Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

We are happy to offer some insights on Qlik drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics and BI focusing on mobile, embedded and collaborative capabilities. Because each is a critical aspect of modern business intelligence, we developed specific criteria for each in order to provide an in-depth look at features geared specifically to mobile, embedded and collaborative use.

In all of our Value Indexes we utilize a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Qlik and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

Qlik offers Qlik Sense and QlikView products, with new developments generally appearing first in the Qlik Sense product line, an offering designed for cloud-based deployments. Qlik uses an in-memory architecture for highly responsive interactive analyses and the products can also be configured for live access to data sources in place. Combined, the products offer a broad range of capabilities for both ad-hoc and preconfigured analyses such as dashboards and reports.

In our Value Index evaluation, the best ranking for Qlik is sixth in the TCO/ROI category. The company does a good job providing tools and documentation to support an TCO/ROI analysis on the benefits of using its products. Its highest rating is in Manageability, where it provides to analysts the means to manage its products from discovery to dashboards. The next highest rating is in Usability, where it performed well in terms of specific usage of its analytics.

MOBILE ANALYTICS & BI

Qlik offers Qlik Sense Mobile for iOS; a version for Android is planned but was not considered in this evaluation. Since Qlik Sense uses responsive HTML5 displays, non-iOS devices can access Qlik Sense via a browser, but that doesn’t offer the same experience as the native mobile application. For tablets the HTML5 displays and interactions work reasonably well; for smaller devices Qlik Sense Mobile offers a better experience but nonetheless could do a better job exploiting native mobile capabilities such as location awareness and notifications. Overall Qlik ranks 14th in this Value Index.

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS & BI

Qlik offers Qlik Sense and QlikView products, with new developments generally appearing first in the Qlik Sense product line, an offering designed for cloud-based deployments. Qlik uses an in-memory architecture for highly responsive interactive analyses and the products can also be configured for live access to data sources in place.

Overall Qlik ranks 14th in this Value Index. The products provide strong calculation and analysis capabilities along with strong customization features. The company is investing in the developer community and has created Qlik Branch with a number of useful resources.

COLLABORATIVE ANALYTICS & BI

This assessment considers both the Qlik Sense and QlikView products. The Qlik products make it easy to share analyses. Documents can be generated in a wide variety of formats to engage various individuals. Qlik nPrinting can be used to deliver documents to various users automatically via scheduled delivery or subscription.

Overall Qlik ranks 15th in both this Value Index and the Capability category.

The products lack social media capabilities such as wall posting, discussion groups and messaging within the system. They also do not enable participants to assign tasks and track them to completion. Qlik could support better collaboration among line of business personnel with more styles of analytics including scorecarding and strategy management capabilities, which help facilitate communication of an organization’s progress toward its goals and strategy.

The Qlik product line does not offer as much forecasting, planning and predictive analytics as some of the other products we assess here and would benefit from more collaborative capabilities. It also lags in the Adaptability and Reliability categories. Better capabilities to integrate Qlik into business processes and other applications would improve its Adaptability score; better metrics and configurability to support scalability across users and data would help improve performance in the Reliability category.

This assessment was based on Qlik Sense June 2018 and QlikView November 2017. Since our evaluation was completed the company released Qlik Sense November 2018 and QlikView November 2018. New features include machine learning, dashboard extensions, visualization enhancements and improved management capabilities.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.

Regards

Ventana Research