11 May 2016

Qlik offers visual analytics in the cloud for business

Qlik, a visual analytics provider, has announced Qlik Sense Cloud Business. Qlik Sense Cloud Business enables users to create, manage, and collaborate with visual analytics in the cloud. The subscription-based cloud offering extends the power of data-driven insights to users and groups throughout an organisation.

Qlik Sense Cloud Business has an intuitive design that enables users of all technical skill levels to quickly and easily create, manage, and collaborate with meaningful analytic apps. Responsive design capabilities offer analysis on-the-go from any device – regardless of device size – including touch, drill, and interact features, with no additional development necessary. In addition, data management capabilities empower users to combine data from diverse sources, including in the cloud, uploaded from on-premise, and third-party apps, to quickly create rich, interactive apps. This user experience is underpinned by Qlik’s Associative Model, which enables users to probe all the possible associations that exist across all of their data.

Deliver value faster

The existing Qlik Sense Cloud Basic and Plus offerings provide individuals with all the advantages of Qlik Sense combined with the ability to easily share analysis and insights. Qlik Sense Cloud Business adds additional security and governance features, with a focus on empowerment. The cloud-based model allows organisations to add new users and apps as requirements change, with the elasticity to support current and future needs. 

Qlik Sense Cloud Business includes: 

A group work area allowing users to collaboratively create, edit, and access group content and apps, enhancing collaboration without limiting flexibility.
Group data space enabling all users to contribute data that contains reusable and consistent definitions, expediting the process of creating new apps and eliminating the guesswork in maintaining apps as business requirements evolve over time.
Group shared networks that offers multiple shared networks or streams that users may be invited to follow, enabling control for which users have access to which apps.

“Our cloud strategy encompasses more than just an infrastructure or software-as-a-service play,” said Anthony Deighton, Qlik CTO and SVP of Products. “At Qlik we see an exciting opportunity for cloud-based value-added services to optimise the visual analytics experience. Likewise, because people do not make decisions alone, sharing in the cloud will always be an important part of our collaboration strategy.”
The company has also previewed Qlik Sense Enterprise 3.0, the newest release of its business intelligence (BI) and analytics solution that will be available in June 2016. Qlik Sense Enterprise 3.0 combines enterprise readiness and governance with visualisation and data preparation capabilities, allowing organisations to meet a broad range of BI use cases from a single platform. 

With this latest release, Qlik has improved its management and administration capabilities to support IT with more effective auditing, configuration, and governance for broad multi-geography deployments. New user interface enhancements in the Qlik Management Console (QMC) provide configuration options for content and resources. In addition, Qlik Sense Enterprise is now available in Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Turkish.

Developers are empowered with a new development hub. This includes new developer APIs and capabilities, including an app integration API, a visualisation API for programmatic creation of analytics, and a new integrated developer environment (IDE) plugin for Visual Studio.

“Qlik built the category for user-driven, self-service BI. With Qlik Sense, we continue to expand the market by creating a scalable, secure, and extensible platform that organisations can consider the centrepiece of their enterprise-wide BI deployment,” said Deighton.

"Our platform approach allows us to address such a breadth of use cases with more depth than other offerings. The openness of our platform expands opportunities for custom analytics apps, embedded BI, and developer innovation. With our industry-leading global partner network at the ready to bring these solutions to market and our rapidly growing community of developers, we’ve hit an exciting point in the next phase of industry leadership, extending beyond visual analytics.”

More intuitive app creation, visual analysis, and collaboration

Users will benefit from new visual search capabilities that allow them to search across charts and data. In addition, visual exploration capabilities now allow users to explore and discover insights in analyses using governed metrics and dimensions. Additional functionality improves business user app creation, including time aware charts, automatic detection of geographic data, and improved application of data-driven colour palettes.

Several new features facilitate sharing and collaboration, including storytelling that allows data stories to be directly published to Microsoft Office and PDF. In addition, Qlik Nprinting, which previously supported only QlikView, now supports Qlik Sense. This enables organisations with legacy reporting environments to move aggressively to a modern BI architecture while maintaining their requirement for statutory or compliance reporting and extending more interactive analysis to business leaders. 

Interested?

Qlik Sense Cloud Business will be available in the second half of 2016.