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. Qlik 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® offers a compelling portfolio of data integration and analytics services. It is a full SaaS platform, and customers can also deploy a hybrid cloud by combining Qlik Cloud® with a client-managed Windows-based deployment. In the area of enterprise-level BI & analytics capabilities, Qlik Cloud® includes Qlik Sense®, supporting a broad spectrum of analytics use cases across organizations.

Qlik Sense® is powered by Qlik’s associative engine and offers flexible and fast access to analyzed data. In addition to its mature in-memory analytics engine, the vendor now provides 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, 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.

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 & 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.

ML powers the suggestion of insights for consumers in ‘Insight Advisor’ and NLQ. Insight Advisor is an assistant that auto-generates insights with advanced analytics, assists with analytics creation 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. Recently, the vendor acquired Kyndi to grow its GenAI capabilities.