QlikView Reviews

Disclosure: I am an industry analyst focused on self-service business intelligence and data analysts. QlikView and Tableau user. Current clients include QlikView, Spotfire, and Tableau.

What’s the future of BI? Last fall, one sharp source of mine answered, “Two words: Tableau and QlikView. You didn’t hear it here.”

Those are startling words coming from that source, a well-regarded BI consultant known for big-name clients and their big deployments.

At about the same time, a column of mine appeared in Information Management titled “Don’t call it BI” — in which I mentioned Tableau and a few smaller tools. A reader emailed, “You should also become familiar with QlikView.”

My many Tableau-using friends say QlikView is hardly worth a look. Poor visualization! Control panels! Scripting! “It’s so — yesterday,” one emails.

It’s “yesterday” to some yet it’s the future to others. It’s time for a look.

Both Tableau and QlikView promise the same magic: Listen to one pitch and you might think that you’re listening to the other. Each sets itself up against traditional, big-iron BI. Each claims to empower business users by giving them all the data and control they need for free discovery. Each is easy to use. Go inside each tent, though, and you see how different they are.

Metaphorically speaking, Tableau is West Coast. It’s built for discovery by the individual. Just show up and ride on the breeze, the demos seem to say, free as a seed fairy on a meadow. The inevitable mistakes of discovery are quickly undone and forgotten. Create the most dazzling visualizations — “vizzes” — thanks to built-in best practices that nudge you toward beauty and punch.

One of the most attractive aspects is users’ effervescence. They seem to be riding on the wind and solving business problems all at once. Their rapture sweeps me away every time I’m near it.

If Tableau is West Coast, QlikView is East Coast. Its community is bigger, the third-party add-ons are more plentiful, support seems more available, and overall workflow feels more structured. It too is built for discovery, but it’s discovery rooted in community. The “associative experience” reveals relevant data, and you can create your own views and in quick succession ask any questions, anticipated or not. But unless you’re working alone, someone else probably defined the data and its structure for you. This is QlikView’s counterpart to Tableau’s meadow, though it’s more like a manicured garden than Tableau’s unfenced field of daisies.

QlikView’s boundaries may be more apparent than Tableau’s, but I suspect that there’s at least as much power there. I just haven’t yet been able to judge it for myself well enough.

The trouble for me is that I’ve used it alone, as if stuck in a remote cabin. Though even Thoreau might have liked the “associative experience,” QlikView really comes alive only when you link to others.

As in Tableau, any QlikView user can create or modify a workspace, a document linked to one or more sets of data with any number of displays. Unlike Tableau, QlikView isn’t so finicky about data; for one thing, linking to Excel spreadsheets is easier.

I can’t speak with assurance just yet on the differences between QlikView and Tableau Server — more on that later — though I think I see a QlikView edge there.

One other advantage for QlikView is clear: built-in collaboration. True, Tableau workbooks can be passed around in a variety of ways forever. But as with our atomized life on the West Coast, such a community would be for me, the hypothetical manager of a group, too loose for comfort.

Tableau users will shudder, as if about to be extradited back to Maine. “Great, central authority all over again,” they would say. Yet when I imagine myself managing a group, I would feel disabled without a tight, integrated social structure.

“It’s the soft stuff that matters,” TechTarget research director Wayne Eckerson likes to say. Such stuff is what interests me more than anything: Who are these people and how did they choose what they did?

Have most Qlik or Tableau users chosen their tool the way most of us choose spouses, religion, and politics — guided by our relationships? How many software shoppers qualified their candidates with lists of requirements and features and followed through based on evidence? Did they do what a veteran sales person at a large BI vendor sees?: “They gather requirements, they issue RFPs, they visit trade shows, they talk to vendors, and ultimately they pick one because they like its color.”

I think it’s usually about “color,” color being the cover story for something most people can’t quite describe. For now, though, I’m happy to say that at least my first question has been answered: Yes, QlikView belonged on that list in “Don’t call it BI.”

QlikView was born in 1994 in Lund, Sweden. While it was quickly spreading in Europe, it was virtually unknown in the US for many years. In 2000, there were few companies that used this BI tool. (I was lucky to work in one of these companies and learn QlikView in early 2000.) The situation is quite different now. Certainly the product has changed a lot, but the most important features that are responsible for its success remain the same.

First of all, the exceptional ease of use. User doesn’t need to learn anything “BI-specific” or any particular technology. If you know how to click – you can use QlikView applications. Well, maybe 15-minute presentation is needed to explain what this particular application is about and how to use it.

Second, there is no steep learning curve for the developers. After initial training (two or three days), you can create QlikView applications. Not the advanced ones yet, but quite reasonable and useful. The only technical knowledge I consider a pre-requisite is SQL, and you don’t need to be on an advanced level, basic “SELECT … FROM …” is good enough to start from. Even if you don’t know any SQL, you still will be able to develop QlikView applications using wizards that will create simple SQL queries for you. Developer certainly must understand the business needs, and know where to get the data which support business requirements.

Another important advantage of QlikView – it is “in-memory analytics” tool, I believe the first of this kind. All data is in memory rather than on the disk or other storage, and this allows get the results fast. Certainly it was somewhat a limitation in early years because of the limits of 32-bit architecture and memory price. Now with much cheaper memory and 64-bit systems, the “in-memory” applications can handle larger amounts of data than ever before.

Unlike the most (if not all) other BI tools, QlikView does not require data warehouse. Data can be read directly from the original sources, and all ETL work can be performed within QlikView application itself in the data load script and on the front-end level. If a data warehouse exists already, QlikView can use it as well.

Speaking of data sources, QlikView can load data from the variety of the RDBMS (I used it with Sybase SQL Anywhere, Oracle, MS SQL Server), Excel files and many file types including CSV and XML. There is also a proprietary data type, QVD (for QlikView Data) for temporary storage and retrieval, which is extremely fast. In practice, it is not uncommon for one QlikView application to read data from several heterogeneous data sources – multiple databases, maybe even of different types, from QVDs and flat files.

QlikView continues changing, adding more features, improving performance, opening new possibilities. The important event in the company’s history were moving to the US in 2006, and going public in 2010. I guess it is here to stay and increase its market share.

Disclosure: The company I work for is a Microsoft Partner

Qlikview is one of the older names in Business Intelligence software since it’s been around since 1993. It’s known as being particularly easy to learn, which is important for quickly training employees and getting them up to speed.

Business intelligence tools are applications that deal with Business Objects and that help with analysing and presenting data. For the most part, a BI tool will be working with data that’s already been in-putted into a system, and you’ll simply be using the BI application to work with that particular data set, though there are exceptions. The best business intelligence software for you though will depend on what you need, since there are many pros and cons of various BI programs.

-- Cons --

Qlikview has strong features all around, but there are other clients that tend to be somewhat better when it comes to certain features. For example, Tableau actually has a free reader integrated into it, which makes offline viewing considerably easier than the limited viewing capabilities while offline that Qlikview has.

Qlikview also struggles when it comes to integrating GIS data, which can be pretty important for topographic and geographic analysis and presentation. Other programs having mapping abilities integrated into the client, for example. Qlikview also struggles when it comes to multidimensional support, and support for things like xVelocity or Power Pivot.

While Qlikview excels in ease of use, there are many alternatives out there like Tableau and OLAP that tend to be better at analysing data in a deep and thorough way, and with support for all of the other applications and data sets that you may need.

-- Qlikview Pros --

An advantage of Qlikview is that it takes a very small amount of time to implement. It’s even better at this than other similar software such as Tableau. Another advantage that Qlikview has is that it has a significantly larger Partner Network than many of the alternatives.

Additionally, Qlikview has development scripting that tends to be superior as well. The 64-bit in-memory of Qlikview is among the best of any software BI package period. Qlikview has good interactivity with the UI, solid visual controls, and extensive compatibility with both web clients and especially with mobile clients. Qlikview also has considerably more mature features when it comes to data interactivity and visual drilldown as well. It’s easier to deal with the visualization aspect of the program than almost any of the competitors, including Tableau.

The best feature for Qlikview tends to be the visual drill down which it just does better than any other client. You can hardly go wrong with all of the extras Qlikview like MDI support, as well. The software shines when it comes to ease of use and learning curve. If you need to implement a BI solution fast and without hassle, Qlikview is often the best way to go.

Disclosure: I work for a company that is a partner with QlikView, SAP BusinessObjects and Microsoft.

As a non-Apple using professional (we are becoming less in numbers) I have always leaned further to the Android side of the mobile world. As a QlikView professional, most of my experience is on Windows desktops, laptops and servers and in previous years involved less interaction with what many people believe to be the greatest gadget(s) in the world.

So enter the iPad and QlikView V11.0.11426.0 SR2. Day one, the first step was simple, get to the QlikView Access Point. Open the browser, navigate to my access point and sign in. Outside of the search for the “\” key (domain\userid) that all went well.

The first question you are presented with after getting to the access point is would you like your default in full browser mode or small device mode. iPad is full browser. No question. I’m not a big fan of the small device mode unless the application was really made for phone use. The full browser mode gives you the full experience but beware: if the application was not developed for a smaller device, selection and navigation can become difficult. If you want your users to spend their time using the application, rather than zoom in, selecting, zoom out…repeat, follow some simple design rules from QlikView site:

- It is recommended that QlikView applications are designed for 980 x 590 with a tab row, and 980 x 610 without a tab row. This is a rule of thumb and depends on many things including the version of iPad your audience is using. I found myself struggling to keep the application down to this limit and expanded it slightly after thorough testing in a “no-tab” application.
- Use Arial or other font faces that are supported in iPad browser. I got lucky because my client gave me two options for font based on their creative team, one of which was supported.
- Font sizes – minimum 11pt. Good for most users. Someone with large hands will still probably struggle a bit selecting a specific line item but they probably struggle with most touch screen applications. I did cut this down to 9 and 10 pt sizes for informational only text areas that were non selectable.
- No Mouse Over Options – No mouse, not an option.
- There are some additional tips that I recommend you review but ultimately just keep in mind what you are designing for.

So now I am having enough fun with this that I really want to start testing out existing applications, some designed for mobile and some not. Unfortunately my lack of attention span kicked in and I was diverted over to the Apple Store to discover QlikView for iOS.

When is the best time to implement Business Intelligence?

Many of our clients still operate with outdated ERP legacy systems. The common complaint we hear is “I cannot get access to the information that is stored in my ERP system!”

Most commonly, issues are due to the fact that when these systems were built, paper-based reporting was still dominant. That is not the case anymore.

--A New Approach to Reporting--
There are ways to solve data access and reporting issues today without having to go through a costly conversion to a new ERP system.

Today a number of new software products are available that are relatively easy to deploy. These tools can put the power if information in the hands of users.

-- QlikView --
We recently reviewed one such product from QlikView. This Business Intelligence (BI) vendor got its start in Sweden in 1993. Today they have over 27,000 customers worldwide.

Our client still uses a legacy system they implemented 20 years ago and struggles to manage the business with poor information. The information they access often takes hours to assemble.

This BI product easily attaches to the client’s various data sources: the old legacy data files, Excel files, Access files and more. The data files can be linked. The user, through a series of wizards, can easily construct displays of the data.

-- A Cube of Data --
What we saw during the system review was the access of a “cube” of data. The system organizes the cube by dimensions and the user can “slice and dice” the information by the various dimensions: dates ranges, customers, products, territories and more.

In this demonstration we viewed a dashboard that showed tabs across the top:

- This year YTD compared to last year YTD
- KPI’s over time
- P&L
- Cash Flow
- Budgets
- Trends

The user could click to the tab, and then select the dimensions they wanted to look at.

The user can add notes to the dashboard for other users to view. Also, the user can share a view of the dashboard to other members of the team at no addition license cost. This increased insight aids in overall business process improvement.

-- Unlocking Data --
Over the years, our independent ERP consultants have found BI to be an effective route to unlocking information. By getting information into the hands of the users, companies achieve benefits that can then be used to fund the transformation to modern ERP. The BI system you deploy today can ease your transition to modern ERP implementation and is compatible with your data today and your data tomorrow.