Qlik’s ‘Visualize your World’ event put on an insightful display of its new visual analytics and cloud offerings whetting the curiosity of organisations on how to make their businesses more agile. By Jasmine Desai.
Information decays with time. Responsiveness on the other hand to this change brings resilience. It is a hard fact that organisations have to cope with uncertainty and realise that there is no perfect data. Giving a more poignant view on this issue, Donald Farmer, Vice President Innovation & Design, Qlik, in his keynote elaborated, “Organisation underestimate uncertainty, which can lead to missing out on opportunities. Automatable decisions are not ambiguous. They are operational, highly structured and predictable. Data warehouse is a single version of truth. But truth is always changing.” Making business intelligence and analytics sound like philosophy, Farmer veered it towards practicality saying that data/information should prompt debate.
In digital economy, conversations are the most important part of work. It is how employees discover what they know, share with their colleagues and in process create new knowledge for the organisation It is an unavoidable fact that organisations have to sift through lot of data before making decisions.. He said that if we do not get curious about what we are doing, we will not use software no matter how good it is. Unconscious brain makes decision before it gets to conscious logical point. Organisations should innovate to allow people to constantly adapt to changing environment and changing needs.
Qlik event quickly navigated towards its latest products announcement. Visual analytics clearly stealed the show. Farmer mentioned that visualisation itself is not enough. There is a broad spectrum of needs and thus uses of analytics across any business, all of which are critically important. Qlik is a platform, not just a tool. It enables self-service discovery and embedded analytics. Organsiations can opt for Qlik Sense which features visualisation. Current visualisation tools provide ease of use for the Excel user, but they are not designed to scale and also lack data governance and enterprise class-management. The Qlik platform gives ability to answer not just ‘what happened?’ but ‘why?’, as well as providing insight into ‘what is likely to happen.’
Attendees were given a run through on different Qlik solutions like Qlik cloud, Qlikview, Qlik Nprinting and Qlik associative engine. Qlik Nprinting enables smart data load, prints and exports, and gives smart data compression. Qliksense Enterprise 2.0 will create trendy looking reports fast and distributes customised ones as well. The platform spans use cases across organisation ranging from self-service data visualisation, to reporting and dashboards to guided analytics and embedded analytics, based on QIX Associative Indexing Engine. Qlik Sense Enterprise includes Qlik Analytics Platform, Qlik Sense Desktop, Qlik Sense Enterprise and Qlik Cloud.
Qlik Analytics platform gives web mashup, custom extensions, custom development. Highlighting Qlik’s platform-based approach to BI and the transformation of analysts into indispensable champions, the event helped delegates to better understand the importance of empowering everyone across a business with visual, intuitive data analysis. Qlik also introduced its latest product innovations– Qlik Sense Enterprise 2.0, Qlik Sense Cloud, Qlik DataMarket and Qlik Analytics Platform and presented the company’s product roadmap.
Farmer said, “Qlik helps people use analytics to harness the collective human intelligence across their organisations. With Qlik, every user can explore data to create rich analytics and uncover insights that can have a real impact on the day-to-day operations of the business. It is this added competency that we wish to emphasize through the Visualize Your World events across the globe.”
Addressing the event, Souma Das, Managing Director India at Qlik, said, “All sessions at the Visualize Your World focuses on the way BI and analytics are currently being used, encouraging organisations to be more open to innovation and defying conventions to actually get the most from their data. Qlik is noting a shift in the way Indian business applications are deployed around analytical capabilities.”
Customer case-studies which were presented were from companies like Canon India. The company has a centralised data centre at the corporate office and is connected to all the locations through VPN. The process of churning out reports from Oracle applications that formed the basis of transaction processing, extracting into Excel, cleaning it wherever required was turning out to be time consuming and not user-friendly. Hence, they decided to implement QlikView that would fit in the bill perfectly, providing what a sales company like Canon needs the most. Canon India wanted dashboards and charts across hierarchy of products/ geography and off-take patterns, so that the management could view hourly refreshed data related to their domain and take necessary decision. The company also wanted to consolidate data from different data sources and provide a unified view solution. Canon India deployed QlikView which enabled to aggregate data from Lotus Notes, Excel and Oracle. The solution gave real-time information anywhere. Sales projection became easy and fast. Data cleansing was done after analysing the areas where wrong data or duplication of data was taking place. It also helped avoid multiple storage of data.
Another testimonial was given by Tata Technologies. “As an existing Qlik customer, we have been very impressed with QlikView and are pleased to see the latest products in their data discovery portfolio. For us, it is critical to accelerate the delivery of actionable analytics to the right people at the right time. There is great potential for an organization to deploy Qlik Sense self-service visualization alongside QlikView for its guided analytics capabilities. This will enable faster and smarter decisions. The annual Visualize your World event is a wonderful platform to connect with Qlik, learn of their latest offerings and share best practices with peers,” said Pawan Bhageria, Sr. Vice President – Mfg & IT Practice, Tata Technologies
HDFC Life Insurance also talked about its experience of leveraging the Qlik solution. The insurance company was facing challenges due to proliferation of data and its existence in silos. The company wanted to reduce response time to customers and improve satisfaction. It also wanted to provide a strategic decision making model to senior management. HDFC Life deployed QlikView business discovery software in key business functions in under four weeks. The solution is also available on mobile devices to these users. The organisation intends to roll the solution out to operational decision makers as well in the near future. The implementation increased customer response times by 50%. It also accelerated business growth by 17% in two years.
The event also featured presentations from key Qlik global executives like Leslie Bonney, Chief Operating Officer, David Telford, Senior Group and Industry Partner Lead and John Sands, Qlik Evangelist which helped visitors to uncover meaningful insights for their businesses.
