried. Some of their comments are similar to those of Excel users who later (and still) suffer the consequences of spreadmart chaos. Other comments are reminiscent of early MOLAP (Oracle Hyperion Essbase, IBM Cognos PowerPlay, Microsoft Analysis Services) tool users who could build interactive data marts without IT’s involvement.

So is QlikView really all that different or is it just a re-incarnation of personal and departmental analysis tools? I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Their best “feature” is the rapid implementation time, without as much data chaos as spreadsheets and with more flexibility than traditional MOLAP tools. Sometimes speed-to-insight trumps a perfectly architected data warehouse and broad BI solution.

 

By the way, QlikView is not the only product that does not neatly compare to a single module within a BI platform. Tools like TIBCO Spotfire and Business Objects’ recently released Polestar face similar challenges with product positioning. Even advanced visualization tools such as Tableau, Advizor Solutions, and Corda sometimes struggle with articulating where they fit in the BI spectrum.

  

I welcome your thoughts about these products and how they fit into your total BI strategy.

Regards,

Cindi Howson