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. It is currently owned by the private equity company Thoma Bravo along with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and a selected group of institutional investors since 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 and analytics capabilities, the main offering is Qlik Cloud AnalyticsTM. It consists of Qlik Sense (dashboards and data discovery), Qlik Reporting Service (reporting), Qlik PredictTM (predictive AI), Qlik Answers and Qlik Insight AdvisorTM (NLQ and generative AI), and Qlik AutomateTM (no-code automation), supporting a broad spectrum of analytics use cases across organizations.
Qlik Cloud Analytics 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 provides direct query capabilities to query live data from cloud databases, including Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Databricks. Qlik Cloud Analytics 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 and analytics capabilities. During data preparation, joins and default aggregations are suggested for measures. Qlik Cloud Analytics 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 Qlik Insight AdvisorTM 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. Included in Qlik Cloud Analytics, Qlik Predict (previously known as 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.
A further component of Qlik Cloud Analytics is Qlik Automate (previously known as Application Automation), a visual, no-code facility to automate tasks and workflows within Qlik and in conjunction with third-party applications. For example, Qlik Automate’s automation capabilities can be used to create custom publishing routines for reports or to send notifications and insights to chat applications.
At the beginning of 2024, Qlik acquired Kyndi and subsequently launched Qlik Answers, an AI-powered assistant designed to analyze unstructured data. Over the course of 2025, Qlik Answers will be integrated with the capabilities of Qlik Insight Advisor to unify structured and unstructured data within a single natural language experience. The goal is to deliver trusted answers and enable automated actions. This new agent-based experience is expected to become available later this year.
