'We are outpacing big vendors like SAP, IBM, SAS in BI tools category': Qlik

In an interview with Firstbiz.com, Arthur Lee, vice president-product management at Qlik talks about the latest trends in the fastest growing Business Intelligence (BI) market, and how companies across industries are turning to data visualization tools to derive meaningful insight from their data.

Tell us about Qlik and its India operations? Can you share some details about the company’s offerings, including Qlik Sense?
Qlik is a leader in data discovery delivering intuitive solutions for self-service data visualization and guided analytics. Approximately 33,000 customers rely on Qlik solutions. Headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, Qlik has offices around the world including Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, with more than 1700 partners covering more than 100 countries. India is an important market for Qlik and is one of the fastest growing and evolving. We have been in the country for over 4 years now and have a very strategic and strong presence in terms of customers, partners and employees. We have hundreds of customers of various sizes in India, panning across industries. Another key element in our growth path is our strong relationship with the partner community. They are a key ingredient in our success story.

[caption id=“attachment_109962” align=“alignleft” width=“250”]  Arthur Lee, vice president-product management, Qlik[/caption]

Qlik Sense is a next-generation, self-service data visualization and analysis application built using Qlik’s market-proven data indexing engine. Qlik Sense delivers the ease-of-use business users require to create personalized visualizations, interactive reports, and dashboards on any device through simple drag-n-drop techniques, while ensuring centralized data security and governance.

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Despite being seen as a high investment domain by companies, analytics is becoming Indian CIO’s top investment priority. What kind of growth opportunities do you see for your company in the Indian market?
India as a market is significantly different from other regions like the USA, Europe, and has witnessed significant growth in the Indian BI market. Organizations here are more open to innovations; this could mostly be due to the increasing data deluge seen across sectors, as a result of which, more and more organizations are turning to BI and analytics tools.

We are investing in our customers by supporting them with the Qlik Customer Success Framework. With our recently held Visualize Your World events across the world we are also educating the market about self-service data visualization and analytics.

What we are also seeing is that businesses now want to support their users with BI and analytics rather than just in the hands of some select decision-makers. They want to enable their business users to be able to make decisions themselves. Qlik solutions are doing precisely that, providing them with a self-service BI platform. It is definitely a positive sign for Qlik to see that increasingly Indian companies are starting their journey towards analytics and that is when they are coming to us. What we see in the Indian market is for businesses to support their uses with analytics which is similar in the rest of the world.

In addition to our direct strategy, we have a very strong partner strategy and network in place. We work with a number of business partners with a direct sales force. Our partners include solution providers, OEMs, System Integrators and consulting partners.

Who do you see as your major competition in the Indian market? With so many big vendors such as SAS, IBM pitching, what exactly differentiates Qlik from its rivals?
What differentiates Qlik is the focus on people versus just the data. QlikView ranked first in the customer satisfaction, performance satisfaction, production satisfaction, and considered for purchase categories among large international BI vendors in the BI Survey 14, conducted by the Business Application Research Center (BARC). This was the sixth year Qlik participated in the survey and the company continued to have a strong showing of customer participation. Continuing to outpace rivals in the large international BI vendors peer group such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Tableau, QlikView received a No.1 rating.

Can you name some of your clients in India?
In India, some of our clients are Aditya Birla Minacs, Mahindra & Mahindra, HDFC Life, Godrej, Canon, Flipkart, Fullerton, Mercedez Benz, Shoppers Stop and so on.

Can you brief us about the latest trends and challenges in the BI market? Are you seeing any trends and challenges unique to the Indian market? Where do you see the data visualization tools industry moving in the coming years?
Data analysis is becoming decentralized in many organizations, making them more intelligently nimble, and new tools are making analysis possible for non-data specialists. Data analysis and reporting have become much more sophisticated over the last five years and with the introduction of data visualization tools, now we really do have the opportunity to enable everybody in an organisation to derive insight from their data.

According to Gartner, BI market’s compound annual growth through 2015 is expected to be 8.1 percent. Business Intelligence implementations are driven by a variety of immediate business needs and long-range strategic goals. A handful of trends stand out including Big data, continued demand for visual data discovery, cloud computing, mobile BI, ease of use, and self-service BI. These will continue to shape the adoption of BI in 2015.

Where do you stand in the global BI and analytics space in terms of market share?
Qlik is the seventh largest vendor in the BI tools category (separated from advanced analytics), behind SAP, IBM, SAS, Oracle, Microsoft and Microstrategy. With a growth rate of 45 percent, we are outpacing all listed here. In terms of growth rate, SAP comes second with 19.9 percent.