QlikTech Updates In-Memory BI Software

May 8, 2007 Alex Woodie

Qliktech today launched QlikView version 8.0, a new release of its Windows Server-based business intelligence tool used by thousands of customers across the world. With version 8.0, the company has added new “what if” analysis and collaboration capabilities and strived to improve the tool’s scalability and flexibility.

QlikView is an in-memory associative database that QlikTech says provides a more affordable, responsive, and easier-to-use alternative to traditional on-line analytical processing (OLAP) and data warehousing applications, which rely on terabytes of spinning disk to store data.

This week at its Qonnections 2007 conference in The Netherlands, QlikTech launched version 8.0 of its flagship QlikView product. Anthony Deighton, the company’s vice president of business development, says there are four main focuses in version 8, including scalability of users, scalability of reports, better end-user collaboration, and actionable analysis.

QlikView deployments today often range from 12,000 to 20,000 users. “We’ve been asking, What does it take to deploy 30,000 to 1 million users,” Deighton says. Similarly, version 8.0 features enhancements centered around the management of large number of QlikView reports and documents.

On the collaboration front, QlikView 8.0 makes it easier for users to share their QlikView reports with others, while respecting security settings and restrictions on data access. Instead of taking a screen shot of the report and e-mailing it, a QlikView user can now invite another user to join a shared document over the Web. “If you’ve created a cool chart, I’ll be able to see that as a shared object. Then you can see what I’m doing in the data, and I can see what you’re doing,” Deighton says.

The final new feature in version 8.0 is support for “what if” modeling. With this release, users can create placeholder fields that hold data in memory and can be treated just like any other data, giving users more precise tools for creating budgets and forecasts.

QlikTech has been growing. At the end of 2006, the company claimed a total of 5,436 customers, a rate of growth equal to 11.2 new customers per day, according to Deighton. Many of those are AS/400, iSeries, and System i shops. “The company is doing very well and growing like a weed,” he said. “Also, we’re adding more customers in larger enterprises. We’ve seen more penetration into very large companies.”

One of the keys to reaching that base of large customers is the better scalability (and better traction against RISC-based OLAP tools) enabled by the proliferation of 64-bit X64 hardware, Deighton says. “In the past, one might have reasonably said, if you do a big piece of analysis, you need OLAP. Today that’s no longer true,” Deighton says. “That has largely gone away with 64-bit technology.”

QlikView 8.0 is still in beta testing and is expected to be available shortly. The product is licensed on a named-user basis. Fully functional solutions can be had for about $50,000. For more information, visit www.qliktech.com.